How long has your list of procrastination opportunities become? When I started tracking the ways that I procrastinate, my list was amazingly long. I surprised myself by the number of times every day that I put a small task aside to be replaced by something that I thought was much more important. I mentioned at the outset of this challenge that this had been one of the most revolutionary changes that I’ve made in my life that really directly relate to how have I’ve become more mindful moment-to-moment.
Here’s what I discovered when I really began to watch and observe my behavior. Yes, I put aside many, many small tasks. What were the consequences of that? The first major consequence was that every day I would have at least two hours (if not three hours) of thoughts that rattled through my mind about all of those unfinished tasks that I needed to remind myself to be sure and complete. I make no overstatement here. I was occupying a lot of my thinking and awareness brain capacity to making sure I remembered to do all of what I had so casually set aside. My brain was filled to the brim with a long list of unfinished tasks to be completed.
What do these thoughts sound like if I were to voice them to you now? I would be thinking to myself,
“Oh yeah, that’s right I’ve got to write that letter to Betty that I promised that I would write.”
“That’s right, I’ve got to buy that present for a friend and that’s going to be due in a couple of weeks so I have to be sure and get that done.”
“There are four or five emails I didn’t respond to last week. I can’t remember quite what they were but I’m sure I’ve got to do that at least sometime in the next couple of days, they’re probably waiting for a reply – well of course I just don’t have time right now to get back to those and I’m not sure, it’ll probably take me 10 or 15 minutes to even find them and I don’t have enough time to go back in my email a couple of weeks ago to find who it was that wrote me and what it was, that’s just too much work, I can’t do that right now.”
“And yeah, that bill, I know that bill for the internet is due. If they shut my internet down I’m really shut down for good so let me think about it. Yeah. That is one I really ought to do right now but I really don’t want to do it. I hate to do the bills but I’m going to go find that internet bill right now. It is probably back in that box where I put all the bills.”
So what do I do? I march back to the box. I’m very proud of myself because I am actually attending to something I know I have to do. I can’t put off any longer. And guess what? I can’t find the bill. The bill is not in the box. So I say to myself,
“But I’ve really got to pay it, I think it’s due today or at least maybe tomorrow so I’ve got to pay it today or else I’ll have to pay the late fee and my internet might actually be shut down.”
What then happens? We’re talking 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes – sometimes an hour – I have to launch a search. I begin to think,
“Let’s see, when did that bill come in? That was two weeks ago and, okay, I went to the mailbox, or was that Deborah? I can’t quite remember that. Maybe I did go to the mailbox and I picked up the mail and then I came in the house and where was I when I looked at the mail?
Let’s see, well maybe I left it in the car, that’s possible. Well let me get the keys to the car, I’ll go out to the car right now. I will look in the car and see if the bill is in the car. Maybe it is in the car.”
I go out to the car. The bill is not in the car.
“Okay, that didn’t work, let me go back in the house. Where was I when I saw the bill? I remember opening the bill, I remember about how much it was, so where did I open up the bill?“
Okay, I could go on and on and explain to you the process of what I encounter when I have these kinds of experiences and of course my frustration level begins to get higher and higher and higher because I can’t find the bill, I know it needs to be paid and I simply can’t get that task done.
I come to a decision point after 45 minutes of looking.
1. Do I just give up?
2. Do I find a different way to pay the bill, like maybe going to the company itself?
3. Do I go online and see if I can find it (although I don’t even know how to do that)?
4. Do I just say, “I won’t bother paying the bill this time? They’ll send me another one, I’ll have a late fee, what does it matter?”
How do I solve the problem? In other words it engages a whole sequence of activities and challenges that really were entirely unnecessary. This is only one small example. It is often the case that when I get ready to do something that I know has to be done, I can’t find the materials that I need in order to actually execute the act.
What then is the change that I made in my life? It’s been a gradual change but what I decided to do is this: When the small little tasks were in my face I started acknowledging when I procrastinated (for, of course, a presumably very smart and rational reason). It’s pretty easy to do. It’s not as if there’s any secret to when you procrastinate, the thought is,
“Oh, I can’t do that right now I don’t have enough time.”
