In one of his first workshop videos, John Four talks about procrastination and what to do about it. Before I come to that, let me talk about my own procrastination problem which is kind of a constant in my whole life (Hi, my name is…). I seldom suffer under writer’s block. I also don’t lack ideas, quite the opposite. And that’s the problem because I can’t decide what idea to tackle first and I get sidetracked to easily.

I will not bore you to death with the story of my voyage to education, but let’s just say that nothing I chose to learn from childhood had any direct benefit for my later career decisions (apart from that I learned a lot about myself on this journey). I ran one way and at the next decision point, I ran into a totally different direction. I guess I finally arrived where I belong in the meantime but, man did I choose a complicated path to get there.

I also am collector of books and computer games and may not be physically able to read or play through them all because it’s just too much and the collections keep growing. But that’s not the problem. The problem is, that I can’t even decide what to read or play now and waste a lot of time by just thinking about it.

And it’s quite the same with roleplaying games. When I started with the adventure building workshop, I immediately had an idea I wanted to work with. Then I read through old blog entries and immediately had another idea equally appealing. Then I listened to the new album by Avatarium, „Girl with the raven mask“ (my personal album of the year and that’s with new albums by Maiden, Slayer, Amorphis, Blind Guardian, Kamelot and Nightwish …. but I digress) and immediately had the idea to build a whole campaign based on the songs on that album.

So if I talk about procrastination, that’s what it is for me. To be paralysed by so many options and instead just chosing one and go from there, I keep pondering and pondering (and accumulating other ideas). No easy way out of this and even though I already decided which idea I want to use for the workshop, it’s quite hard not to be distracted by those other things.

By the way, John suggested the so-called First Move as a means against procrastination. Each voyage starts with the first step, and the idea of the First Move just means to find that first step which will inspire you to take the second, the third and so on. This First Move can basically be anything what helps you start the journey. If you want to write an adventure you could start with a map of the adventure location, with a description of the location the adventure starts in. It could be the villain you want to set the heroes against, it could be a central scene you want to develop the adventure around and so on. The important thing is to identify what works for you as a first step and take this step every time you start a new voyage.

And I guess my First Move was to finally decide not to waste my time with thinking about what I want to do but just doing it. And if everything goes well, I still can realize those other ideas (or at least, some of them).