One of my worst habits is my ability to procrastinate on a lot of things. Sure, I don’t necessarily make it a habit to delay what is important or urgent, at least not without good reason: rather, there are tasks I’d rather not do, and would rather put off for another day, or at least until I have to absolutely do them.

There’s a huge list of things in that area between the really urgent and really important stuff and the things that are of no consequence which tend to drop off my radar, and which I end up pushing down the priority queue. Small things, like cleaning my bathroom or working through the detritus on my desk – things that usually end up being pushed for another day, until I can’t bear it anymore.

I don’t claim being special in this regard: procrastination is the sin of the modern age, where our attention is bombarded Things To Get Done, and yet with seemingly little time to work with. I also don’t mean that I twiddle my thumbs all day and do nothing – I am quite productive, thanks, and I do try to meet deadlines especially around critical work.

I’m trying to be better in this regard, but I’ve yet to find what works for me. Structured task lists, in my experience, tend not to work, at least because the bookkeeping overhead annoyed the hell out of me then – however, considering my penchant for keeping track of my work, I just might revisit putting some structure in place.

That said, I did cross off an item in that never-ending list of things I keep postponing: I finally cleaned my bathroom after a couple of months. I mean, not that my bathroom had devolved into a huge grimy mess – I just started getting annoyed at the line of soap scum on the bathtub, as well as the bits of dust and lint collecting in the corners.

So, I invested some elbow grease and scrubbed the tub this past Saturday afternoon. Got rid of the soap scum, and my bathroom floor is looking nice now. There was a bit of grime around my sink I scrubbed off as well.

Small wins. I’ll take it. Maybe next Saturday I can cross off other items on my list, who knows – but knowing myself, I’d probably punt it to another day. Or until I get annoyed at the state of things.

Previously: Breadth/Depth