procrastination and tidiness

Procrastination is a four letter word to me. It is a curse. It has haunted me through all my days. It is not that I am lazy. At least I do not think I am. There just are things that I do not want to do. Like clean the basement or garage. Hence a tidiness problem as well.

I have procrastinated over many things over the years, but the big one is always cleaning up my crap. My room as a kid was something else. The floor was a sea of comic books and After The Battle magazines. My nightstand and dresser were covered with coins from various countries and military figurines. I was not so much a slob, but when it came time to clean and tidy, it was always: "I'll do it later."

My dresser still is covered with coins, shortwave radios, and trinkets, including a Boba Fett from Star Wars fame and a Mater from the movie Cars. I have a small pile of books by the bed, because I cannot seem to get around to putting them back on the shelf.

Okay, so maybe I am a slob on a limited scale. When the wife and I moved from our apartment to our first house, I threw a bunch of "stuff" into boxes because I kept putting off packing them up properly. They never got unpacked. I did it again when we moved to our current house. There are still boxes, unpacked, in the basement from two moves ago.

My workshop, when I did computer support for an airline, was a monument to piles of unbalanced papers and gear. I just kept putting off putting it all away. Yet I could find everything I needed. My two workshops now are just as baffling, but now I have more trouble finding what I need.

Until recently, just before I started this blog, my email inbox had over three-thousand emails waiting to be sorted and "labelled". One thing I hate about gmail, is its inability to create folders. I find the search function when looking for items I labelled, and often archived, sorely wanting. Searches often do not find an email I just labelled and archived. Realising I still had to action it, attempts to find it can take an inordinate amount of time. Anyway, not wanting to continually look at a figure of three large in my inbox, I finally trashed over fifteen-hundred emails and labelled and archived the rest. Of those fifteen-hundred plus emails I archived, half are most likely garbage, but I said I will deal with it later. Now I have less than one-hundred emails in my inbox.

So, I guess I am making progress. I am sure the wife would not agree though. One can always hope. The Economist, The Globe and Mail, and The Guardian all have interesting articles about tidiness and procrastination. Of course, I just quickly scanned them. I will read them in more detail...later.