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                                                                                       WELCOME  TO  MY  AUTHOR  PORTFOLIO

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Winnie the Pooh will soon turn 100. How much would that be in bear years?

A.A. Milne, creator of W. T. Pooh, wrote more than the stories he’s famous for. Here's part of a poem he wrote called The Old Sailor:

                                       There was once an old sailor my grandfather knew
                                       Who had so many things which he wanted to do
                                       That, whenever he thought it was time to begin,
                                       He couldn’t, because of the state he was in

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So, our topic this month is procrastination. It was originally scheduled for February.

 

Procrastination is derived from the Latin word for tomorrow—cras. And not from crassus, the Latin word for thick, fat, dense. Procrastination, we all know, means to put off until tomorrow...or even later, if possible.

 

While there’s tons of information about procrastination, some suffer from the opposite malady—pre-crastination.

Precrastination was coined by psychology professor David Rosenbaum in a study he published in 2014. He defined it like this:

Precrastination is the tendency to work on tasks at the earliest opportunity—even if it means more work or comes with extra costs.

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While the procrastinator delays important tasks too long, the pre-crastinator doesn’t delay unimportant tasks long enough. As you can imagine, procrastinators significantly outnumber pre-crastinators, like a million to one.

 

Studies of procrastinators claim there are six distinct types. And seven stages. But you can read that later when you have time.

 

Take a lesson from ants. According to legend, they never procrastinate. But there is such a thing as slacker ants. They don’t put off work until later. They just never do anything. 

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Lazy ants are not crazy. And crazy ants are not lazy. There is yet to be written a book called The Lazy Crazy Ant.

 

In all the advice available for dealing with the widespread problem of putting things off, there is one that stands out. Japan has an anti-procrastination cafe. You may not be allowed to leave until the task you entered with is complete. Not. Allowed. To. Leave. Sit! Comply, human!

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Oh, bother!