It is far too easy to mistake something like failing to vacuum the living room or postponing an oil change for your car as inconsequential, until you realize that the days and weeks of your life are composed of thousands of such minor things, the poor execution of which builds up and up and up until whatever worthwhile endeavor you hoped to achieve with your time is eclipsed by a garbage barge of unfinished business that you had no good reason to avoid.
If you consider any necessary task in terms of time and energy, there is usually no better time to attend to it than immediately after it becomes apparent that it must be done.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Something may prevent you from acting immediately, or there may be something more important which takes precedence. But as a heuristic for productivity, it’s generally best to do something as soon as possible.
Seeing this maxim in writing, it seems so obvious that to actually state it explicitly feels like little more than articulating the mundane. Yet for me this understanding was an epiphany. Beneath the surface, it made all the difference to know that if, for instance, I had to do the laundry and nothing really kept me from doing it, I would not only gain nothing by doing it at a later time, but I would incur a variety of pointless expenditures. Apart from the self-evident cost (in this case, not being able to wear the dirty clothes) the delay would cost me in terms of attention, for I would notice the laundry later and remember that I had to do it. It would cost me in terms of decision, for I would then have to deliberate for a moment or two whether I should do it or something else. It would cost me in terms of emotion, for I would have to deal with the irritation and guilt of not having done the laundry.
Each subsequent time I avoid a chore it feels slightly less excusable, and if I felt mildly irritated and guilty the first time I avoided doing my laundry, I might feel downright embarrassed by the tenth or twelfth time—not to mention ever more anxious as other matters requiring my attention inevitably manifested and entered a queue of Things Which I Do Not Possess Enthusiasm For. And try as I might to ignore it, the unfinished task inevitably generates in my subconscious a litany of questions: When do you intend to do the laundry? Why aren’t you doing it now? What else do you have to do? Should you do the dishes instead? What are the benefits of doing the dishes instead of the laundry? Do you have enough clean clothes? Are you really going to use paper plates for dinner tonight instead of unloading the dishwasher, then rinsing and putting in the dirty dishes? Are you too tired for such simple tasks? Didn’t you take a break earlier? What else do you have to do tonight? Don’t you also have to clean the garage? When was the last time you did that?
Not that every question entailed under such circumstances would ring out in my mind as I went about my business, but they were all floating around in the background at least as I occupied myself with whatever seemed preferable to doing my laundry. And despite the fact that I did not consciously attend to all of those questions, they took up space in my head, as does everything else that I have to take care of, even when I’m not thinking about the individual tasks themselves. It was as though, in computing terms, they used RAM1. And as with RAM, one’s mental space has its limits. While I do not have the expertise to describe what is happening neurologically when I have too much on my mind, I do know that the more I have to deal with, the worse I get at almost everything. There’s a very strong correlation between me having a bunch of stuff to deal with and forgetting what I’m doing, being unable to make a decision, being less productive, making mistakes, getting flustered, becoming distracted, and so on. Making a list definitely helps (if you’re good at capturing everything and staying on top of it2) but even that doesn’t eliminate the oppressive weight of knowing that there is an overwhelming number of things that you need to attend to. Indeed, at a certain point managing the list becomes just another anxiety-provoking task in the inescapable, ever-changing agglomeration of responsibilities requiring your time and attention3.
In light of all that, the childish resistance to chores seems stupid. This was the trick, for me: confronting my dislike for a task with the irrefutable understanding that delaying it was an utter waste of my life, a waste which subtracted from everything else I wished to do in order to gratify the petulant desire to avoid that which I did not wish to do. Of course the shortest path to relief from the burden of any chore was to take care of it as soon as possible, but not doing so is not merely a delay: it actually increases the burden.
Sadly, just understanding the futility of procrastination has failed to make me a paragon of efficiency with an empty inbox and a to-do list in which every task is routinely completed and replaced by a new one every day or so. No, that requires far more than an aversion to procrastination. It requires balance. Learning when to rest, when to focus, when to act, and when to study—doing things when they are meant to be done whilst navigating the chaos of the day. Achieving that is no simple trick; it is the work of a lifetime. Not being stupid about avoiding the things that you will have to do eventually is but a small and important part of that.
It should be noted that all the above has concerned procrastination largely in terms of small, routine tasks, as it seemed most useful to illustrate the subtle costs of foolishly whittling away one’s time and energy when there was little at stake. It is far too easy to mistake something like failing to vacuum the living room or postponing an oil change for your car as inconsequential, until you realize that the days and weeks of your life are composed of thousands of such minor things, the poor execution of which builds up and up and up until whatever worthwhile endeavor you hoped to achieve with your time is eclipsed by a garbage barge of unfinished business that you had no good reason to avoid. Yet as detrimental as that can be, it mostly falls short of ruinous, which is where you can end up if you avoid delaying something truly important. Chalk this up as another statement of the obvious perhaps, but the consequences of procrastination seem to increase in severity in proportion to the importance of what you postpone, and if you put off for too long the things that matter to your health, to your relationships, to your personal development, to your soul, you can usually expect to pay dearly. That sort of procrastination is the kind of error the gods punish people for, so to speak—the stuff of tragedy.
Finally arriving at this understanding after several decades, I am left wondering how much further along I might be in achieving my potential if I had given up the absurd, self-sabotaging protests against responsibility when I was younger. It is impossible to say. The time and effort lost, and any subsequently precluded deeds add up to a heavy price. Still, I find it has served me in a way. To be able, now, to take on drudgery not with annoyance and resentment, but rather embracing it with the awareness that it shall be dispatched as placidly and efficiently as possible: this is a perpetual satisfaction and a blessing. The work doesn’t become fun exactly, but at least it gets done with grace, and there is something to celebrate in keeping the bother to a minimum.
Random-Access Memory, the computer memory type which stores working data and effectively limits the amount of programs and files your computer can have open at once.
Effectively managing and using to-do lists is something of an art. I recommend David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology to those who wish to get better at this.
I have a recurring nightmare about being in college. It is the end of the semester during finals and I suddenly remember that there’s a class I forgot to attend. From conversations it seems that this is not an uncommon sort of dream, which I guess comes from having so much on your mind for so long that you start to worry about overlooking something very important.