I’m giving it ten minutes. Simply starting a postponed project is usually more than half the battle. So I am committing to sitting at my computer keyboard for a mere ten minutes to see if I can at least start to write something. Here goes.
It has been nearly a month since my last blog post. My prolonged silence has been more lack of motivation than anything else. It is not as if I have had nothing to write about. An active thought life and daily experiences continually supply fodder for this writer’s rumination. And it is not as if I have been too busy, which is a common laundry basket in which we throw all our dirty little excuses. No, truth be told, I simply have not as the saying goes “gotten around to it.”
It raises an important question. Why is it often so difficult to overcome inertia, to get something rolling, when that something is the very thing that in the doing causes a person to derive great benefit and satisfaction? One answer is procrastination. Procrastination is a ten dollar word describing how we’re duped into replacing high priority, high return tasks with low priority, minimal return actions. In the financial world, and yours and my world for that matter, such careless investment is a projection for loss. Loss of progress, benefit to others, self satisfaction and respect.
Like most people I am confronted by the procrastination huckster on many fronts. It is not just with my writing. It coaxes me when it comes to working out, honey-do list items, organizing work and storage space, home and self improvement projects. I could go on and on. How to resist its enticing deceitful ways?
Give whatever you’ve been procrastinating ten minutes. That’s right. Just ten minutes and likely as with this blog, your engagement with the project will expand beyond ten minutes and you just might get ‘er done! I did and here it is!
What have you learned about overcoming procrastination?
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Sometimes it is just easier living with the undones than to spend the energy to take care of them. That is how I approached my last room in my house to redo, the bathroom. The wallpaper was horrid and to make it worse, for the past few years, whenever I would see a loose section, I would reglue it down. This summer, I began to pick a way at it and lived in a wallpaper jungle until I said ENOUGH and set aside time to totally tackle the job. All of my regluing only made the project much more tedious. For a whole month, my cabinets and their contents were on my living room floor. I had to use my living room mirror as all there was was a hole in the bathroom where the bathroom mirror hung. Finally, it all came together, the walls were stripped and painted and everything is in it’s place. I had a vision of the finished product…..but a vision needs legs and arms. What peace and sense of accomplishment comes when it all comes together.
What a great illustration of how patient persistence can defeat procrastination. It is a case of stringing a whole series of 10 minute minumums until the project was completed. Good encouragement for anyone tackling a big project. Thanks for the comment.