Procrastination and Priorities

PROCRASTINATE:  
  1. to defer action; delay.
  2. to put off till another day or time; defer; delay.

I could definitely be considered a serial procrastinator. I know I'm not the only person who struggles with procrastination, because I have clicked on many articles with tips on how to avoid procrastination, and if people are writing about it and people are reading about it, then there must be other people struggling with it. I firmly believe procrastination is fairly common, and it's likely this post would have gotten more readers if I had entitled it: 'Conquer Your Procrastination' or similar.

Procrastination is not without consequence. Things that get put off tend to pile up. The 'list of things you need and want to do' gets longer and longer. When you finally make the time to start addressing the list, deciding which thing on the list to address eats up a large portion of that time since there is so much to choose from. While that sand slides through the hourglass, you not only feel the burden your procrastination has caused, but that while you decide what to do you're making things worse.

My ability to procrastinate used to come with a sense of pride. The homework with the ever-approaching deadline? No match for me. I was fully capable of putting it off and putting it off, only to cram in a burst of effort at the last minute and still get a passing grade. Marvel at my prowess! Inevitably, I reached the point in my life where I realized that getting a passing grade was a lot more difficult in the real world, and my procrastinating habits were making my life harder instead of easier. I also realized that I owed it to myself to do better than 'a passing grade,' and that pride in doing my best on a task tasted far sweeter than pride in my ability to procrastinate and not fail.

Thinking it Through
I was actually in the process of not-procrastinating when this post began to form in my mind. Particularly when what you've been putting off is manual labor: washing dishes, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash - your mind has plenty of time for internal dialogue about abstract concepts. As my hands did their work, my mind examined my procrastination.

Was I intentionally procrastinating? I don't really need to make a budget. I've gotten by, at least, with not having one for many years. I want to be on a budget, I want better control of my finances. Surely with these noble goals I wasn't intentionally avoiding making a budget. Even back in school, I wasn't intentionally avoiding the homework. I wanted to spend time on it. I wanted an awesome finished project. I wanted to knock it out of the park.

If I wanted to spend time on it, why wasn't I?
Because you don't want to spend time on it, you want to have already spent time on it. You want it to be done, to reap the benefits of having done it - but you don't actually want to do the thing itself.
Instant gratification? Of course that's what I wanted. Only in retrospect does my desire for the result outweigh what I wanted to do at the time.

But it happens almost every time. Almost every time I choose what I want to do at the moment of what I want to have done, and almost every time hindsight shows it to have been the wrong choice. Logic suggests remembering this and using it to overcome the appeal of what I want to do at a given moment - yet, logic faces a challenging foe in the form of momentary desires.

Priorities in Order
My rational mind constructs a simple plan to follow. It sorts through all of the retrospective anecdotes and finds the pattern of the data. To reduce the stress of enormous todo lists, follow these simple steps:

It assures me that by doing so my life will become more peaceful and more under control. My stress level will decrease. My contentedness will increase. Just follow these simple steps. Try it for a short time, prove it's effectiveness.


 I see the logic. I see the simple wisdom. Then it occurs to me, This wisdom should be shared. You should turn all of this thought into a blog post. Quick, do it now, before you lose the inspiration.




Clearly it will take great effort to promote this and manage to prevent hypocrisy.

It will. Let's focus on that right after we write the post and hit publish...

How I Found Religion Through Science

A long time ago, when I first heard the statistic that human beings only use x% of their brain (4, 10, whatever), I had a bit of a daydream. I thought it would be remarkably awesome if while we were here living our lives using that tiny percentage of our brain, the rest of our brain was off in the universe somewhere building our afterlife. Shortly thereafter I dismissed the daydream as just a daydream - but I've since grown spiritually quite a bit.... and I think I was onto something. What's more, I think our current understanding of science backs me up on this.

Growing up in the United States, I was exposed to quite a few different religions. Most of them were one flavor or another of Christianity; Catholicism, Baptist, Pentecostal, Mormonism, etc. Of course, I was also exposed to Buddhism, Judaism, Atheism, and if you want to count it, even Agnosticism.

The thing that I came to believe over time was that if God exists, man had undoubtedly gotten it wrong somewhere along the line. If the Christ people were right, Judaism was wrong. If the Pentecostals were right, the baptists were wrong. If the Buddhists were right, Catholics were wrong.

