“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” -William James

There is an incredible satisfaction to getting a task done that has been weighing on you. I am so close to completing my first book that I can taste it. Attending to the details for closure is hard for a big picture thinker like me. Today, with the help of my journalism student daughter, I am proud to say that the citations that have been hanging around my neck are almost done. It seems kind of amazing to even say that, for the number of days that I have been procrastinating and stalling on the job.

It is like that about most things, once we face them and decide we are going to deal with them, the work of it is nothing compared to the stress of putting it off. Procrastinating actually does make easy things hard and makes hard things feel impossible. Tasks expand in our minds the longer we put them off and just to approach can make you overwhelmed. Now that I have done so many citations, I am not sure why the idea of them seemed so difficult. It wasn’t just the level of detail and my not remembering how to write up citations, which apparently there is now a website which does it for you.

It has been said that procrastination is the most common form of self sabotage, the way that we commonly bury our opportunities without having to face the possibility that we can make our lives exactly how we want them. Lucky for me that I have too many people watching me now, pushing me forward when I might want to find some dumb reason to stop. It takes a courageous heart to actually follow through on one’s dreams. The time of our lives is now. One hundred years ago, author Arnold Bennet wrote, “We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until tomorrow. Keep going… Concentrate on something useful.”