Musings by Melissa

I’ve been putting off writing this post.  (Get it?!?)  But ’tis the time.  I’m sure that all of us suffer from some form of procrastination.  Some people procrastinate on everything and some people procrastinate only on the difficult or time-consuming stuff.   I fall in that latter group. 

On my weekly to-do list are things that I need to do every week, like clean the bathrooms, plan our meals, and plan our lessons for the week.  But I also include things that are of the “more difficult and time-consuming genre.”  Things like send my family’s picture to the free directory submission for our church’s directory of who’s who.  (Sending photo’s via the computer is not one of my strengths!)  Or writing two lessons for our Wednesday night church program.  (This takes thought and time, and for me, alone-time.  Something that is quite rare!)  Or planning the geocaches that we’re going to look for on our vacation.  (Again a time-consuming thing)

I can’t say that I’ve overcome procrastination, but I’m working on it, and my to-do list helps considerably.  I guess I’m the type of person who enjoys crossing things off a list. 

I think it also helps that I have two to-do lists.  One is for the stuff I’m working on this week, and the other is a list of what I hope to accomplish this year.  When I make up my weekly to-do list, I glance through my yearly list, and add a couple things from that list to my weekly list.  This allows me to procrastinate on the other stuff on my annual list while focusing on one or two specific things on my weekly list.  (I hope this is making sense!)

Overall, this has also helped considerably.  It allows me to prioritize my annual list every week, and it allows me the freedom to choose what projects I’m going to work on next.  I usually have a couple “annual projects” going at all times.  One difficult project and one time-consuming project. 

This has helped me.  Perhaps it will help someone else.  Now… to go cut those squares for my next quilt…