Procrastination

I had planned to write this last year but two. I know it is never too late. There is always time to do it in the future.

When I was in school, we knew that the semester was always concluded in three nights; the night before CAT 1, the night before CAT 2, and the night before the main exam. One only needed to spend time lazing around the whole semester, then get into action the last day. The strategy always worked, sometimes.

And that is the life of a procrastinator. They say that there is a lot of time to enjoy wasting. There is always time for anything. Have you found any living person who ran out of time and the clock stopped ticking for them? If you are in Africa, there is a lot of time. When God created time, he made a lot of it!

The procrastinator makes new year resolutions and waits till December to start implementing them.

We are many

There is one of us who was told to come up with a register of all the procrastinators. He is yet to get started. But we are many, very many. We are the people who enjoy the benefits of procrastination.

Benefits

If you can do it in two hours just before the deadline, why do it in six hours one week before? There is nothing that saves tune than procrastination.

Even wisdom is usually a function of age. Better delay doing it until as late as possible, for then you will be older, hence wiser.

Procrastination is natural. Natural is good. Let’s save the planet.

It has saved me a lot if things. I have always procrastinated on taking driving classes for the last 71 years. Now they have come up with self-driving cars, saving me the hairs I would have lost taking those useless classes.

The Perfectionist

There is one class of procrastinators who go through hell on earth.

A procrastinator who is a perfectionist will face death by a thousand cuts. Late to start, and even when they start, they will restart again to meet certain standards. As they suffer from a paralysis of analysis, even the non-perfectionist procrastinator will be a million steps ahead. Time is not good for perfectionists.

The Ugly of Procrastination

While procrastination has its cure in deadlines, where the procrastinator spends sleepless days and nights just before the deadline, there is one thing that all procrastinators live to regret. In absence of deadlines or external factors to motivate them, many of life tasks can be ignored forever.

This is why many tasks are never done. Many degrees are not studied. Businesses are not started. Important self-development goals are ignored. At the end of the decade, one will look back and cry at the missed opportunities, but it will be too late.

When we realize that time is short and the clock is always ticking, we will understand that procrastination is worse than an armed robber.

In the words of Denis Waitley, ‘Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.’

Disclaimer

The only thing a procrastinator will never procrastinate about is on procrastination.