This Week's Quote and Commentary

“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.