Procrastination
September 18, 2009
I stay busy, I am pretty sure of it. And I whack line after line off ‘to do’ lists both here in the office and at home. And things get done, I can point to plenty of projects and errands and meetings and phone calls and emails and family time and involvement at church. I don’t watch much TV, perhaps 8 to 10 hours per week (and virtually no sports). We don’t have any of the premium cable channels, so half of what I watch is in Spanish. I don’t game online or with the Playstation. I don’t Facebook or MySpace or YouTube. I do have a Linkedin account, but it took me 3 months to fill in the profile and make my first contact. I don’t spend much time online at forums or surfing the internet. Unfortunately, I don’t volunteer much time at all in the community or at a school or in a nursing home or with Boy Scouts. I don’t spend time online tracking my meager investments or planning my next brilliant financial move.
I don’t remember my parents being so busy. I remember them in the living room having long conversations about work, night after night. I remember long Saturdays doing some house work and then settling in for a BBQ on the patio. I think they paid their few bills in a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon. My parents worked hard full-time, but in their off hours they were really off, and appeared (at least to a child) to have hours and hours of leisure time.
We seem to spend 3 or 4 hours a week inputting every receipt into Quickbooks, researching mistakes by the water company, following up on overcharges at the bank, reconciling multiple accounts, talking to a rep at Verizon about the PureLuv.com charge that showed up on our cellphone bill, finding out why Intuit started charging $39 every month after a one-time tech support call. And so it goes.
Our modern world sucks the time and life out of all of us. We were supposed to be empowered by technology, when the reality is that it is just another thing on a never ending to do list. I have “list anxiety”, that nagging feeling that there is always another thing that needs to be checked off – another project to complete.
So I don’t think I am a procrastinator, I try hard to get the things done which need done. I know I am not alone, on this planet we are the busiest nation of people going nowhere — our faces turned down to our iPhones, checking voice mail for the tenth time today.