Procrastination

I was going through an old notebook and I found something which I had written ten years ago. It is still very pertinent and I wondered that I could have written it down.

I had been reading the Bible and had written down this:

“If you wait until the wind and the weather are just right, you will never sow anything and never harvest anything.”

“Procrastination is the Thief of Time” so the saying goes. How true it is that we make excuse after excuse not to do something, saying that there is always a tomorrow and we can do it tomorrow.

We wait for the right time, the right day before we take action. It is human nature, after all to rationalize the lack of action. What we don’t realize is that time goes by all the same, whether we do something or not.

If we choose to while away the time by doing nothing useful, time still goes by. If we choose to do something useful, we will have a product by the end of that time, be it cookies, a story, a poem, or a painting.

What makes procrastination worse, is that as we age, we tend to be forgetful. We may have decided to put off a chore till later only to forget it completely so that chore never gets done.

I’ve been guilty of that. How many times have I said that I would call a friend in the afternoon, after lunch, only to forget it when the afternoon rolls around. Sigh….. and I didn’t even realize it until days later, that I meant to call. By that time, it didn’t seem right to call then, as days had passed by and somehow, it didn’t seem to matter any more.

On the other hand, “…the firstlings of my thought shall be the firstlings of my hand…’[apologies to Shakespeare’s Macbeth if the wording is not totally accurate], could bring undesirable consequences if we are to act without first considering the outcome of the action.

So with the advent of the Year of the Tiger, I will do my utmost to forget about procrastination and do what I have to do.

One trick is to write down a list of the things that you need to do the next day. Then as you complete each task, you can cross it out. At the end of the day you can then see how much you have accomplished. That which was not done, will have to be carried forward to the next day. { That’s why we have diaries!!}

This will be more systematic than relying on the memory which often lets us down.

So let’s be happy
and do the best we can while we are still alive for no one knows when his hour will come. We should enjoy what we have worked for and look on it as a gift from God. Everything has been ordained by God. There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to keep and a time to throw away.

Let’s throw away the bad memories, the bad things of the out-going year and keep only the good things, the good times and the good memories. As we spring-clean our homes for the New Year, so too we should spring-clean our souls and our thoughts.

As we bid goodbye to the Year of the Ox, let it carry away the bad.

Here’s to a fresh and new beginning in the Year of the Tiger! Let’s not squander it away for we don’t know how much time we have.

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