The deluding comfort in procrastinating

Lately I’ve been trying to determine why is't that I put off what I could do today for tomorrow. This to me, and I believe many can relate, is a painstaking battle which I tend to keep failing. Instead of doing the usual, finding a counter to the problem, I found myself thinking hard about why I’d do anything to avoid doing that which is due to be done. The answer, although obvious, was stupendous.

I came to the realisation that I put off projects, tasks and especially necessary action toward my dreams off for a paradox: Comfort. I say it’s a paradox because there isn’t real comfort in procrastinating work that is intended to add value in your life. Yet most of the time, I now believe, I tend to put off work just so that I can lounge a bit. So that I can do a bit of thinking. Have a long chat with buddies. Stare endlessly at the screen. All these simply delude me that I’m enjoying comfort and avoiding toil or pain, and labour of love isn't really pain.

The truth: remove the delusion and what you get is a rude awakening. That when the delusional comfort has passed, precious, invaluable time will have elapsed too. And the hard truth here is that once the delusional comfort has blown off like smoke, one will still have to face the need to start working toward achieving those very same goals they dodged yesterday. And it clearly won’t help the results to work on it at the eleventh hour.

There’s no running from it. What we set out to do we have to get down and dirty and do it. You've got to give it to Nike for getting the most difficult part of life right: Just Do It. The comfort that we seem to derive from procrastination is only there to work against the comforting feeling of achievement. The mesmerising smell of success.

The hard part for me is having realised that I can put my own preferred and ideal life (which should follow with the achievement of my attainable goals) and lives of those attached to me put on the back burner. I know when I work daily at my goals with consistent action, I get closer to realising them, yet the lounging, the procrastination seems to somewhat provide instant comfort. Imaginary comfort.

In short, such imagined instant comfort is, I’ve realised just recently, extremely dangerous and has planted in many of us what flirts very well with laziness. Very few overcome laziness, many, like myself, need to remember that procrastination makes an empty promise of instant delusional comfort. And perhaps we can recall the importance of discipline.

Procrastination keeps you today in the very same place you were yesterday. And it masterfully succeeds in this job by way of trade: you forgo, for now, your potential achievements for delusional comfort. In reality, at least for me, it makes fcuk all difference in my life this kind of delusional comfort. So it is my goal to stop all trade with this addiction called procrastination. And surely, replace it with addiction to action.

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