Just Do It

I am a professional level procrastinator. It’s not much of a confessions, as far as confessions go. Most people procrastinate to some degree, some of us are just worse than others.

I generally don’t get anything done until the last possible moment, even if it costs me money or creates problems for me. I don’t know why I am this way. I hear people talk about how some people “thrive under the pressure” of a deadline. I don’t think that’s it. It isn’t about avoiding unpleasant things either because some of the stuff I procrastinate on really isn’t unpleasant at all…..and still I don’t dive right in.

But I have always thought to myself “Hey, at least everything gets done eventually.”

Then I realized something. Everything doesn’t always get done. There are things out there that don’t have hard and fast deadlines. Things that, while they should be done, it’s not required. And those things never seem to get done.

Here is a perfect example. I have to clean out my work filing cabinet. I need to remove any files from before 2018. Because of that, I have refrained from filing anything from 2019. If I dig into it, I probably stopped at the tail end of 2018, the thinking being that it would just clutter up the files while I am removing stuff and it’s better if I just leave it out until the cleaning is done.

And that makes complete sense. But there is no deadline for this. So it is not done. Where is my filing then, you ask? In piles all over my office floor. And it has been for the last 6-8 months!

Why would someone do this? I have no idea. In reality, the whole project probably won’t take more than a few hours. In any given week I have three hours to give to this. Hell, most days I probably have 3 hours to give to it. So why isn’t it done?

Here’s the worst part…the mental energy that I put into thinking about this needing to be done, planning to do it, stepping over the piles, sorting them alphabetically for when I actually might get around to this, etc., far exceeds any amount of time I could possibly spend just getting it over with.

Every year at new years and at my birthday when I am thinking about things I want to change, etc., this is always at the top of the list of thing I Am Not Going To Anymore.

And yet, here we are.

I continue to swear I am going to change my evil ways, or at the very least just do my filing this weekend but to be perfectly honest, I have no idea how to change.

Other than to Just Do It.