I used to joke that I was going to join the procrastinator’s society, but I’d do it tomorrow.
Everybody puts things off at times. Sometimes they have good reason, but a lot of the time it is because they just don’t want to face up to the task in hand.
Check any filing basket in any office and you will see the stuff that continuously gets shuffled to the bottom of the deck.
And the problem with that is, sometimes things that should get done, don’t get done and the consequences are often worse than just dealing with the task in the first place.
John F Kennedy once said: “There are risks and costs to a programme of action. But they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
Now, I’d never claim to be any kind of a DIY expert, but finding myself home alone on Saturday last, I scribbled down a list of tasks around the house that I’d put off for a while and I made a plan to get through as many of them as I could.
One task in particular was something that had been niggling at me for ages. A blocked drainpipe that I knew would need investigation, but which honestly I feared would require calling in a plumber to fix.
It was the worst job on the list, so it was the one I decided, needed to be tackled first.
Now, I am all in favour of calling in experts when a task is beyond me, but I also know that now more than ever, there is a wealth of information to be found that I can use to help me make that call.
And so, after some online research I realised that there was one simple investigation I could make in the pipe network that could resolve the problem – but if it wasn’t that, then the expert would be required.
It was a simple fix though and with that task safely out of the way, I powered through the rest of the list because there was no dreaded ‘worst task’ on the end of it anymore.
What I realised from all of this is that, instead of procrastination you just have to make the right decision to move forward – because, the reality is, when you hold on thinking it’s all going to somehow magically come good – well.
I was reminded of a piece I once read about a college professor who spoke to his class:
“Suppose,” he said, “you had five birds sitting on a wire and three of them decided to fly. How many birds would you have left on the wire?”
He asked them all to write down their answer and when they had done so, proceeded to explain that the correct answer was that five birds remain.
Making a decision to fly without acting on the decision, was a waste of energy.
The momentum to do something about our decisions is energised by action.
And because tomorrow will not always come, the time to act, is now.
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