I have to thank my young friend Shehzaad for inspiring me to write this piece.  This is the question he asked me: “How do you put off procrastination?”  I will admit it took me almost 2 weeks to mull on the question, and was tempted to put it on the backburner, but it was with sheer determination, and a stern commitment to myself to take care of things that needed to be taken care of immediately.  Exposing my own inadequacies was really important. This was when the light in the tunnel emerged, and all the pieces of the puzzle came together.

In addition to burning some serious midnight oil, questioning, analyzing, and fact finding I understood that there is a serious difference between procrastination and laziness.  To make things simpler, let me illustrate real scenarios of procrastination.  Rita is 40 years of age; works at a renowned bank and because of her excellent KPI was given a promotion.  While everything seemed to come up roses, there were some new computer software packages that she had to learn.  Coming from a retail banking scenario made it worse as Rita was subconsciously a technophobe. She kept trying to evade learning the programs.  She even began to get defensive, and would postpone proposals that required her to be working on the new application.  Ultimately things came to a standstill when in a moment of panic she broke down and confessed her insecurity to her supervisor.  Suffice to say, they took all things into consideration.  However, Rita had to face her fears and make a concerted decision to learn the computer program.  Suffice to say, she still has her job.

Mayank is another example of procrastination.  He had a chauffeur driven car in Delhi and when he and his family arrived in Etobicoke during one of the harshest winters in Canada he realized that he couldn’t depend on public transport to get his family of 3 kids around.  He passed the written test but failed 8 times on the road test.  Losing his confidence because of successive failure he kept putting it off, for up to 4 years, while his wife (who by the way had never, ever driven in her life before) moved ahead, got her license and began taking to the wheel.  No prizes for guessing who his kids called ‘Super Mom.’ His wake up call came when they visited a relative’s house and a snide comment was passed about his masculinity.  The effect was spontaneous, he got his drivers license immediately.

In short, the fear of failure results in procrastination.  As it is our minds are often battlefields of all sorts of anxieties—stress in the workplace, responsibilities at home, callous employees, and uncaring employers, unproductive and under qualified supervisors who have risen up because of their sucking-up capabilities, uncertain times, assumptions and deductions about the future, and a Pandora’s box of what is to come.  Add a potpourri of worry to the mix, and instead of having tunnel vision, what we eventually do is let the importance of today’s success be postponed to tomorrow, or the day after.  Call it slacking, putting off, postponement—whatever is keeping us from reaching our true potential needs to be taken care of.  And our time starts right now. No more dilly-dallying, or setting back what we are truly capable of.

Personally I have struggled with procrastination myself.  God knows how many times I have made up my mind to do achieve something, and then very conveniently backslide.  Watching too many films, surfing on the TV and net (without a clue of what I’ve seen, or heard), making empty talk with friends, online shopping, overeating when idle, downloading unnecessary apps on my phone are some of my weaknesses.  So the first thing to do is to try and eliminate all of these impediments.  Before their slothful demise you will get a kind of panic attack, or cold turkey syndrome.  Wait; don’t give in to the quick fix, or nicotine patch.

Instead, follow this simple and easy to imbibe game plan:  The world’s most successful men and women keep a daily planner—on their Smartphone’s, the most important to-do’s in your day may not necessarily be about yourself, it’s also about changing your surroundings, and other peoples lives.  Whatever your role; as a boss, parent, mentor, or teacher—it’s your personal mission and vision that will be reflective in your demeanor.  Secondly, charge-sheet yourself; keep a list of daily, weekly, and monthly objectives and just like you would in a shopping-list, tick each thing off as soon as you’ve achieved the outcome.  Most importantly keep a track of your time management, how wisely you’ve used your time is going to show up in your charge-sheet file.  If you’ve just lazed away your day by refusing to get out of bed, the items that you wanted to get done will often slip away into Procrastinationland.  In other words it’s also called Never-Never land; because it’s never going to come back.  A Hindi quotation puts the writing on the wall in the best way, and to sum up here you go:

Kaal Kare So Aaj, Aaj Kare So Ab (Literal translation: It is best to do what is important today knowing that it will have the maximum impact today)

 

 

 

 

Jude Paul Fernandes is the author of ‘Frost Bites’, available at the Toronto Public Library.  His novel ‘Lonely in Mumbai’ is no longer in Procrastinationland.  And will appear in the summer of 2017.