Don’t put it off, just do it — a la Nike

I have a lot of conversations with myself. Lying in bed at night, waiting to fall asleep after the restaurant downstairs closes for the day, I make to-do lists and eventually drift into dreamland feeling a sense of accomplishment.

I’m sure you’re wondering what a restaurant’s closing time has to do with my bedtime. You’ll understand if you had to put up with a bombardment of sound just as you were trying to succumb to Morpheus. The workers here seem to derive great pleasure in conversing in decibels that strive to break the sound barrier.

I tell myself that they must be so relieved by the end of a hard day’s work, having to take orders from everyone, that they now feel free to shout out commands to each other. So, apart from voices trying to drown each other out, there is the clanging of huge vessels. I’m sure this must be a great stress-breaker, but what about my stress levels?

That’s when I decide I’m going to have a word with them about toning it down. But that’s as far as I get. Intention is never translated into action.

Reading an article on procrastination has firmed my resolve to act now and think later. But then, shouldn’t one stop to think before doing something? It’s all so confusing. Anyway, one thing I’m good at is making lists. Perhaps that’s a good way to start. The only problem is that I often get so overwhelmed by the sheer size of the agenda that I start the postponement process. For example, item no 2 doesn’t have to be done today. It can wait. As for item No 16, maybe I’m being a little premature. That can even be done next week. And so it goes on.

I console myself with the fact that I’m not a super human being and there’s only so much one can do within a given span of time. After dismissing all the chores as ‘not so urgent after all’, I find myself back to square one.

As I write this piece, my glance keeps falling on this weekend’s list. And the guilt starts to build. To appease my guilt conscience, I am going to take a short break now to attend to one of those tasks.

I’m back and feeling less wracked by guilt. But why am I using the word ‘less’? Is it because I know deep down that I chose the easiest item on the list? I try to justify myself by telling myself it’s not as if this were as important as Schindler’s list. Now that is something worth thinking about. By now you know what I mean by my penchant for having internal conversations.

I suppose the trick is not to let the list build. Attend to matters as and when they crop up or require attention. Easier said than done, though. If I’m at work and I am suddenly possessed by the urge to catch up on my laundry, there’s no way I can take time off to attend to that.

So, now I’ve put my finger on the pulse of the problem. It all boils down to timing and memory. It isn’t really my fault if my memory decides to upgrade itself and remind me of certain things at the most inopportune moments. Why didn’t it prod me into action when I lay supine for hours, playing catch-up with my favourite TV shows?

So, let’s play passing the buck instead. In this game, you convince yourself that all that work left incomplete or undone is only because you had so much on your plate and tackling all of it is beyond any ordinary human being. I did say I wasn’t super human, didn’t I?