And I kept feeling shi**y about it because I am guilty of preaching others to be intentional about time management.
But you know what? I had very valid reasons for procrastinating on sitting down to set my 2024 goals.
December was a very busy month for me
In fact, I should say it was crazily busy.
I had one marriage to attend, another one to prepare for (thankfully I did not have to be physically present for it) and finally we had a vacation lined up.
And yes, my daughter, who is in Class 11, had her Maths tuitions every evening in preparation for the winter break.
The usual year-end (over)load of client work was already there because this is the time when most of my clients become slack and their teams go on leave. So there are lots of client deadlines too.
To be honest, I could sync my slack time with theirs but that’s simply not feasible. I already have had my holiday season in October. And right now, I’m not in a position to have two vacation seasons. Though I am working towards that.
So basically December was a crazy month. We had an extended-family vacation over the Christmas weekend and after we came back on 26th of December, my younger one fell severely sick. To give you an idea, she is still on her antibiotics, though she started going to school yesterday. Which was a big relief!
All in all, I never got the time to get down to really thinking about the year that was and the goals that I wanted to set for myself in 2024.
But you know what?
All these explanations that I’m giving you for not getting down to working on my goals for this new year are excuses.
Nothing but excuses.
If I am kind to myself, may be valid excuses.
But still, I only have excuses for procrastination.
I feel bad about falling in this trap because I have frameworks in place which allow me to get away with investing minimum time and effort in my goalsetting exercises.
I check in on the progress of my goals every three months. So by the time year end rolled in, I was already pretty aware of where I stood and where I wanted to be going forward. It was only about putting it down in black and white. Because documenting, as I keep saying, is the most important step in reaching any goal. Because you tend to forget, as the months pass, what you started out to do.
That set me thinking about procrastinating, because that’s exactly what I was doing. Holy God, me procrastinating!!
That too when I am supposed to be very good at time management. Despite knowing that procrastination is the greatest obstacle for everyone who has ever tried managing their time, even for a day.
I can almost hear you all saying to me – hey! didn’t expect that of you.
I am not perfect and I procrastinate. Period
I feel bad but I don’t mind coming clean to you, because no one is perfect. And I am definitely not perfect. In fact, I started on this path of creating time management books, resources and coaching programs for people because I know that everyone – okay, not maybe everyone cuz there are some superhumans too, but quite a few of you out there fall back on their time management journey from time to time.
And that led me thinking about procrastination. Now that’s a topic I have researched many times for many of the different articles and content pieces and LinkedIn posts, etc. etc. etc. And I have even written an Ultimate Guide to Procrastination. I read it again, which led to its 2024 update, and I realized that it needs to go out again.
But coming back to the problem at hand, what’s the antidote to this habit of procrastination.
Well, my ultimate guide talks about a couple of things such as motivation and accountability partner.
Currently, I do not have any mentors and I’m not part of any group where I get that sort of support. I have also tried my hand at accountability partners many times, but failed miserably. So I have myself and of course, my kids who keep asking me uncomfortable questions about my goals and dreams that I have been sharing with them.
Which sometimes makes me realize that your family members can be great accountability partners because they are anyways expert in making you uncomfortable.
So finally I got down to writing down my goals. Sharing them with you is for some other day. For now, you have to simply believe that I have done that.
And during research there was a new thing that I discovered about procrastination. Which is,
As we get older, we get better at managing procrastination
Okay, 46 cannot be termed old, but still I am certainly older than I was a year or two ago. So I had this notion that as we get older, we tend to procrastinate more. Because we become so set in our ways that we do not want to come out of our comfort zone even a teeny bit.
But turns out I was royally wrong.
A 2016 study found that as we grow older, we get better at managing procrastination. In their study, 14-29 year olds were the ones who procrastinated most.
This made me feel two things as once. One, my kids are in the perfect age to procrastinate. And two, I am much better at this than I would like to give myself credit for. So right now I don’t know whether to be happy or frustrated at coming across this study. The only solace is that it was not that big a study group (sigh).
What next, going forward
Going forward, I have done two things:
- Promised myself to not procrastinate on the bigger tasks. Smaller tasks like updating expenses in the Notion database is always going to fall through any promise I make to myself!!
- Started a series on procrastination for my newsletter subscribers. Starting today. If you are curious, you can read today’s edition here.
