Want More Time to Write? Uncommit Yourself

Have so many things on your To Do list you don’t know where to start?

Tempted to postpone your writing – again – so you can take care of all the things that you somehow ended up being responsible for?

The next time you’re facing a “faux commitment,” that is a commitment you shouldn’t have made, didn’t want to make, got manipulated into, or now realize you just don’t care about, use the new, patented UnCommit Yourself Method.

Don’t waste your valuable time – use any of these 30 alternatives to get out of a faux commitment:

• Change it
• Postpone it
• Cancel it
• Reschedule it again and again and again…
• Play hooky
• Deny it
• Forget it
• Blow it off completely
• Pass it off to someone else (aka delegate)
• Hire someone else to do it
• Give lip service to it, but don’t actually do anything
• Refuse to do it
• Lie about it
• Tell the truth and plead for absolution
• Shift blame
• Develop a reputation for being unreliable
• Claim that one of your multiple personalities must have made the commitment
• Be late, so late, in fact, that everyone else has left by the time you arrive
• Invent a laughable excuse and refuse to explain further
• Pick a fight or be so nasty the other person tells you s/he doesn’t want your help
• Be so bad at the task you are never asked to help again
• Claim to have an injury
• Injure yourself or induce illness
• Ask your doctor or therapist to write you an excuse (“Suzy is too healthy to do this”)
• Invent a relative who conveniently “dies”
• Change religions so the commitment falls on a holy day
• Change the time, don’t tell anyone else you did that, and then express your surprise and outrage that no one else showed up
• Quit
• Claim to have amnesia
• If all else fails, grit your teeth, honor the commit and vow to never commit yourself to something like this again.

In my next post, I’ll pull my tongue out of my cheek to take a serious look at when and how we really can uncommit ourselves.