I woke up on Saturday to find our kitchen and dining room area looking as it often does at the end of the week: articles of clothing placed on chair backs, mail left on any convenient surface, dishes in different stages of the cleaning process, shoes left in places for maximum tripping hazards, and I could go on.
Taking one look at all this mess, I knew this was my top priority for the day. I walked into the kitchen, opened the side door to the house, and went right into the garage to start a woodworking project. Two hours later, I was at a good stopping point in my project. I felt good about all that I accomplished. As I came back into my kitchen I was faced once again with what my priority for the day was.
We all know procrastinators, people that wait until the last second to do something, or they always have an excuse for why they did not get to it. I am not a wait until the final second person, never have been. Admittedly I was the kid in college that would have that end of semester project done two weeks into the semester.
What I have discovered is a second kind of procrastination, one that is more accepted and less obvious: active procrastination. In my weekend tale, I was actively procrastinating. I was not sitting around doing nothing, I was doing a bunch of things. Building a shelf, stacking wood, reading a book, but those activities were distracting me from what needed to get done.
The thing with active procrastination is you will still feel accomplished; people will still see what you have done. “You are not lazy; just missguided in what you need to focus on,” they might say. The truth is you are a procrastinator, too.
We all like doing the low-energy, low-willpower required tasks. If we don’t get to the important, high-priority tasks at the beginning of the day, I can guarantee we will not somehow have more motivation at the end of the day when all those other low-level tasks have already sapped us of our energy.
The best thing to do is get your most important tasks done first thing.
Your Fitness Sherpa,
