FINANCES : The Procrastination Disease

Has it ever occurred to you to have the loftiest financial plans in the world and somehow you have never got around to implementing them? Are you the type who always makes resolutions about improving your financial health every year only to end up with just paper resolutions? Do you find that most of the time you find yourself postponing everything important t until the last minute? The bad news is that you have this disease called procrastination, and the good news is the cure is only and only you. Procrastination is in a few words the disease of putting things off. It is the act or habit of putting off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness. It is easy to make up many excuses for putting things off. This is not the time right now. I will do it later. Let me sleep on it. I can do that this weekend. It is easy to put off the unpleasant, difficult and time-consuming tasks. In essence, procrastination is nothing more than a time waster. It causes many more headaches than it cures. Think right now of all the small tedious things you have procrastinated about in the past week, month, or year. They are all cramping your brain. To beat this wasting disease, learn to make a schedule or a calendar of what you must accomplish in time. Begin with those small but important assignments that you have been avoiding for months like making your balance sheet or drawing a monthly budget. Eventually you will feel very relieved when you get those small little things out of the way. After clearing the entire backlog, you can now schedule your future timetable by day, week, month or even year. Learn to do daily do lists and review them at the end so that the undone things are moved to the next day. Also, a weekly to do list will help you make your daily duties well. Personal finance involves meticulous planning and tracking of daily and monthly costs. If done well is easy to know your overall costs simply by looking over your financial records. There is no space for procrastination in pursuing your set financial goals because they are usually specific and time bound and if you put off implementing the first goal you end up putting every goal of your financial life. By putting off implementing one of your goals, it may appear like you are giving yourself some breathing space. Instead you are putting your own financial life n he waiting list, and who looses most – you. Former US president Theodore Roosevelt said that “In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” Pearl S. Buck has some good final advice – “I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” Next week we will talk about how to beat proctastination. kelviod@yahoo.com

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FINANCES : The Procrastination Disease