What are you putting off?

Have you ever procrastinated on getting something done, agonized over it, worried about it, and then when you actually did it it took much less time and was easier than you thought? In my experience, the longer you wait, the harder it becomes. It gets built up in your mind to be difficult and time consuming, and the more you put it off the more mental energy gets spent avoiding it than it would actually take to complete it.

Case in point … when we bought our home 14 years ago the bedrooms all had these custom fabric covered cornices as window treatments. They were very simple, with clean lines, so we decided to keep them up in most of the rooms. When my youngest son was born we recovered the 2 in the nursery with a baseball fabric to match his theme, which was really rather easy to do.

However, in the master bedroom we never really cared for the color or pattern of the fabric on our 4 windows. For the first so many years (I was just a week away from delivering our first son when we moved in!) we didn’t really think about it or notice it, we were so busy with the baby, then another, then another, that we really didn’t give it a lot of thought. Then at some point we changed up the color theme of the bedding in our room and it really didn’t work anymore. Every day, multiple times a day I would walk in our room and groan a little inside when I saw them, and make a mental note (and then another mental note and then another) to buy new fabric to re-cover them. This went on for easily 2 years before I finally went out and bought the fabric to re-cover them in a simple neutral that coordinated with our bedding. I should be done now, right? Nope. I kept putting that off the actual re-covering, thinking it would take too much time, that I didn’t have the energy to deal with it, etc and tucked the fabric away for at least another year or two before I finally dealt with it (by then I had new bedding again, which luckily my fabric still matched!).

When I finally had enough and made myself get started, it took all of about 40 minutes to re-cover all 4 cornices. That’s it. I spent years of mental energy thinking about something that took me 40 minutes to complete.

Is there something that you are putting off in your life or business? Tell us about it in the comments and then take some action on it today! If you can’t complete it today, then at least set a timer for 10 minutes and get started … my guess is that once you get started, you will get in your groove and keep going. And if you don’t? Then maybe it is no longer a priority for you and doesn’t belong on your to do list anymore. If that is the case, strike through it and move on!