Procrastination

Finitude: it is a new word that I learned while reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.  We have limited time on this earth.  We can only do so many things.  We need to prioritize things that are important to us. The rest, we have to procrastinate on them.

This is one aspect of procrastination.  This is a good kind of procrastination.  It will let us focus on what we have determined to be important.

There is another aspect of procrastination, and it rears it’s ugly head when we start on difficult tasks.  This kind of procrastination is the kind to avoid.  It could be driven by perfectionism.  It could be fueled by what Burkeman identifies as our inability to reconcile our perfect plans with the challenges the real world imposes on us.

There is a remedy for this: execution.  I am not sure who said that a good plan violently executed is better than a perfect plan is not realized.  It is our duty ourselves to beat the debilitating type of procrastination through actions, no matter how little.

In sum, we should limit what is on our plate by procrastinating on the big things that do not mean so much to us.  Having the few massively important items on our plates, we should dive into them without procrastination.

The massiveness of these items nay trigger fear followed by procrastination.  Chunk them down to nibble sized tasks and start working away.