What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“That’s a great plan, Phil. When do we break ground?”

What does that mean?
This is another quote about getting up off your rear end and getting busy. If you don’t start it today, when will you start it? Tomorrow? The day after that? For any non-trivial task, you aren’t likely to start it and finish it tomorrow, right?

By starting today, you at least stand a chance of finishing tomorrow. While larger projects may take more time to complete than that, if you don’t start today, you are pushing the date for the completion of the task back by another day, and that’s not good.

To rephrase the quote, if you don’t start, you’ll never finish. Also, the longer you wait to start the longer it will be until you finish. Pretty straightforward and reasonable, right? If you have something to do, plan it (as much as is reasonable), but then get started. DO IT!

Why is not procrastinating important?  
I’m not sure. Let me think about it for a few hours, and then get back with me, OK? It’s only a little funny, the fact that I waited until about two hours before my self-imposed deadline to get started on this post. It wasn’t that I was too busy, I just didn’t make it a high enough priority. Actually, it’s kind of sad.

Procrastination is just another word for lack of self discipline and time management skills. Time is something we just can’t get back, once it is frittered away, it is gone forever. Procrastination is just a slow leak of time, where we keep finding things to do, instead of doing what should we should be doing.

Procrastination is what keeps us from getting started. If you don’t have this problem, I am a little bit jealous. But I can get better (and I am presently better than I used to be), if I work on my time management skills and on my decisiveness. As I get better at these, my tendency to procrastinate has decreased noticeably.

Where can I apply this in my life?
I could be doing other things now, if I had started sooner. While this task is not trivial, neither will it take until tomorrow to complete. However, I have taken several hours to do other things, when this was tonight’s number three priority (after getting car parts and spending time with the family).

But sometimes it takes a very pointed quote to reach out and give me the smack on the side of the head necessary to get my attention. While I would eventually have done most of the things I did earlier, I should have done this task before the other time-wasters and trivial pursuits.

The way that I have been working on my procrastination is in the areas mentioned in the prior section, by build time management skills, and working on being more decisive. If you have some other method that has worked for you, please leave a comment, so that we may all benefit from your experience.

I have read some time management books, and most seem to boil down to having a system, a standard method of doing things day to day. This helps keep you aware of what time you have, and how you have allocated it. This also helps me keep my focus on the most important tasks.

Note that I said important tasks. I find it very easy to be distracted by urgent tasks. Once you learn to say “No!” every once in a while, you will find it a little easier to stay focused on that which is important, rather than running from fire to fire, never getting your important tasks done.

The other way I have been working on my procrastination is to try to be more decisive. I don’t always get started when I should, as the quote says we should try. My work on this post is an excellent example of what not to do, having postponed starting it several times, in order to do other, non-priority tasks.

What are some of your reasons, or even excuses, for procrastinating? Now dig a little deeper. Why do you delay? What do you gain? For me, beating the odds seems to be the biggest thrill. Doing something boring can become exciting, if you leave yourself almost no time to get it finished.

If you can find out some of the ways you find pleasure in procrastinating, you can start to plan ways to come up with better ways to motivate yourself and make better habits for yourself to follow. The only question is when are you going to get started on it? When (now) would be a good time to start?

From: Twitter, @AR_Foundation
confirmed at : http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johannwolf150574.html
Photo by lumaxart