I Procrastinate

Really?

I hear this comment a lot and I’m often seeing people posting on facebook and Twitter that they are procrastinating a lot today.  My first response is to query that.  I think it is often easy to label our behaviour like this rather than admit to ourselves what is really going on.

What does procrastination really mean?  The English Oxford Dictionary definition is “The action of delaying or postponing something”

Why would I query that this is what you are doing? Well because I’ve caught myself being tempted to use this line and when I’ve delved down into what is really going on for me it’s normally something else, like:

• I’m feeling lazy
• I can’t be bothered
• I don’t want to do it
• It’s a task I’ve been given by someone else
• I think it’s going to be difficult
• ………

So when I say “Really?” I don’t mean to be harsh, I’m just asking you to look a little deeper, to ask your self what is really going on and to act accordingly.

I did that today with three tasks I’d been ‘procrastinating’ about for over a week.  When I faced up to the fact that I didn’t want to do them and I thought they would be complicated and awkward I found that I just sailed through them and they were done in minutes.