The Power of Procrastination

A friend of mine has had a leak in her basement for the last three years. For those three years she has been convinced that her house is collapsing because the foundation is cracking, that the house is sliding into the sea.  She has settled into a sort of vague sense of fatalism about the entire ordeal, using a wet-vac to suck up the water several times a day when it rains.

The other day I went out to do some odd jobs: hanging cabinets, cutting down dead trees and moving heavy objects... the sort of tasks she can't do for herself.  She expected this would be an all day affair, because each of these simple tasks were beyond her ability, but I had it all done by noon.

So I removed the offending wall. In less than an hour I had the drywall cut neatly and the insulation bagged.  It turns out the leak wasn't from a crack in her foundation at all, but a shoddy patch around a sewage pipe. A quick drive into town for quick setting concrete patch and the leak was gone.  Replacing the hole in the wall will take another couple of hours; mostly waiting for stuff to dry.

Three years of doom and gloom for a job that could be done in an afternoon for less than she probably spent on the wet-vacc to keep the water under control.  Three years of increasing certainty that she'll have to sell her house, at a loss, and move into a crappy apartment somewhere.  She spent a thousand times as long worrying about it as it took to fix it.

In my own case, Procrastination has cost me measurable amounts of money... at least three thousand dollars in the last year from one source alone. I could be more exact if I wanted. I could detail out the various ways that I've hurt myself financially over the last year, the missteps and mistakes I've made along the way. I've drug my feet between jobs, failed to follow through on timely offers. I've never had a great excuse, either: I just put it off 'just another day'.

I am not a rich man by any stretch, and I have lost thousands of dollars in this last year alone because I have procrastinated, and many countless more in all the years before.  I burned out in my career because I put off taking vacations for myself, I've put off my writing and publishing because I was afraid, denying myself a possible fall back income.

And that is the power of procrastination. It weakens us, makes us weak where we should be strong. It torments us with worries over easily fixable problems and steals money from us when we aren't looking.  It is the drunk uncle who comes by without being asked and breaks your furniture and steals your wallet.