In about two weeks, I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Europe about procrastination. My talk is focused on how to overcome procrastination in website maintenance tasks. Because let’s face it: website maintenance is tedious. At the same time, website maintenance is very important.

I hope you’ll all join me for my talk in Torino. Next to this talk, I’ve also been working on a new WordPress plugin, which is designed to help people overcome procrastination in website maintenance tasks as well. In this post, I’ll tell you about how my fascination for procrastination started.

Leaving Yoast led to some chaos in my work life

About a year ago, I left Yoast, marking the end of about 10 years of working in a team. After I left, I noticed I had a hard time organizing my work. I was now working alone, and I noticed that I was procrastinating and postponing tasks. I was even forgetting about tasks altogether. It turned out that I missed my colleagues, who constantly reminded me of what needed work or attention during my time at Yoast.

My leaving Yoast exposed my chaotic self. The system I built over the past 10 years for getting things done didn’t work anymore, and I needed to look at myself.

Excellent planning and Organizing skills

I am a highly efficient person. I went to college, I co-founded a company. Next to that, I can plan and organize. I am always on time and I meet all of my deadlines. People who have worked with me will (hopefully) see me as someone good at organizing and someone who does what she promised to do.

These things, however – planning and organizing- have never come easy to me. I am good at it because I have to be.  I have to plan everything, which takes up much time in my daily routine. You should know that I have a digital calendar and a paper one. I need to update my planning daily and write everything down. I make lists because otherwise, I’ll forget things. And even then, I need a lot of reminders. My life consists of organizing, planning, updating, and organizing again. If something changes, I always need so time to update my calendar and get my ducks in a row. But all in all, I figured out how to be successful and beat procrastination. After an initial chaotic phase after my leaving Yoast, I have found a new equilibrium (well kind of).

Why do I procrastinate?

For the past year, I’ve done some soul-searching. Why do I procrastinate like I do? I’ll tell myself to do something and end up filling out online quizzes to figure out which Winnie the Pooh character I am most similar to. I spend hours doing useless stuff, and then I’ll be highly productive for an hour and do a day’s work.

For the last few months, I have been reading a lot of scientific research about overcoming procrastination. I’ve learned all the best practices and discovered that I apply many of them in my daily routine. In my talk at WordCamp Europe, I’ll share a lot about my journey towards understanding procrastination.

Procrastination and website maintenance

Ever since leaving Yoast, we wanted to build a new plugin. We just like creating a product, and we love WordPress. While hyper-focusing on procrastination, I came up with a new product idea. What if we would help people with their website maintenance tasks? These tasks are essential, but also so prone to procrastination. We (Joost and I) have a lot of expertise in website maintenance and would be able to help people with that. Combining that with my experience in organizing and overcoming procrastination (and my new scientific knowledge) could make for a great new product. So, we started working on a new shiny project.

It all comes together…

I’ll speak about procrastination and website maintenance tasks at WordCamp Europe this month. We’ll also release the first (beta) version of our new plugin, which is called Progress Planner. These are exciting times! I have enjoyed working on this new product, we hired a small team of the very best experts and together we’ve created something wonderful. And I have enjoyed my deep dive into the psychology around procrastinating. I’ve found a new passion for overcoming procrastinating and for planning and organizing tools and tricks.

Coming soon: Progress Planner

Our new plugin will launch soon. We have a lot of ideas on how to improve it further and we will build a pro version. In the pro version, we’ll help and advise people on how to get those website maintenance tasks done. The free version gives you a dashboard in which you can track your activity on your website. You’ll earn points and unlock badges if you work on your website. We’ll send you reminders not to forget about your site. In the end, we hope Progress Planner will be able to motivate people to stay active on their website. And to celebrate your progress! So stay tuned, because we’re planning to release Progress Planner very soon!

Published by Marieke van de Rakt

Marieke is partner at Emilia Capital. She is an investor, an entrepeneur at heart and a marketeer. She has a PhD in social sciences and is the mother of four kids. Next to that, she's a feminist, a ballerina and a diet coke addict.