Procrastinating with author, Julie Merz

Today’s Top Ten List: My Favorite Ways of Procrastinating

1. Cleaning my kitchen. There is something comforting about creating order and I really do get good ideas while washing pots, I swear. (thirty minutes)
2. Ditto: folding laundry (15 minutes, unless I raid my teenaged daughter’s room and scoop up the scattered pants and shirts from the floor)
3. Planting flowers and pulling up weeds. It feels good to create places of beauty, however small and humble. (long summer afternoon…winter afternoons can be spent dreaming over plant catalogues)
4. Reading junky magazines while pedaling stationary bike at the gym. That’s how I keep up with the Kardashians, Brangelina and Jen, Suri Cruise’s latest outfit. (thirty minutes is all I can take, both of exercise and celebrity gossip)
5. Sharpening ten pencils, even though I write on a laptop. (five minutes, while I speculate, sadly, on the possible future obsolescence of the pencil)
6. Asking my teenaged daughter to clean up her room. (that’s at least ten minutes of futile debate!)
7. Checking e-mail. It feels like work…though I know better. (let me not count the hours)
8. Dancing in my living room. I am not particular: Earth, Wind & Fire; old jazz tunes, Michael Jackson, Allman Brothers. (ten minute spurts)
9. When things get truly desperate: getting a mani pedi at the salon down the street. No one asks me questions and I get another chance at the junky magazines I haven’t already read at the gym. (30 minutes, unless I am lucky and there are five other procrastinating writers ahead of me)
10. Reading a big fat fantastic novel. (an evening, under the covers)



Julie Metz is the author of The New York Times bestselling memoir PERFECTION, which was also a 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. The recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, she has published in The New York Times, Glamour, Hemispheres, and the New York City story site mrbellersneighborhood.com. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York where she is at work on a novel (and has therefore had plenty of time to try out everything on the above list more than once).