Many years ago while studying for my Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing I got to see one of the finest lectures I’ve ever had the privilege of attending. It was by then-department-head, Ian Robinson, and the topic was about procrastination. Yes, really.

The lecture dealt with all aspects of procrastination, from the motives to the consequences to the psychology. To my impressionable 20-something-year-old student brain it was both fascinating and terrifying, for I saw myself in everything he said (I suspect many in the audience felt the same). It is for this reason that I still remember two of the lecture’s key points.

The first was one of his opening remarks, and it went something like this (this is not a literal record of his words, but it’s pretty close):

The two worst procrastinators are students and writers. Since you’re all student writers, you’re doubly at risk.

The second point went like this:

A writer loves nothing more than an interruption.

Why do we procrastinate?

Hearing someone say “a writer loves nothing more than an interruption” was, for me, a moment of sharp realisation. It made me see, for the first time, how often I was a willing participant in derailing my own work.

Consequently, it’s something I try to keep in mind whenever I have to sit down and start writing. Naturally, I try to do the common sense things: work in a quiet place, minimise distractions, not stay up too late the night before, work during the first half of the day when my mind is freshest, and so on.

And yet, that’s one of the paradoxes of writing. The best place to write is a quiet, preferably secluded, solitary space. But while we are left to our own devices, in the company of no one else but our own minds, and with no overseer to hold us to account, it also becomes that much easier to give in to procrastination and validate the excuses we tell ourselves.

There are in fact many traps that we willingly permit ourselves to walk into.

Social media, for instance, is often just one or two easy clicks away, particularly if notifications on a device scream out to be checked. Neglected emails suddenly take on a vital new importance. Crap on a desk that’s accumulating dust begins to feel like a priority. And sometimes there’s the temptation to get stuck into that other project. This last one is especially insidious for the simple fact that doing it (instead of working on what you first set out to do) now seems far more enjoyable and rewarding, even though it brings you no closer to completing what you had set out to get done.

Add to this factors like tiredness, distraction, too much caffeine, and it becomes clear why writing may seem like a hard and thankless task. Indeed, its reputation for unpleasantness is such that mass culture even furnishes us with the well-known cliché of the tortured writer: a scraggly, starving, individual tormented by invisible demons and who is (probably) an alcoholic.

And yet, the battle to do The Thing and start writing is almost always little more than a battle with one’s mind. Unlike gruelling physical exercise or a difficult conversation that might have painful real-life consequences, the battle with oneself to stop procrastinating and just start writing usually entails no physical or social harm.

It is in moments like this that I take comfort in the following observation from Meditations, the classic text on Stoic philosophy by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Ask yourself, what is there unendurable, so insupportable, in this?

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8:36

I love this line because it invokes one of the great principles of Stoicism and Stoic belief. It’s a masterful observation and a beautifully simple way of framing something that befalls just about every one of us. Namely, so many of us fail to do so many things because we fear consequences that, in all probability, cannot harm us.

To be clear, every human being has a breaking point. Even the most resilient among us will eventually falter if exposed to enough trauma, sleep deprivation, physical hardship or chronic stress.

But for so many of the rest of us, there is a high probability that very little of the above applies to your process of writing. It is unlikely that you will be persecuted or murdered by a totalitarian police state, a theologically-driven government, corrupt officials, or drug cartels – all very real things that continue to occur throughout the world.

So remember this next time you struggle to start writing. What is truly difficult about what you are about to do? What actual harm could befall you if you were to start writing? What risk is there to you personal safety ?

In all probability, the worst that could happen is that your work does not get published, whereas the best that could happen is that your work does get published and you may go on to fulfil your dream

What is there unendurable, so insupportable, in this?

What indeed?