I was in 6th grade when I realized that I could breeze through school without studying, that I could get good enough grades to pass (not straight A's), and that if I did have to turn in work I could do it at the last minute. That has been true for me from 6th grade through my graduation with an undergraduate degree. If we're doing math, that's at least 11 years of a habit that I then carried into my professional life into my first job out of college.
It's a hard thing to beat, those habits are. They build us up to that version of ourselves that we all know we should be, or they create a sort of entropy within ourselves that leads us further away from who we really want to be.
At the risk of sounding like a moron, I recently had a realization that I wanted to put on "paper" here. Procrastination obviously leads to doing things at the last minute; that's fine when your only responsibility is school, but it becomes a problem professionally when the only guaranteed time you have to get something done is now. In a few hours, or tomorrow, something else is likely to come up or a customer is going to have an issue of utmost importance. That leaves you with what could have already been done being undone, still. It leads to unmet deadlines, whether those deadlines are those that you have set for yourself or deadlines that have been set by others. Again, procrastination is not doing now what I now have the time to do.
I recently got a great, new job (woo!) that I am very much enjoying. So far, it's a small company and I am the only full-time employee. My colleague, the founder of the company, and I are the only two putting in hours. As you can imagine, there's no place for apathy like there was at my previous company of several hundred employees. What I'm saying is that there are different expectations when there's no one else around to get the work done. I feel that my back has been against the wall, so to speak, since joining Kyneteks and it has forced me to make decisions of real consequence. Some of these thoughts about habits here on this page are years in the making. As humans, there is real satisfaction in putting in a hard day's work. I've strived for that for years, regardless of how I've presented some of my own thoughts on this page so far.
Some of the decisions of real consequences I've had to make since starting this new job relate to habits. I have come to understand that, with my back against the wall (so to speak), I am going to do the tasks that are needed now and consequently be that version of myself that I idealize, or I am not going to do the tasks that are needed now. Most of the time, it has really been that simple. See, another form of procrastination can be doing work for Kyneteks, but not the work that needs to be done now. I could spend my time working on a website when a more important task might be something that I don't desire to do as much.
Where I feel that I risk sounding like a moron is with my realization that everything doesn't have to be done at once. Sure, we all know this, but the thought has seated more deeply within my mind and actions more recently. Procrastination leads me to having to do it all at once because I haven't left any time to do it another way! Piece by piece, bit by bit, brick by brick, page by page, layer by layer, day by day, habit by habit and we can have something monumentally different than what we would have had otherwise. These actions go both ways. I don't have to be the version of myself that I idealize today. Indeed, no, but I do have the capability of being a little closer to that version of me today. I'm seeing that it isn't an all or nothing, but a "some and a little bit more" situation. Let's do some today and a little bit more tomorrow. Let's get some of this done now and a little bit more done here in a little bit. People do change.
We all go through seasons. We all find spurts of motivation. The hardest thing to do is start, oftentimes, but once we're in motion it's a lot easier to keep going. Most of us fight to "stay on track" when we finally get that good thing going. Maybe, this is just a reminder to myself that I don't have to be brand new today, but I can work on myself some today and a little bit more tomorrow.