Procrastination 101: Cleaning up my Desk so I can do my Work

I spent much of this morning cleaning off my desk so I could get my work done.

Although this is technically speaking my day off, I have a lot of stuff "to get done" today... all of which are time consuming things. Some of them are just tedious (sorting paperwork in preparation for doing our taxes), some are a hassle (getting our older car towed from a garage where they couldn't fix it, to another where they hopefully can), and some are boring (taking photos and processing them to list items for sale on eBay).

With all this ahead of me, I determined that it was "essential" to my progress to clean up the mess on my desk, first.

I'll be the first to admit that I am far better at creating organizational systems than actually using them. Am I poorly organized? Yes. Would I have been able to get my work done without tidying up my desk? Absolutely!

People often perceive me to be quite "together," and are surprised to find the chaos often reigning in my immediate surroundings. And they wonder why stuff stays so messy.

It took me some years of pretty rigorous self-inquiry to arrive at some not necessarily pleasant conclusions about my life. Perhaps most central to these is the fact that I have almost always been "underemployed," meaning that it has typically taken me two or three jobs, or multiple projects, generally adding up to 70-80 hours of work a week.... not to "get ahead," but simply to "stay afloat." 

At the end of it, I'm just too damned tired to also be an organizational wizard... I just toss stuff on my desk and collapse into a chair to find a few moments' peace, or a brief meditation, or something to entertain myself.

Surprisingly, I actually have a lot of gratitude for the fact that my wife and I get to be "independent." But it does seem to be an almost eternal financial struggle... and that's just tiring. 

Anyway, I do end up procrastinating a fair bit when my few hours of free time somehow get allocated to "things that need to get done." Maybe we all do that. 

But hey, at least my desk is a lot tidier now, and I'l save time by not looking for stuff I previously wasn't sure where to find!

How about you? Are you a procrastinator, or do you always get things done and neatly kept in place? Are there specific situations that push you into procrastination? Leave a comment!

(As always, all text and images by the author; this is original content created for Steemit)