So, hating to be wrong, I adopted the belief that the only right answer was 'I don't know' - and I've considered myself agnostic ever since..at least until recently. I spent the better part of my youth and the early part of my adulthood in a little town in Oklahoma - Altus, Oklahoma. We didn't have too much religious diversity there, but we did have several different flavors of Christianity. So, having adopted agnosticism, it was worthwhile for me to have an answer when questioned by Christians with: What if you're wrong?

Fancying myself clever, and knowing enough about what the bible had to say to back it up, the answer I had for myself and them became: If I'm wrong, and there is definitely a God above who will judge me for the way I lived my life and the beliefs that I held on Judgment Day, I trust his judgment. After all, if the all-knowing creator who knew the number of hairs on my head while I was in the womb was doing the judging, he would very well know why I believed what I believed - he made me this way. He would also know what I would have had to experience for my beliefs to fall in line with whatever the correct faith was - and if he chose not to send those experiences my way...well, that was his call to make. While certain Christian's beliefs led them to believe that I would surely be sent straight to hell for not believing as they did, that was their judgment - and I had decided that if God exists, his judgment would be much more loving, fair, and wise. So I carried on like that for many a year, without fear of eternal damnation and just a tiny measure of faith.

Recently however, that view has changed in a very fundamental way....

Don't Write Yourself Off

If wisdom can truly be shared through written word, then I pray that what little wisdom I have come to own can be shared with you now. If not embraced outright, my hope is that at least the seed of this truth can be planted in your mind so that you, too, can come to this beautiful understanding.

Don't Write Yourself Off
What has taken me 34 years of rather unfulfilling existence to finally understand is that it's VERY IMPORTANT for you to stop writing yourself off. If you have been, stop. If you haven't been, why haven't you people done a better job of getting this message out there?

If you had gotten through to me with this 16 years ago, 12 years ago, hell - even 3 years ago, my life would have been so much different. And, since I'm not writing myself off anymore - not only would my life have been so much different, I think the world would have been better off. That's right - the WORLD would have been a better place if I had figured this out even just 3 years ago. It makes THAT much difference.

At this point, you might be writing me off. You might be saying to yourself, "what kind of egomaniac thinks the whole world would have been a better place if he had figured this out 3 years ago?" You know what, that's fine. In fact, if I were reading this rather than writing it, I might be doing the same thing. I am completely okay with you writing me off and dismissing these words as rubbish. Just don't do it to yourself.

I won't be doing it to myself, not anymore, and you shouldn't either. You probably have been for years, and it's time to stop.

- What took so long?
I don't know why it is or how it came to pass that this fundamental thing was not apparent to me sooner. It doesn't make sense to me that people who understand this haven't spread the message to every one they know. Their friends, their children - how have they not spread this message to them? - and by six degrees of Kevin Bacon, shouldn't it therefore have spread to me sooner? Shouldn't someone have pounded this into my head by now?

Once you realize that you've been writing yourself off for your whole life and then stop, you can't help but see the people around you writing themselves off every day. The waitress that wants to be painter, the office drone who wants to start his own business, the secretary that wants to open a no-kill animal rescue, that transcriptionist who wants to be a writer.... they're all writing themselves off.

The only reason they wish they had a different life is because they've been writing themselves off. The only reason you wish you had a different life is because you've been writing yourself off. It's bullshit. Stop it.

- Soccer Trophies
Maybe they came close. Maybe they all most got the message out. You know those trophy-kids? The ones that played in the soccer matches where everyone got a trophy, even the losing team? I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I think maybe this is the message they were trying to get out. They just didn't understand it well enough, or they got the message slightly confused. They thought this meant "Everyone is a Winner," but the actual message is "Everyone can do a hell of a lot better if they get out of their own way."

If a kid loses, he's not a winner. That's giving him a terribly false impression of how the world works and he's going to be torn apart by the way the world really works. This is a world where you can be a gazelle just getting a morning drink when some lion can come along and rip your throat out. Human society is NO DIFFERENT. The only reason anyone thinks human society isn't rip-your-throat-out deadly is because the lions prefer calm gazelles, sedated with a false sense of security.

If a kid loses, he's a loser. Don't give him a trophy. However, if you ever hear your child say "I'll never win a trophy. I'm not good enough." I want you to immediately slap him in the face hard enough that he'll remember it for the rest of his life. I don't care if you're in church, slap that little ...

If he's talking like that, he's learning to write himself off - sell himself short - mentally sabotage himself and maim his entire life. Don't let him learn how to do that. Don't allow him to talk himself out of trying.