There are a lot of words that suggest evil, but ugly is a completely different animal. Procrastination has to be the ugliest of those words. It leads to all sorts of other ugly words such as late, overdue, forgot, penalties, fines and even traffic tickets.
Procrastination gets me in more trouble than anything else. What causes it? For me, it’s when I don’t think I can finish something in the amount of time I have available. When it comes to procrastination, I have to be the Queen. It seems when one thing gets put off, it follows that other things will also be put off. Putting one thing to the side, means when the next project comes in, it will then join the first. Suddenly there are stacks of projects in front of me, and it becomes overwhelming, leading to – you guessed it – even more procrastination.
In reality, most tasks actually take me less time to finish than I estimate. Sometimes I procrastinate just to avoid something that’s unpleasant such as making a doctor’s appointment. But, once the appointment is made I can no longer avoid it.
Procrastination is really ugly when combined with business projects. The one I project I see clients put off the most (that can seriously hurt a business) is reconciling the checkbook. Each month when your statement comes in, it should take less than twenty minutes to reconcile your checking account. Putting this off for several months, means you are probably going to have to spend a few hours or more on this one task, because it has become overwhelming and, that ugly word, procrastination has won again.
This means you won’t have an accurate financial picture of your business. That will lead you to make uninformed decisions or possibly miss some very good opportunities, and it’s another victory for procrastination!
I would love to tell you I am not ever going to procrastinate again. But I have to go get caught up on this stuff I have been putting off, before I can stop putting of the next item on my list. Procrastination is such an ugly word because it starts a vicious cycle. So, I’m off to figure out how to get out of this vicious cycle and get back to work. Or maybe I’ll just do that later! Arrrrgggg!