The Thief of Time
I was with a friend this week, who told me a story. She is a great gardener with truly green fingers that can pretty much grow everything. Some time ago, she decided that she wanted to grow more of her own veg and a plan to do this that involved getting an allotment. This was no easy feat as the village she lives in has a long waiting list. But she put herself on that list and patiently waited, knowing her day would come. In the meantime, she developed her plan, working out what to grow, what she would need, what the layout of the vegetable beds would be and so on.
Just over twelve months ago, her chance finally arrived. She got her allotment. At the same time, she met a man at a work event. They were chatting and he told her how much he wanted an allotment and how he had a plan to grow more of his own veg. An allotment had come up and he was going to start. He had great plans and fantastic ideas for the things he could do with it. It was a dream come true. My friend laughed and said that this was what she was doing too. Maybe they could compare notes the next time they saw each other?
In the following months, my friend put her plans into action. It was hard work but she did it and she succeeded. Not everything grew as she had wanted and lots of things took more time than she expected but she did it, learned from it and is carrying on.
12 months on from that work event, my friend saw the man she had met the year before again. She said hello and asked how he was getting on. He replied, ‘Oh yes, I’ve got a plan to do that. I must get around to it and get going on it.’ She smiled and moved on thinking ‘And here I am with one growing season completed already’.
Putting off until tomorrow what can be done today has become something of an art form in my house. Especially for my husband. Just this weekend he promised me that he would do three jobs that really needed sorting out; the first was to fix a cupboard shelf which had collapsed (leaving me thoroughly annoyed when it caused my best Pyrex measuring jug to fall and smash to tiny pieces), the second was sorting out a hole in our kitchen ceiling (which has been there for at least a year. Don’t ask. That’s a tale for another time), and finally putting my son’s wardrobe door back on its hinges (before you ask, yes, we do have a lot of DIY outstanding).
At about six pm on Sunday evening, I looked around and wondered just what my hubby, the love of my life and the apple of my eye, had been doing all day. I asked him (ok, shouted) which of the three jobs he had actually managed to do. Of course, the answer was precisely none. He’d had other things to be doing. Things that he would rather do. Things that he much preferred to be doing.
It’s easy to put off the difficult things that need to be sorted out. I am sure that we all do it every day. There is a phrase known as ‘eating your frog’. On one particularly memorable time management course that I went on, it was explained that, to prevent such procrastination, you should always do the most onerous or arduous things first thing in your day.
Getting your frog eaten, the jobs that you really don’t want to do, the things that you don’t want to look at and are the most unappealing to you, would then make you feel lighter and able to look forward to the rest of your day. I do try to do this and I can say that a lot of the time it does help. Getting things done that are on your mind instead of hoping that they will go away definitely does me some good.
What if it isn’t just the things that you don’t want to do that you are putting off? Instead, what if it is the things that you really want to do too? What if you put things off that you would really like to achieve because you are afraid, fear failure, think it will be too hard, too risky or just too plain ridiculous to believe that you can do it? I think I do this too. I think I do this more than I should.
One definition of procrastination is that it is ‘the thief of time’. By putting things off for a multitude of reasons that you carefully justify to yourself, you truly are losing time and the chances to do the things that you want to do the most. Maybe you are stealing that time from yourself. Whichever way I look at it, I am losing the opportunities to do the things that I would like to, by putting the things that I don’t want to do in their way. This mostly relates to work. All too often, I will put work first. Sometimes that is because I need to catch up (there aren’t enough hours in the day) and sometimes it is because I have agreed to take on too much.
A few weeks ago, I suddenly realised how mad this actually is. I sat in my car on a Sunday morning, having taken my son to play rugby. Instead of watching him (the thing I enjoy doing) I found myself working away, balancing my laptop on my knee whilst sat in the driver’s seat. I texted a friend, who messaged me back asking me ‘what on earth I was doing working on a Sunday morning, from my laptop, in the car AGAIN’.
It got me thinking. This wasn’t ‘normal’ behaviour. Yet again I was putting off something that I wanted to do (standing outdoors in the sunshine, watching my boy having fun) for the sake of something I didn’t want to do on that day. Time passes very quickly. Kids grow up very fast. Yet here was I giving up another chance to watch my son while he still wants me to.
The things that I want to do aren’t very fancy. At the top end of the scale, I still want to get to look over New York again from the roof of the Empire State Building and if I got the chance of a few weeks on an island somewhere in the South Pacific, I wouldn’t say no. Mostly though, I just want to be able to knit or be creative, sort out my spare room, plant my favourite flowers and take time to try new recipes. It isn’t much but it would improve my mood no end if I could do them all. For some reason though my plans only ever stay as plans. So, the time has come to stop putting it all off. No more misappropriation of time for me. I will start as I mean to go on. Probably first thing tomorrow morning.
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