Day 17 - Letting Go of Procrastination
Procrastination is the thief of time. ~Charles Dickens
You know that moment when you realize you’ve been surfing on Face Book for over 30 minutes and now it’s too late to go for a run? Or, when you have just spent 15 minutes categorizing your pens instead of getting started on your term paper? Or, when you realize you’ve just spent an hour contemplating how you can better organize your closets, but haven’t actually organized them? Or, you realize you’ve just tidied up your overflowing inbox, but haven’t finished the email you started when you went to your inbox in the first place?We all carry the affliction of procrastination to one degree or another. In my case, it seems to pervade my persona almost to the same degree as perfectionism or people pleasing! Is there a vaccine against the Triple-P Disease (Perfectionism, People-Pleasing, Procrastination)??Usually we procrastinate on stuff that we don’t really want to do, right? And, we don’t really want to do something because it’s unpleasant in some way. Maybe it involves a hard conversation we are reluctant to have. Maybe it’s something we aren’t really skilled at doing and we feel inadequate, so we put it off. Whatever, the reason, there are things we simply must do and procrastinating only drags out the process of doing something unpleasant. Common sense tells me that, if there’s something I am likely to put off doing, I should do that first, just to get it off my list and go on to something I want to do. Easier said than done!When my kids were younger and there was a lot of laundry happening, things used to get backed up in the laundry room and the kids began to think of the dryer as the families collective clothes drawer. Anytime they were looking for socks and underwear, they received the standard answer, “Look in the dryer!” With all kinds of good intentions, I would gather up the smelly, dirty clothes from around the house, take it to the laundry room and sort it into piles of whites, lights, brights and darks, just like my mom had showed me. Then, I would throw the pile of darks into the washing machine, then the dryer, and fold them, putting them into each person’s basket to take upstairs. Then I would do the brights and lights, putting in the whites last. (There’s a point in here…stick with me…) By the time the whites were done drying, it was usually late at night. Folding all the little t-shirts, underwear (everyone wore white in those days!), and matching all the little socks just seemed like too much work, so I would leave them in the dryer, thinking I would get to them the next day. Sometimes a whole week would go by and, since everyone ended up finding their own socks and underwear in the dryer every day, I would no longer have to worry about folding them. In some ways it was a brilliant strategy! But, I got pretty tired of having to go to the dryer myself, on occasion, in order to help some little person get ready for school on time. So, here’s the point. I finally decided to do the whites first. That way, all those tiny little things got folded first and out of the way while I still had energy to do so. When the darks (mostly jeans) were done, since there were generally fewer of them, they were much easier to deal with. Ta-da! Problem solved. No more procrastinating on folding the whites!That was an easy fix, but there are other areas that aren’t so easy. What about procrastinating on getting healthy, making a tricky decision at work or having the hard conversation with a friend? These procrastination points ultimately end up controlling our life and changing our destiny. Stop, and re-read that sentence. What an astonishing thought! Here’s the thing…in the end, procrastination is driven by fear. We fear the pain of inadequacy and failure, so we shrink back from doing something. It seems the more inadequate we feel or the more we focus on past failures, the more we slide down the slippery slope of procrastination and avoidance. We secretly hope, by procrastinating, we will find an easier or more “perfect” way that will mitigate our chances for failure. But, procrastination doesn't deliver "easy" or "perfect" and our lives are permanently changed.So, it seems to me that procrastinating is all about poorly prioritizing. I procrastinate more when I put a higher priority on my insecurity, inadequacy or fear of failure than I do on my health, my job or my relationships. I must change the order of priority…I need to wash the whites first! By shifting my focus and identifying the things that really matter, I can begin to believe that procrastinating is not the answer to my fear. God invites us into the courage of living each day, this day, to the fullest. We dare not put off doing the important things. We do not know what tomorrow will bring.