Procrastination

We all do it and we’ve all paid the price for it.  But why?

In a recent article on CIO.com, Meredith Levinson writes about Rory Vaden’s, founder of training company Southwestern Consulting, thoughts on this matter.

What it boils down to is we delay our work because we feel entitled to delay, fear the work or want to achieve perfection rather than just getting the job done.  The last two points really hit home for me:  as a life long procrastinator, I’ve constantly pushed deadlines because I don’t know exactly what I want to write, preferring instead to cogitate on the matter until the document is fully completed in my own mind, but not down on paper.  I fear, in a very gut wrenching and visceral way, the act of sitting down to write without knowing, in advance, what I want to say.  I’d rather play a video game and miss the deadline than face that fear.

Here’s what I decided:  from now on, next time I’m procrastinating, I’m going to sit down and write out one paragraph of the document rather than avoiding it all together.  We’ll see if that works – if not, there’s always a game of Bejeweled to distract me.

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