Posts Tagged ‘Weekends’
Planned procrastination
Confession: I actually like working on the weekends. I can get ahead of the upcoming week, free myself up for any unanticipated Monday developments (the Internet is a crazy place, after all), and better coax my ADD-brain into tackling longer form projects.
But every weekend, I do the same. Damn. Thing.
less time stressing, more time at the park with charlie
I promise myself that this time I won’t save everything for Sunday evening, which invariably means I’m up crazy late. Instead, I’ll spread the work out. Get up early on Saturday, perhaps, and check a few to-do boxes over a latte. But without fail, I always end up procrastinating until Sunday night.
Which totally sucks. Not only do I feel shitty about not meeting my goal, but I’ve also sabotaged the rest of my non-working weekend with guilt.
This time around, I tried something new. I accepted that I wouldn’t get to my work until the very end of our glorious three-day weekend (so in this case, a Monday), and I gave myself a free pass to just enjoy myself until then.
And it was AWESOME.
Ask any habitual procrastinator, and they’ll tell you their biggest source of anxiety isn’t the adrenaline-fueled eleventh hour (that’s actually kinda fun). Rather, what plagues us are hours one through ten, when we know we should be working, but almost certainly won’t, if prior data is any indication. Sure, we all have highly developed powers of compartmentalization, but we still spend time feeling guilty about just how highly developed these powers are.
So new goal: when I already know I’m going to put off doing something, I’m just going to roll with it. This mentality goes beyond near-term, definitive deadlines. Want to join CrossFit but know you won’t have time until the Spring? Enjoy your curves while you still have em. Or, on a more serious note: to all my friends who love what they do for a living, but feel the pressure to get a “real,” better paying job; or dig the single life, but worry they should be settling down – give yourself a free pass. Pick an age, any age, and go ahead and postpone tackling that responsible, adult milestone until then.
Because if you’re not ready, you’re not going to do it anyway, silly. So you may as well have fun in the interim.
