"Never put off till tomorrow what may be done the day after tomorrow just as well." –Mark Twain
If anyone is keeping track, my newsletter is a few days late this month. There are a few reasons for this: (1) I couldn’t think of anything to write about this month; (2) I didn’t feel like spending time thinking about what I should write about; and (3) I chose to do other things rather than force myself to work on my newsletter. In other words, I procrastinated.
Procrastination is defined as “the action of delaying or postponing something.” Procrastination is often associated with laziness—it is essentially the action of taking no action. It is choosing not to do something because you don’t really feel like doing it. It is telling yourself “I’ll do it later, and it’ll be fine” and then believing what you’ve told yourself is true.
Despite all outward appearances, I have always been a procrastinator, and for some reason this doesn’t really bother me. Part of this is perhaps because my procrastination has not had any terrible effect on my life, and sometimes it has actually helped me. Like when I delayed starting on a project I didn’t want to work on, then had the project get cancelled. Or when I put off doing something difficult, only to have something happen that greatly facilitated the thing I put off doing.
I had good intentions last week—really, I did. When I pulled out my “writing” laptop at night, I told myself I should work on a topic for my newsletter. But then I would open my work-in-progress and start writing, instead. A few days ago, I even found a quote about vacations and wrote a couple of sentences about the importance of taking a break from doing work to regroup and recharge, thinking that could be the topic of my monthly musings. Then I decided I was too tired to write anymore (or my eyelids started to droop, preventing me from being able to type), and I put away my computer.
Bottom line, I just wasn’t feeling it this month—I didn’t have it in me. Then, on Friday, I got a text from one of my subscribers saying he missed my monthly message and hoped I was doing well. Someone had noticed that I hadn’t sent out my May newsletter! That was it—that was all I needed. That was my spark. Suddenly, I knew what I wanted to write about, and, more importantly, I wanted to write it.
So, I guess this makes me a follower of the Mark Twain school of thought: “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done the day after tomorrow just as well.” Or, in my case, never force yourself to do something now, just for the sake of getting it done, when waiting won’t hurt anything. Maybe, sometimes, procrastination isn’t the action of delaying something you don’t want to do. Maybe it’s just waiting for the right time to do it. Because sometimes you can do something tomorrow even better than you could have done it today.
- Kathryn Amurra