Grace and Procrastination
One of those issues that have been almost omnipresent in my life for quite a while is procrastination. That ability to put things off with regularity has led to more agony and trouble in my life than anything else in my life and in my ministry. I have tried all kinds of different time management and organizational strategies. Every year or so, I get really upset and frustrated with myself that I put in a lot of effort to get my life under control.
Yet, all those attempts last for only a couple weeks and I get back into the same cluttered morass that I was in before. Maybe even worse because now I add guilt and further frustration to the mix. The spiral of procrastination becomes a vortex.
In the last few months and especially the last few weeks I have been in another cycle of trying to wrestle the demon of procrastination into submission.
If I follow course, this attempt will last another week or two and then will fade away.
So, I’m trying not to follow course. I’m seeking this time for more than just a different technique (though I am open to tools that will actually work for me) but a new attitude to my dilemma.
One day a couple months ago, there was a reference on my twitter feed to Mark Forster and a new approach to working with lists called Autofocus. It is a way to trust one’s intuition in deciding what needs done at any time. I liked it. It fit better than any other tool I’ve tried. In the last week, Mark has released a version 2 of Autofocus which I am using now. Yet, it wasn’t yet enough. My struggle was still a source of great frustration. My war on poor management was still on.
Today I identified this as what needs to change.
In my reading up and studying Autofocus, I found a link to a set of pages on procrastination itself from the Department of Health of Western Australia. I am still working my way through the exercises, and I am excited since it offers me a new approach.
One important aspect of that approach is grace. As long as I approach my time use from a position of judgment and condemnation I was always working and fighting against myself. And with all the self-criticism all that happens is I dig myself deeper into depression and self sabotaging activity.
That hit me this morning as I was journaling about my frustration with my lack of motivation to change.
Before anything can change, I have to begin with God’s grace and acceptance. Even as I recognize that I can be more than I am now, I have to begin with who I am right now, procrastination and all. The freedom to become begins with the freedom to be.
That is God’s approach to our own transformation. Grace comes at the beginning of God’s work in our lives, infuses every phase of the process and provides our hopes and dreams. I heard someone say that God loves us enough to come to us just the way we are, yet God also loves us so much that we aren’t allowed to remain as less than we can be.
