Friday, February 13, 2015

Lessons from a Procrastinator

Welcome!

I'm so excited to finally start this blog.  I've always had a love/hate relationship with writing.  I love writing but it can be incredibly difficult and scary.  But as Eleanor Roosevelt said, "Do one thing every day that scares you."  And here we go!

A little about myself.  I grew up in a small town in Colorado with two hippie parents and a dazzling older sister.  I have some incredibly fun memories from my childhood but I grew up without a lot of structure or stability.  Now I crave structure.  I love to plan, organize and systematize.  I'm a mom of two young girls on Long Island with an incredible husband.  I work in advertising and love to read and run (kind of).

Loving to organize, you'd think that life would be smooth sailing but I'm also a pack rat, indecisive and get quickly distracted.  This can turn my fantastic 'projects' into bigger messes than when I started.  Over time I've figured out how to work within my limitations and I'm hoping to share my lessons learned with you.

Lesson 1:  You will ALWAYS want to do it less later than you do now.

One more addition to my list of 'quirks' is that I'm a procrastinator and it is the worst on a week night.  It is 8pm, I've been going non-stop since 5 or 6am and the last thing I want to do after the girls are in bed is prep work for the next day.  Why do it now when I could be relaxing?  I'll surely have plenty of time in the morning.  In hindsight, every single time it ends up being a bigger issue to do the task later than if I had done it in the first place.  I will have even less time, even more to do and need to factor in obstacles I never saw coming my way.

Today was a perfect example.  I'm training for a half marathon (Go Athletes to End Alzheimer's!) and was supposed to run 4 miles yesterday.  My daughter had a Valentine's Day party in daycare and I was up late making fruit kabobs.  I told myself, "Hey, you are going to have a hard time getting out the door in the morning with all the party snacks, Valentine's cards, etc.  Plus, it might snow!"  So I didn't go running.  Today, I woke up early, got everyone fed and ready, was putting a coat on my youngest daughter and BLEEEEECK!  She puked all over me.  Surprise, surprise, she also had a low-grade fever.  Oh, and it is -5 degrees outside with the wind chill.  Guess who isn't going running today?  This girl.

Point being, just do it now.  Not necessarily a lesson I follow all the time but it helps motivate me to think about all the insane scenarios that could come up if I was to push the task off to another time.   Plus, this is one of those things that makes you a responsible grown up.  So I hear.


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