I can’t be bothered 

Do you ever feel like this?

Do you find yourself wanting to curl up instead of following through with what you’ve planned or need to do?

Perhaps when:

• you’ve planned to go for a walk and it’s wet and windy outdoors 
  
• you have paperwork or your annual tax return to do 
  
• you have phone calls to make, receipts to organise or – dare I mention this – photos to sort (don’t we all now have thousands of digital photos needing organised).

Responsibility in Children

At what age do we become responsible?

Young children are fortunate in not having many essential tasks to do, nor responsibility to bear. At some point there is a gradual transfer of responsibility from others. It starts with smaller self-care tasks such as brushing their teeth, packing their school bag and making their own sandwiches. Fast forward a few years and they have likely graduated to juggling hobbies and homework, looking after their pet and putting freshly washed bedcovers back on – ok maybe not this last one!

Some manage these more mundane tasks earlier than others (I suspect a few of you feel you know some adults who still shy away from responsibility!). 

Responsibility in Adults

What about us adults?

Most of us can be good at talking ourselves out of something less enjoyable with:

‘I’ll be rubbish’

‘I haven’t been in ages – maybe next time’

‘No thanks, it will probably be quite’

We can come up with every excuse in the book (and buy into them too!). Some food for thought however: 

• Do you think the bestselling author always feels like writing?
• Do you think the scientific researcher always feels like reading those lengthy reports?
• What about the restaurant chef – do they always feel like cooking for others late into the night?

Building Responsibility

Three lessons sooner or later most of us learn are that:

• There is no getting out of some things – like it or not, some things just need done!
• If something needs done, the sooner you do it the better! 
• By not doing it, it won’t go away!

We may think that responsibility and certain types such as creatives don’t go well together. The truth is that doing what needs done is essential to doing well in any area, creatives included. For them to write only when they feel like it would be a slow and unproductive process. Many writers set themselves fixed hours to write in the knowledge that whilst some days are better than others, turning up and writing is key to any writer’s output.

Procrastinating 

Not doing things that need done can end up a lot more tiring than doing them. Think about when you’ve put something off. The chances are you didn’t just forget about it. The chances are it popped into your head every so often. After a while it likely irked you that you hadn’t done it. You may have then found yourself really not wanting to do it- putting it off even more and beginning to dread the thought of doing it. If only you’d just done it in the first place.

When you eventually plucked up the courage to attack it, it most likely only took a short time, perhaps as little as a few minutes and nowhere near as long as you had imagined. Remember how good it felt to finally tick that lingering task off your list.

Procrastination can become quite simply a bad habit. It can easily spread to other areas of our life as we find ourselves ‘not feeling like’ doing quite a lot of things. Think about a couple of scenarios: 

• If pupils only go to school when they feel like it, many would never go.
• If children only brush their teeth when they feel like it, many would no longer have teeth to brush.

To leave you wish a few wise words: 

‘One of the most important keys to success is having the discipline to do what you know you should do, even when you don’t feel like doing it’.

‘Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most’.  

‘You will never always be motivated. You have to learn to be disciplined’. 

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If you, or anyone you know, would like to stop procrastinating to get into gear with their desired changes, take that first step and get in touch here today (no procrastinating!). 

Image courtesy of Tim Savage.