PITY THE PROCRASTINATOR

Do you put off until tomorrow what you can do today? If so, you are a procrastinator and, according to psychologists who talked with the New York Times, you should change your ways immediately. Not tomorrow. Today.
A little procrastinator is perfectly normal. The psychologists concede as much, but in too many cases, it becomes a dangerously neurotic activity that can lead to grave results.
Suppose you are still putting off the chore of filing your income tax return. You are courting catastrophe. Believe it or not, a great number of people never get around to filing their tax returns on time, and not because they dread parting with their money, but because they keep putting it off.
As for me, I have never procrastinated and never shall. This is not a boastful claim of personal virtue. The truth is, I never have time to put things off. What puzzles me about reports that the country is rife with procrastinator is how so many people can find time to do this.
Let me cite my own case. Today I was supposed to telephone to man whom I owe a small sum of money and ask if he can wait for the payment until next month. The reason I haven’t is that I have misplaced my cordless telephone.
If finding a cordless telephone as difficult as finding eyeglasses, it will take me at least an hour, and there isn’t an hour available today to look for the lost phones. Even if there was, I wouldn’t be able to phone my creditor because his number, which is unlisted, is in my address book, which I misplaced last week.
Yesterday, I scheduled three hours to search for the lost address book, but had to cancel the search because of a letter from a friend who said he was coming by to listen to me praise his poems, which I recalled last seeing in a still-sealed envelope on which I was computing my tax bill.
Here was a sobering memory. I could’t remember whether, after computing the tax and filling out the return, I’d put it in the mail or misplaced it. In the latter event, I would need to retair a lawyer to bail me out as soon as the police pounce. Naturally, I decide to phone a lawyer immediately.
That’s when I discovered that my cordless telephone was lost. The four hours, I’d planned to spend that evening writing thank-you notes for the last Christmas’s presents, had to be scrubbed because my friend of the lost poems had said he was coming by for praise that night, and I had to spend it sitting in the dark, so he would think I had left the country.
As this illustrates, my day is so fully occupied that there is never a minute left over to put things off. The next item on my schedule, for instance, involves research into the habit of rats. For years, I have been persuaded that reats steal things and hide them in nests. This theory stem from an occasion ten years ago, when I misplaced a pair of glasses and never saw them again.
We had a rat in the house at that time. I believed that rat took those eyeglasses. Everyone laugh at this. I resolved to go to the library and read about rats in the hope of having the last laugh.
Unfortunately, for the past ten years, something more urgent has always come up. But now that my cordless telephone, my address book and a sealed envelope full of poems have also disappeared, I intend to move with dispatch. We could very well have a rat in this house running up the phone bill. I shall set out for the library tomorrow.



Condensed from the New York Times
Russell Baker: Author of Growing Up