Procrastination

Well, it's three days until the start of the Labor Day weekend. I guess Summer's almost over.

There's a large part of me (OK, OK, I know - what part of me isn't large?) that's tempted to just screw off the rest of this week, waiting for the holiday. Even though I know that in my situation I really can't afford to just leave work undone for three or four days. As a small business owner / independent contractor, the sooner the work gets done, the sooner I get paid. So I really can't afford to screw off for three days.

But the temptation is still there...and it's still pretty strong, actually.

For folks whose weekly pay check is not really tied to the amount of work they do in any given week, the temptation is often irresistible. For some reason, in the week (or two) before a holiday, everything seems less important, and everything is certainly less appealing than kicking back and slacking off to “get ready for the holiday”.

And it's not all that tough to do.

Getting in thirty or forty minutes late (“Holiday traffic is starting early this year!”). An extra 10 or 15 minutes at lunch. Thirty or forty minutes talking “business” with my colleague in the next cubicle. Leaving twenty or thirty minutes early (“Gotta beat the holiday rush”).

It adds up pretty quickly.

Now that six hours of solid work I give you on a normal day is down to four or five. And of course, there's the hour or two I need to spend playing that on-line game Information Technology (IT) just keeps forgetting to block - mainly because the IT techs are in the middle of a never-ending tournament.

Now I'm down to two or three hours of distracted (“how the heck do I get into that IT tournament?”) work time.

Let's face it, it would probably be more productive to just let me take sick time ('cause there's no way I'm going to waste my vacation time) for the next three days.

Sound familiar?

Well, even if you won't admit it, I guarantee that even in this bad economy, it's happening in your office as you read this. And if you're reading this at the office, I guess that means you're slacking off, too; surfing the web; doing “research”.

So how do we stop all this slacking in preparation for the weekend?

I'll tell you tomorrow.

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I'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to leave a comment here or e-mail me at: TomFawls@Council4SmallBiz.com.