“Procrastination is attitude’s natural assassin. There’s nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task.” – William James
So
true, yet so avoidable.
Procrastination
zips you of energy. You use up your energy thinking about the task, thinking
about how hard the task will be, thinking about how much you do not want to do
the task, thinking about everything else you would rather be doing than the
task.
Get
it. You are actually wasting more time and energy NOT getting the task
accomplished than you would if you just buckled down and got the job done.
This
quote reminds me of another that (and I am paraphrasing here) if you have to
eat a frog, do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse can happen the
rest of the day. Point being, get the bad thing out of the way and your day can
only improve from there.
Procrastination
is a silent and insidious disease. You put something off and nothing horrible
happens. SO, you put something else off and nothing horrible happens. It seems
to you that it’s not a big deal. BUT – the more you put things off, the more
the problems start to build.
You
don’t see the problems at first but they are coming. Maybe not today. Maybe not
tomorrow. But trust me, sooner or later you will have to deal with a much
larger problem than you realize.
I
had a boss that would bring me a task to do. I would tell him “let me get right
on that”. He would almost always reply with “you don’t have to do it now.” The
problem was that I already had a full plate for the day, week, etc. My standard
response was always “If I don’t jump on it now, it may never get finished.”
I
would jump on that task right away and get it done. That way, I was not
thinking about, or worrying about, getting something done that my boss directly
asked me to do. Win-Win for me. I looked good for making his request a
priority, and I did not have the stress of worrying about it throughout the day
or days to come.
If
you have a list of things to do (and who doesn’t), I encourage you to jump in
with both feet and challenge yourself to see how quickly you can start crossing
things off the list. I promise you that you will find that each task you have
been avoiding will actually take you less time than you think.
And
when that list is done, you can truly relax without stressing over having this
or that to do.
You
can assassinate the assassin, and get some energy back in the process.