Or a favorite of mine is,
“I don’t want to do that right now. I’ve done 10 tasks that I really didn’t want to do today but I had to do, that’ll be the 11th task and I’m sorry, I’m just not going to do the 11th task. That’s just over the board for me. I’m going to go do something that I want to do!”
That’s usually my rationale. Of course the difficulty as it turns out, since I use the rationale so often —
“I don’t have time to do it right now.”
The little small tasks that I put aside begin to mount up one on top of another on top of another. Soon I have 20, 25, 30 if not 40 undone tasks in the queue, all of which are spread all over my life in different places in different parts of my memory. To now do any one of these little tasks I have to go back in time, reconstruct what it was that I needed to do and must do. It takes me four, five or ten times longer to do the task that it would have than if I simply did it when it came to my attention.
I then made a decision when I recognized all the ways that I procrastinated that I would change my way of behaving. What I’ve done then is when the little stuff comes through and I hear myself saying,
“I’m going to put that aside.”
I stop. I take a breath. I say,
“Whoa! Hold on just a minute! Let’s do that little task right now.”
Yes, it does take usually a little time if I have to pay a bill or respond to an email. But then, it is done. I have finished it! I have even discovered when I have to respond to somebody that takes some thought, it takes some writing, maybe it even takes a little research, maybe that response takes 20 or 30 minutes. It’s much, much more efficient for me and quite frankly it feels a whole lot better when I do it right when the email comes through than if I set the task aside.
Don’t get me wrong. I do put things aside every once in a while. I often get questions that I literally don’t know the answer to Research will be required that will take several hours if not longer. I literally do not have enough time to do that in the moment. I do not attend to every task immediately. Some tasks really do take quite a bit of time to complete. But, when somebody asks me to do something, I make every effort to do it immediately.
People who ask for information need it now. I offer some response which is a start at solving their problem. I respond when I get the question. Now I do not have to dig back in my emails to find the question that was asked weeks ago. What exactly did that person ask me? It winds up being so much more time-consuming and it really eats up my energy to go back and do it if it sits on the shelf for a day or two days or three weeks or four weeks. Attending the tasks as they come through as it turns out is a very healing experience.
The other huge benefit for me personally has been that it eliminates the problem of stuck energy. When we put things aside we begin to create clogs in our energetic system. Energetic clogs slow everything down. There is no flow. No life force is present. Becoming less of a procrastinator has created more flow in my life.
We’re not going to be able to manifest abundance or health or wellness if we are all clogged up with undone tasks. The flow in my life is much better now that I have begun to attend to the little stuff in a timely fashion.
My challenge for you then in this second part of this grand finale of all the mindfulness exercises is really quite simple. Why not give it a trial run? For all of those little things that you tend to put aside – perhaps the phone calls that you know you need to make right then but you put aside – make the phone call! You don’t have to talk a long time. You can just tell the person,
“I just wanted to touch base and say hi, how are you; and by the way I’ve got an appointment in 15 minutes, I can’t talk long.”
That’s perfectly acceptable and it gets that particular connection done. It’s the same for any response whatsoever of a task that you’ve put aside because you procrastinated.
Do everything that comes across your desk, through your computer, through your phone, from your friends, through neighbors. When requests come and you decide you do want to respond to the request, do it right then. Of course you may say “No” and that’s another way to clear out that energy. You’ve made it very clear,
- No, I’m not going to do that.
- No, I’m not going to attend that meeting.
- No, I’m not going to meet that appointment. I’ve just decided it’s not something that I can do right now.”
That clears everything up. You have decided. Instead of putting it aside and saying “Ah…
- Maybe I should do that…
- Maybe I should go to that meeting …
- Maybe I hold have a appointment with that person…
Instead of holding these confusing thoughts you stop, you say,
“What do I really need to do for myself?”
You make a decision. You respond to the person. And it is done. It is complete. There is closure. There is no more pontificating or worrying or agonizing over what it is that you actually need to do.
Again I want to say for me it’s been life-changing. I really think the flow is much better in my life today than it was a year ago. I invite you to launch this particular challenge for longer than a week. See how it goes for you. This may be the first week of engaging a way that you can create
- More flow
- More abundance
- More health
- More wellness
- More joy
Robert
© Parkinsons Recovery