It’s funny, I put off writing this post for over a week. That might make me a hypocrite but it doesn’t mean that the truth is less important. Procrastination is the enemy.

If you want to get something done, start immediately and fail often.

There are a million reasons not to start right away. Maybe you won’t be any good at it, or you have more important things to do. Maybe you are just plain scared of judgment from your peers.

The truth is that starting a task is the most important step to finishing a task. If it’s something simple then just knock it out quickly. If it’s a more complicated task, then engaging your mind is the pathway to completion. Engaging your mind on a particular task acts like a channel, forcing thoughts to form around a central idea. Once your mind is engaged in problem solving there is a very low chance that you will slip on into procrastination.

There are some exceptions to this. When there is a hard problem that I can’t seem to solve with conventional methods, I sometimes allow myself to completely forget about the topic altogether. This is not procrastination but rather a way to utilize my sub-conscious mind. My letting the topic ferment in the deep recesses of my mind I can afford