Procrastinating is harder than just getting it done.

Whether it’s a project, a deliverable, a response to a message, cleaning up, getting organized, taking care of your health, or restoring broken relationships—there will always be added burdens that get increasingly heavy the longer we put off accomplishing whatever we need to. Burdens of:

• Guilt
• Fear
• Stress
• Anxiety
• Difficulty
• Damage control

Let’s look at some examples of this:

• Your boss or team leader gives you an assignment/project to complete—if it involves something you consider boring, too difficult, or distasteful, you’ll want to put it off. If you do, here’s what will happen: Your boss/leader will keep bugging you asking how it’s going and not being happy with your lack of progress. Then you’ll feel like a failure/guilty, be afraid of negative consequences resulting from lack of timely completion, and increasingly anxious about getting it done by the deadline. Then, the quality will be lower and/or you won’t get it done in time, resulting in damage, which you’ll need to control and mitigate.

• You need to respond to someone’s email, text, or call—it could be unpleasant, difficult, and/or “take too long” to answer if you’re busy, so you put off responding. Then what happens? We’ve all experienced this: The message gets buried and maybe forgotten; until we respond, it keeps “hanging over our head” as we ruminate over and worry about it; we feel increasingly guilty about not responding as time goes on (unless we forgot about it); anxiety builds over how to respond; all that causes increasing stress. Since we tend to avoid anything that reminds us of guilt, we’ll avoid responding to that email. When we finally do respond, we still have the original difficulty or unpleasantness, plus we have to apologize, explain, and justify why we took so long to respond!

• Taking care of our health. Let’s start with exercise– Often, we feel too tired to even get up and move, let alone work out in any way. So we tell ourselves, “I’ll exercise later/tomorrow, when I have more energy. But the longer we put it off, the more sluggish we feel, the worse our condition gets, the worse we feel about that, and the harder it is to fix it.

A similar thing occurs with eating right, which takes motivation, time, and effort. We put off preparing nutritious meals until we have more time and energy, since “I feel so tired when I get home from work, I just want to relax and not bother with cooking!” Out come the convenience foods, in they go into our system, where the preservatives and empty calories do havoc to our bodies and brains. Then along comes worse condition, no energy, and feeling guilty over not eating better. This perpetuates the downward spiral. Not a good recipe for mental or physical health!

How about rest? We know we need to take breaks during the day and get a good night’s sleep. But how can we do that when there’s so much to catch up on because we’ve putting things off until “now”? So we “plow through”, with much lower productivity, which makes us take longer—so we have no time for rest/sleep. So we put off sleeping and resting until “tomorrow”, when we’ll “have time for that.” The problem is, what about the stuff we’ll have to catch up on tomorrow, because we still haven’t finished, on account of producing at half our mental capacity today, due to lack of sleep?!

• Housecleaning and organizing, as stuff and dishes and dust (and perhaps bugs) pile up! Just looking at the ever-increasing pile can get overwhelming. Since none of us like to feel overwhelmed, we’ll avoid whatever causes that feeling. Too bad “closing our eyes” and ignoring the dishes and clutter doesn’t make them go away! At some point we have to face it all— when we run out of dishes, pots, and pans, our kitchen starts to stink, and/or the document or book we need gets buried at the bottom of the pile. The bigger the pile, the harder to face it.

• Restoring broken relationships/conflict resolution— Since it’s very unpleasant and risky to try to resolve conflict with others, we naturally put it off, hoping things will get better by themselves. They won’t. Time won’t heal the wounds– the divide will just get worse and larger, due to undealt-with hurt and anger that festers and grows like yeast in bread. It will also be harder to remember accurately what caused the rift in the first place. The offense gets larger and deeper in our minds as we relive it, especially when we feel the need to justify our hurt. Also, other/more offenses, real or perceived, will be added on the original as time passes.

Most of us procrastinate because we’re trying to avoid stress, unpleasantness, and difficulty. But, as we saw, procrastination only exacerbates those. So whatever it is we need to do—get it done!

Start on and finish the project. Get in there and do the organizing and housecleaning. Wash the dishes. Write/call/text the response. Start exercising, eating right, and sleeping better, bit by bit. Initiate reconciliation and restoration with the other person before it’s beyond repair!

Don’t hold back because you think it won’t do any good. As soon as we stop procrastinating and start doing what we need to, good comes.

“And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” Gal. 6:9

“The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.” Prov. 13:4