Procrastination, and how pay off the to-do list debt

Sometimes we procrastinate because we feel overwhelmed by the mountain of things we are supposed to be doing. If you look at your to-do list and it shows 60 overdue items, it’s little wonder if you want to bury your head in the sand!

“What difference does it make if I do one of these things now; I will still have 59 which feels as bad as having 60”

So, treat it like you might a financial debt, and make a repayment plan. Now, instead of 60 overdue items today, you have 1/day for the next 60 days, or 2/day for the next 30 days, or 3/day for the next 20 days, etc. Obviously, you may need to work out whether some are greater temporal priorities and if so, bump those to the top of the list. But don’t sweat the minutiae; your list doesn’t have to be perfectly ordered, just broadly have more urgent things to the top and less urgent things to the bottom.

Note: this repayment plan means having set repayment dates.

Up front, sit down and assign each item a specific calendar date on which you will do that thing.

This is not a deadline! It is your schedule. You’ll not try to do it sooner, and you won’t postpone it for later. You will just do that item on that date.

A productivity app like ToDoist can help with this, but paper is fine too.

What’s important here, psychologically, is that each day you’re looking not at 60 things and doing the top item; you’re just looking at today’s item (only!) and doing it.

Debt Reduction/Cancellation

Much like you might manage a financial debt, you can also look to see if any of your debts could be reduced or cancelled.

We wrote previously about the “Getting Things Done” system. It’s a very good system if you want to do that; if not, no worries, but you might at least want to borrow this one idea….

Sort your items into:

Do / Defer / Delegate / Ditch

• Do: if it can be done in under 2 minutes, do it now.
• Defer: defer the item to a specific calendar date (per the repayment plan idea we just talked about)
• Delegate: could this item be done by someone else? Get it off your plate if you reasonably can.
• Ditch: sometimes, it’s ok to realize “you know what, this isn’t that important to me anymore” and scratch it from the list.

As a last resort, consider declaring bankruptcy

Towards the end of the dot-com boom, there was a fellow who unintentionally got his 5 minutes of viral fame for “declaring email bankruptcy”.

Basically, he publicly declared that his email backlog had got so far out of hand that he would now not reply to emails from before the declaration.

He pledged to keep on top of new emails only from that point onwards; a fresh start.

We can’t comment on whether he then did, but if you need a fresh start, that can be one way to get it!

In closing…

Procrastination is not usually a matter of laziness, it’s usually a matter of overwhelm. Hopefully the above approach will help reframe things, and make things more manageable.

Sometimes procrastination is a matter of perfectionism, and not starting on tasks because we worry we won’t do them well enough, and so we get stuck in a pseudo-preparation rut. If that’s the case, our previous main feature on perfectionism may help:

Perfectionism, And How To Make Yours Work For You

What Grief Does To The Body (And How To Manage It)

In life, we will almost all lose loved ones and suffer bereavement. For most people, this starts with grandparents, eventually moves to parents, and then people our own generation; partners, siblings, close friends. And of course, sometimes and perhaps most devastatingly, we can lose people younger than ourselves.

For something that almost everyone suffers, there is often very little in the way of preparation given beforehand, and afterwards, a condolences card is nice but can’t do a lot for our mental health.

And with mental health, our physical health can go too, if we very understandably neglect it at such a time.

So, how to survive devastating loss, and come out the other side, hopefully thriving? It seems like a tall order indeed.

First, the foundations:

You’re probably familiar with the stages of grief. In their most commonly-presented form, they are:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

You’ve probably also heard/read that we won’t always go through them in order, and also that grief is deeply personal and proceeds on its own timescale.

It is generally considered healthy to go through them.

What do they look like?

Naturally this can vary a lot from person to person, but examples in the case of bereavement could be:

1. Denial: “This surely has not really happened; I’ll carry on as though it hasn’t”
2. Anger: “Why didn’t I do xyz differently while I had the chance?!”
3. Bargaining: “I will do such-and-such in their honor, and this will be a way of expressing the love I wish I could give them in a way they could receive”
4. Depression: “What is the point of me without them? The sooner I join them, the better.”
5. Acceptance: “I was so lucky that we had the time together that we did, and enriched each other’s lives while we could”

We can speedrun these or we can get stuck on one for years. We can bounce back and forth. We can think we’re at acceptance, and then a previous stage will hit us like a tonne of bricks.

What if we don’t?

Assuming that our lost loved one was indeed a loved one (as opposed to someone we are merely societally expected to mourn), then failing to process that grief will tend to have a big impact on our life—and health. These health problems can include:

• Sleep disruption
• Poor immune function
• Cardiovascular problems
• Physical pain
• Suicidal ideation

As you can see, three out of five of those can result in death. The other two aren’t great either. So why isn’t this taken more seriously as a matter of health?

Death is, ironically, considered something we “just have to live with”.

But how?

Coping strategies

You’ll note that most of the stages of grief are not enjoyable per se. For this reason, it’s common to try to avoid them—hence denial usually being first.

But, that is like not getting a lump checked out because you don’t want a cancer diagnosis. The emotional reasoning is understandable, but it’s ultimately self-destructive.

First, have a plan. If a death is foreseen, you can even work out this plan together.

But even if that time has now passed, it’s “better late than never” to make a plan for looking after yourself, e.g:

• How you will try to get enough sleep (tricky, but sincerely try)
• How you will remember to eat (and ideally, healthily)
• How you will still get exercise (a walk in the park is fine; see some greenery and get some sunlight)
• How you will avoid self-destructive urges (from indirect, e.g. drinking, to direct, e.g. suicidality)
• How you will keep up with the other things important in your life (work, friends, family)
• How you will actively work to process your grief (e.g. journaling, or perhaps grief counselling)

Some previous articles of ours that may help:

• How To Keep On Keeping On ← this is about looking after general health when motivation is low
• The Mental Health First-Aid You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about managing depression
• How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To) ← this is about managing suicidality
• Life After Death? (Your Life; A Loved One’s Death) ← this is about bereavement and romance

If it works, it works

If we are all unique, then any relationship between any two people is uniqueness squared. Little wonder, then, that our grief may be unique too. And it can be complicated further:

• Sometimes we had a complicated relationship with someone
• Sometimes the circumstances of their death were complicated

There is, for that matter, such a thing as “complicated grief”:

Read more: Complicated grief and prolonged grief disorder (Medical News Today)

We also previously reviewed a book on “ambiguous loss”, exploring grieving when we cannot grieve in the normal way because someone is gone and/but/maybe not gone.

For example, if someone is in a long-term coma from which they may never recover, or if they are missing-presumed-dead. Those kinds of situations are complicated too.

Unusual circumstances may call for unusual coping strategies, so how can we discern what is healthy and what isn’t?

The litmus test is: is it enabling you to continue going about your life in a way that allows you to fulfil your internal personal aspirations and external social responsibilities? If so, it’s probably healthy.

Look after yourself. And if you can, tell your loved ones you love them today.