I had forgotten

I had forgotten, until recently, the little games that your mind can play on you when you have a pile of work to do.

Not exciting work – I’m talking about the dry stuff we all have to trudge through to keep our businesses afloat, keep our numbers up to date, and so on, not the meaty stuff we entered our chosen fields for.

I have had a mound of such work mocking me from the corner of my office for a few days, but amazingly, I suddenly became busier than I have ever been in my life. Not just with work either – suddenly correspondence demanded to be caught up with, the house needed an urgent clean, and I suddenly decided how important old friends were, and that I must catch up with everything that had been happening in their lives for, ooh, the past 10 years or so.

Finally, because I could take the mocking no longer, I got stuck in and slowly, slowly, painfully worked my way through the pile, but it did get me thinking about how our mind – that of which we like to think we are master – can simply be no better than a rebellious teen sometimes.

It quashes our meek little conscience – that voice that says “Do you really need to be doing that right now, when there is some really rather urgent work to get done?” – and boldly has us off doing things, thinking about things, or thinking about doing things which have no bearing on the real, important stuff waiting to be completed.

There is a hierarchy, too, of procrastination tools. When it’s ironing that needs doing, there is cooking to do. When there are accounts to be worked on, the ironing takes on a new level of urgency. When there is tax-related stuff to be done, I realise how essential doing the accounts are. And when something is due THAT MINUTE, I have a tax-related panic attack and fiddle around with that for a while.

Is this what they mean when meditation-types talk about peace of mind? Are they really at peace with their mind? I know I can’t imagine my yoga teacher running around like a headless chicken trying to find more ironing to do, simply to avoid a pile of bills in her office – which, come to think of it, needs a good cleaning-out after all.

I can only hope that one day, I can achieve the kind of peace of mind that avoids this constant last-minute panic. Or maybe the adrenaline is good for me? That sounds like something which needs to be Googled…

Leah Gibbs is the Founder and Business Manager of Lifestyle Careers. Lifestyle Careers is an online recruitment job board. Our niche and specific focus is the advertising of flexible employment and work at home positions. It is designed for professionals wanting to balance their work and personal life.

Tagged as: procrastination