Procrastination

Diligence is a truth one must espouse in order to build wealth. I’ve made this assertion repeatedly and I stick by my guns! Diligent people are always punctual in every aspect of their lives. In the military, we had a saying, “to be on time is to be ten minutes early”. I am actually glad to no longer feel beholden to that mantra, but like most things in the military there is superb utility to the idea.

Procrastination and putting things off to the last minute it the antithesis of diligence. Being diligent and always on time starts with the basics, like never being late on payments. To be honest, I didn’t realize how much visibility a late payment gets until we started using a credit service to screen our tenants. When we pull our prospective tenant’s report, we are able to see every payment they’ve made on every instance of revolving debt over the past several years!

As a leader and manager over the past quarter century, nothing drove me crazier than untimeliness in the workplace. It’s been my privilege to work with extremely intelligent and capable people over the years who can accomplish just about any task. But if they can’t deliver the product by the suspense date, I assessed their performance behind peers who got good work in on time. It’s not personal, just business.

Similarly, walking in late to a meeting is always duly noted despite what might be said flippantly as we walk through the door. Americans as a whole are getting more skilled in the workplace. If struggling with timeliness, one risks quickly falling behind the competition.

So why a rant on procrastination this week? Well, to borrow a line from a popular song, “I’m the problem it’s me”! I feel myself struggling with procrastination lately. To be clear, I’m still paying bills on time and meeting work obligations. But due to some purely self-inflicted and mostly good things in our life, I just feel like I’m falling behind on so many tasks. What’s worse, I really can’t explain why.

Perhaps, as I blogged a few weeks ago, this is just another sign of the aging process. I can’t spin as many plates as I used to and maybe even some of the drive I used to possess is gone. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still got a lot of gas in the tank, but I can feel it; I will have to let off the accelerator at some point, maybe in the next 10 – 15 years.

Until then, I’ll re-read my assertions from just a few years ago about the importance of not procrastinating and being diligent.  I suppose procrastination happens to the best of us, I just thought it would never happen to me. I got to get busy!

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The commentary provided in this blog is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a source of financial or investing advice.

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