Eat That Frog!

Of my faults - which, according to my other half, are many and various - one to which I will readily admit is procrastination. While some people may live by the motto, "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today," I am more likely to follow the maxim that one should, "Never put off till tomorrow what can be put off indefinitely."

Okay, I may not be entirely serious in saying that, but I'm sure I am not alone in that I have at times put things off for so long that the problem eventually goes away. This can be a good thing sometimes in that a difficult task, put off long enough, might eventually become unnecessary through a change of circumstances. Or a bad thing, as an opportunity is missed or a minor problem becomes a major one. And all too often a task that has been put off becomes still more difficult because there is so much less time in which to complete it. None of this is exactly startling; I have not stumbled on some previously undiscovered trait of human behaviour, but what I did not know (and I have a feeling many of you would not have known either), is that there is a World Fight Procrastination Day, and it was this week; Tuesday 6th September to be precise. Naturally, the first thing I did when I learned this was to Google it, and found that there is no official website for World Fight Procrastination Day: presumably no one has got round to setting one up yet.

What Googling "World Fight Procrastination Day" did find was a whole host of websites that suggest how one should deal with one's procrastination habit, and top of the list comes Mark Twain's advice that the first thing you should do each day is eat a live frog, because that will be the worst thing you have to do each day. In other words, begin the day with the task that you least want to start, and once it is done, the day cannot get any worse and that unpleasant chore will be out of the way.

That's good advice, except in my experience the counter arguments can be seductive and persuasive. First, that task may be a time consuming one, and while it is important, it may not be time critical (well, not yet, but it soon will be), and just look at all those easy, little jobs that aren't as important but are more urgent. Let's get them done, get a few quick wins and then that frog eating task can be attacked without all those other jobs worrying away at the back of your mind; a major justification for putting off some unpleasant, or difficult task is the promotion of other, easier tasks which have far less importance. You know the sort of thing; that task that requires pulling together multiple strands of research and analysing the resulting data and compiling a report for your boss that he wants on his desk this time next week (straightforward, non-urgent but time consuming) suddenly seems a much more attractive proposition than liaising with your HR department to arrange a disciplinary hearing for an underperforming member of your team. For some, it could be the other way round, but for me the most likely tasks I would procrastinate over at work were the touchy-feely, people skill needing, potentially confrontational ones rather than the more technical ones.

And procrastination gives great scope for worriers (like me) to exercise their worry muscles. You can worry about the task in prospect (how do I do it?), worry about putting it off (will I have enough time to do it now?), worry while you actually do it (am I doing it right and have I got enough time?), and worry about it in hindsight (could I have done it better if I hadn't put it off for so long?)

No wonder then that studies have shown that regular procrastination increases stress and anxiety, reduces productivity and may have a negative impact on someone's work performance, to which I would add that it can add a strain on personal relationships too. Just as the procrastinator will put off that difficult or stressful task at work, so they may put off talking about some personal issue, or delivering bad news at home, and with friends or family. At home, the procrastinator will worry about the consequences of broaching a subject - what will the other party's reaction be? And worries about the fact that by delaying bringing the matter up, it will just make it worse. The worst case scenario is that the matter is not brought up until it is too late, with inevitably disastrous consequences.

The garage after a major tidying exercise (sadly, no pictures exist of it before).

Putting things off is frequently justified by the procrastinator by the act of prevarication. If procrastination is the thief of time, then prevarication is the armed robber. Procrastination picks time's pocket; prevarication takes it into a dark alley and mugs it at knifepoint. Prevarication marshals all of the reasons for not doing something, launches them in a blitzkrieg like frenzy and bludgeons the procrastinator  into not doing something because that appears infinitely preferable to doing it.

Some things are more serious things than others if they get put off - the faint but persistent smell of gas that doesn't get investigated is likely to have more serious consequences  than not dealing with that pile of old newspapers that have accumulated in the corner of the lounge and really need bundling up and putting in the recycling.  But even the most innocent of tasks, if procrastinated over long enough, can be a cause of inconvenience, if not exactly dangerous. Val and I have spent the last few weeks undertaking what I can only describe as a major exercise in tut, tat and detritus clearance. We hired a skip (see One Man's Trash) and cut down an old conifer tree that had died a lingering and unsightly death in the corner of the garden, cleared the shed and the garage (where I assembled three new shelving units to supplement the two already there) and generally tidied on a scale not normally seen other than in advance of a visit from the Queen. Going into the shed or garage is now a perfectly normal activity and not like embarking on an assault course.

A rather poorly looking conifer in the rain, and (below) with it removed.

We went through all of the files in the study, binning the old instructions for lawnmowers, hi-fi systems and kettles that have long since bitten the dust (and who needs an instruction manual for a kettle anyway?) The pile of old receipts, bank statements and random letters from random people that, along with a major collection of old boxes and cardboard, we had kept 'just in case' have been dealt with and a major resolution has been made not to allow that sort of situation to repeat itself: no way do I want to undertake the monumental task of shredding that number of old documents that contain some sort of personal detail again. 

To my surprise, I have been inspired by the work we have done, to the extent that I have rooted around through loads of old personal stuff, binning piles of papers, tidying football programmes and generally organising myself. It's addictive and now that the only things I have to do genuinely have to wait, I'm getting impatient and suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

I would like to think that the days of procrastination and prevarication are behind me, although like being addicted to something, it will be hard not to fall into the old, bad habits, but I'm going to try. I'll let you know how I get on...if I don't put it off.