Procrastinate, but Not Now!

By Mike Banks Valentine
Posted Wednesday, December 1, 2004

Procrastination is my sin. It brings me naught but sorrow. I know that I should stop it. In fact, I will -- tomorrow! --Gloria Pitzer

I've been putting off writing this article because it seemed too hard to write about something I seem to have no control over. I'm actually writing it 5 days before deadline and don't really understand why it has me concerned. If it were easy, it would be done though, and I wouldn't be thinking about it now.

The things I've done instead of writing an article about my worst habit have been dull, tedious, slow and irritating. But I've preferred them all to writing about procrastination! Why do we torture ourselves over some things by delaying them like this? In order to avoid putting my own thoughts to the keyboard I went to the dictionary to look up the word.

procrastinate Pro*cras"ti*nate, v. i. To delay; to be dilatory

Dilatory huh? Guess I better look that up too.

dilatory Dil"a*to*ry, Marked by procrastination or delay; tardy; slow; sluggish

I guess I knew that, but what can one say about something that can't be helped. I feel as though I'm chained by dread of action. If I get started now, that churning in my stomach and slight twitch in my brow will turn to nausea and a serious headache.

"Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible." -- George H. Lonmer

That's it, I'll go look up some quotes on procrastination! That will be forward motion and actually move me toward knowing what others have thought and said about being dilatory. Cool! Off to Google, my favorite search engine, to find some procrastination quotes.

In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. - Theodore Roosevelt

At least I'm doing something! But I guess if I really look at it, what I wanted to do was to go to ListBot and retrieve my
ezine archives before they shut it down on August 20. Did I say that I "wanted" to do that? No, I can't stand the thought of the slow, tedious cutting and pasting of all my archived newsletters to my own ezine archive.

"How soon not now becomes never." -- Martin Luther

Here's how you do it folks. Log in, click the link that says, "View Archive" and then go to your browser menu and click on your first archived issue and then go to "View" and choose the "View Page Source" from the choices then, Scroll down past all the stuff on the page until you reach the HTML tag marked [pre] and select everything until you reach the [/pre] tag which follows your ezine text copy.

These tags keep your formatting intact without using alot of extra HTML as you paste it into your own web pages and upload to your own site using FTP.

Go to your HTML editor or word processing program and paste all of that selection into a fresh document and save it as "archive01.htm". Now to your next issue in the archive and do the same thing over and over and over again until you're done. Renaming each page sequentially, or better yet, with keywords important to topics discussed in each newsletter for search engine ranking and relevancy increases.

It took me about 4 days of this before I had my entire ezine archive from ListBot copied and uploaded to my own site for safekeeping. You can take a look at my own archive to see an effective naming scheme using keywords in title tags, metatags and body copy, then creating text links from those keywords and using appropriate titles. Take a look at: (http://website101.com/free_ezine_content/)

Check each of the pages to see that every one has different tags, title, metatags and text links making keywords important. This alone makes the sore typing fingers worth something for all the work it takes. Archiving means more content for your site, which increases search engine rank as well. It's worth it.

I've always known that archiving my own newsletter would help increase search engine ranking and relevance for my web site. I just put it off for so long that it took four days to do what could have been done weekly and taken five minutes a week for the last two-and-one-half years! OW! My achin' shoulders! Carpal Tunnel has my wrists throbbing!

I think we're gonna have a bunch of really weary former ListBot members very sore by August 20, when ...

"The ListBot service will be turned off completely. All ListBot servers will be shut down and all data will be unavailable. Please retrieve any information you need before this date, since (is) inaccessible from this date on."

Don't forget to get your subscriber lists while you are there. ListBot instructions for that task are as follows:

"To download your lists, click on "View Members" in the ListBot control center. Then click on "Download All" or "Download Demographics" to download your list subscribers. If you have problems with this process during peak times, please try again during off-peak hours."

I'm pretty well peaked right now! Damn! I'll never use free services again as long as I live! I swear I won't! Well, maybe the free email service and then there's that free bill paying service and the free messaging service and the free ...

About the Author
Mike Banks Valentine
Get Up! Get Movin' Get Your ListBot List Moved! (http://website101.com/listbot_members.html) How much is your FREE list host really costing you? (http://WebSite101.com/listchannel.html)