Procrastination Will Crack Your Foundation

Procrastination has been likened to a thief and an assassin. It’s a killer!

Procrastination contributes to the high unemployment rate. Sooner or later if you fail to do your job well, you will be recognized for your lack of effort. Perhaps you are thinking that if you wait long enough, there will be a new and wonderful invention that will do your work for you. Surprise! It’s already been invented. It’s called your replacement!

Procrastination causes relationships to never be reconciled and healed. Death is the great final marker; after the body expires, not even the best of intentions can cause a relationship to bloom once again. Mark Twain’s quote regarding procrastination does not account for the inevitability of death: “Do not put off until tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well.”

Procrastination is so much more than just another 15 letter word—if you practice it too much your life spirals out of control and becomes filled with remorse.

The English language has several common words and phrases that slip easily off of our tongue that basically are equal to that 15 letter word: next week, tomorrow, another day, someday, in the future, next year, later, perhaps, writer’s block…the list goes on and on.

And maybe writer’s block doesn’t really belong on this list, but if you are a writer maybe you agree. Unless you clear up the extra to-do’s and doo-dads, it’s easy to be distracted and find something else to do instead of writing. But really, this isn’t a phenomena exclusive to writers. Anybody with a to-do list is in danger of being distracted in this day and age of over-stimulation. Electronics, traffic, full schedules, striving for perfection—all of these things make it easy to fail to get everything done on your to-do list.

Maybe the answer is to shorten the to-do list. If you have no goals, no ambition, no expectation to rise above and be successful, there’d be no need to procrastinate. But I’m being facetious—goals are good; we need to strive toward a higher expectation. God didn’t put us on this earth so that we could while away all of our days mindlessly watching television and surfing the web.

To quote from a fellow blogger, Marilyn Adamson, “When I became a Christian….I found out there were things I was doing that God did not want in my life. I also became aware of the need to love others, to read the Bible, to pray, to witness, to disciple others, etc. And at times I thought, “It was way easier being an atheist.” Now that I knew God, I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility to please him with my life. I would read the Bible, read a command, and it seemed that verse after verse I could honestly say, “Yep, good idea. I need to do that more.”http://www.startingwithgod.com/struggles/expect/

But that doesn’t mean we are expected to be perfect, never-failing, never procrastinating. On the contrary. Marilyn Adamson explains it best: “God does not demand perfection in you. God is not expecting you to measure up. God never thought that you could live the Christian life, nor does he expect that you could actually meet his holy standards. If he thought that you could, he wouldn’t have come to earth to die for you. But he did.”

So my point? We are all human! God made us this way on purpose. God knows that all of us will do a certain amount of procrastinating—it is inevitable. Just balance it out with actually doing something. Accomplishments make a much more positive impact on your well-being than do failures. If you put things off too long, you become overwhelmed with the enormity of it all. On that final morbid day—your funeral—what do you want your epitaph to read? Couch potato? Well-loved father? Successful entrepreneur? He never got around to living?

Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is heavy. Wayne Gretzky