Procrastination

My mind has been so focused on finishing this tax return for the last 7 hours, that I almost missed my "appointment" with myself to write! Damn iPhone calendar.  OK, we all know it's user error...but I felt like blaming someone/thing else.  I have exactly 10 minutes to write before I need to get out of here and go home.

Wow!  I just re-read that first paragraph and realized the whole thing is made up of excuses! Funny, I literally read an article today that said Want to Be Happier? Stop Doing These 10 Things Right Now. Of course, one of those items was to stop blaming others for things and just take responsibility and move on.  You'll be happier when you focus on preventing problems in the first place.  Makes sense.

How does that relate to procrastination?  Pretty obvious, really: Procrastination is the love-child of Blame and its girlfriend, Avoidance.  When I don't want to do something, aka WORK, I tend to "find" all kinds of things that I "really must get done right now!" (avoidance) such as tweak my monthly budget, check my bank balance, clean out junk emails, read LinkedIn articles that are really just fluff and won't help me improve my network or professional life.  Then, I blame all those trivial tasks for keeping me from getting the billable stuff done as quickly as I originally planned it.

The one reliable thing about me, though, is that if I procrastinate a little too often for a while, my work load piles up and then I go into a frenzy of super-focused activity and knock a bunch of things out all at once.  I get everything done, and yes, it is done correctly, but the inefficiency of it all really screws with my "me" time.  Can't have that!

So...I have a goal to write.  Therefore, I need to make sure I do it....every day.  No matter what!  In order to meet that goal, I must stop procrastinating.  Or at least do it a whole lot less.

This is not really the sort of topic I wanted to practice writing about, buy hey! I've got to start somewhere. Oh, and while I'm still here, I'll figure out later how to imbed a link so that I can send you (reader? hello....anyone out there?) to the article I mentioned.

Until next time.....