My tendency to procrastinate is kind of like my tendency to eat sugar (innate? instinctive? inborn?), and it’s led to tons of unnecessary stress for me so I’m done with it. Really! Leaving behind decades of procrastinating is really as easy as just doing it…now. I mean for goodness sake: I even procrastinate putting on lipbalm when my lips are dying for it and a stick of the stuff is lying within my reach!

(Oh, and I don’t think my destiny is sugar consumption…that was a joke!)

I’ve been wanting to vacuum my house for two weeks. A couple of years ago, I inquired on Facebook about how late is too late to be vacuuming when you have a neighbour who lives below you and I think people had said 9pm at that time. In my head, over time, that shifted to 8pm (I actually love vacuuming; I just felt bad because the lady who lives below me is probably in her 60s), and given my tendency to get home late from work, the vacuuming wasn’t getting done. Saturdays would be ideal, but I was too busy sleeping in, washing my hair (really), leaving on the conditioner for an hour then rinsing it out, doing laundry, and slothing (not a word but it really should be) about to add anything else to my schedule. And on Sundays I’d head to my parents’ place after church so I’d get home too late to vacuum (if I didn’t sleep over).

Everything changed this past Friday: I got home (late, but before 8pm) and instead of unwinding (which can take anywhere from 30 minutes to “the rest of the evening”), I immediately vacuumed. And instead of doing the upstairs on Saturday as I told myself I could, I just did it all on Friday evening. And instead of telling myself I could do the laundry on Saturday like I usually do, I put in a load as I was going to bed on Friday night. And when I woke up frightfully early on Saturday (anytime before 11am is truly frightful, but this was before 9am!), I allowed myself to stay in bed until 9:30am but then I kicked myself out of bed, put that laundry in the dryer, did my hair routine and used that hour with my hair in a conditioning cap to clean my kitchen. It felt great, and even though this is a long weekend I already feel like I was extraordinarily productive.

As I look around my house, there is still so much that is out of place: papers need to be filed (doing that once this entry is complete), same with receipts, Christmas decor needs to be put in the storage room (ditto), and two of my succulents are dying to be transplanted (I really want to put this off but I have no good reason to, especially since I have two new, larger pots). By doing things right away, I’ll save precious brain space that I used to use to unsuccessfully keep track of my unending to do lists.

Win-win.

Filed under: Goals, Introspective by jummy