I can do it tomorrow can possibly lead to a disaster. For some people the pressure involved can make them perform better while for most it will show up in the end result that no preparation was made at all. The practice of putting things off till the last moment can often affect a persons’ career, relationship, mental attitude, and can even manifest in physical attributes. Procrastination is an ailment that plagues us all from the easiest tasks we do everyday to major assignments that we know are coming weeks in advance and the effect is different for everyone.
A career can suffer greatly from the negative effects of procrastination from missing advancement opportunities, loss of creativeness, and poor decision making. Some can even say that injuries and miss-haps increase due to procrastination while trying to hurry and catch up on lost time. A persons’ effective decision making ability tends to drop significantly when waiting for the last minute to do something. This drop can lead to a poor presentation, mundane job performance, and lost opportunities in their career. Creative thinking can often take a major blow when waiting till the last moment to get a job or task done. The valuable time prior that could have been used to come up with alternative ideas, many different approaches, and even a revolutionary idea can be lost with the fast paced movements that occur when trying to meet a deadline on time. Ideas that should have been thrown away, practices of personal and team safety in the work place, and the immediate outcome of ones’ performance does not surface till after the end result is looked at and the procrastination is evident in all that was done.
A persons’ relationship can also feel the strain in the act of procrastination. The feeling of tension can become high in a relationship when waiting for the last minute to pay bills, perform needed household repairs, or any other everyday common task. The result of constant nagging, blaming, and other destructive actions can sometimes only lead to further procrastination in a home and has a high possibility of a snowball effect on the outcome. The constant feeling of preoccupation in a relationship due to procrastination can even lead to isolation creating a distance between the couple and even a whole family. This feeling of isolation can also lead to an increase in the avoidance of finishing the task leading to self blame and little room for others in the relationship. Helplessness may even increase from the surrounding people of the relationship or family creating more tension, more blame, and the possible destruction of the relationship all together.
With the increase of pressure from work and family due to procrastination a persons’ emotional and quality of life can take a significant hardship. A sense of perspective and self worth can be lost under the emotional pressure to perform well and to get the job done creating a false outlook on a positive future in ones life. Guilt, anger, depression, irritability, and even envy or jealousy can eat away at a persons’ mental and social capacity taking them further down in their emotional well being. Looking at all these symptoms individually or as a whole can often become the catalyst of divorce, suicide, hoarding, and even various types of drug and alcohol abuse.
Combining all the effects that occur at work, in a relationship, and ones’ emotional attitude it is also evident to look realize the physical attributes that procrastination can cause. Restlessness and sleep deprivation due to constant preoccupation in the mind will often lead to a loss of appetite resulting in loss of weight, strength, and willpower. This weight loss combined with mental fatigue is often the passage for headaches, muscle aches, high blood pressure, and even further illness if left unattended. The mounting stress behind the actions of procrastination, over a period of time, while combined with the physical attributes can often lead to heart attack and even death. People are even more likely to catch the common cold when dealing with high levels of procrastination. The immune system has very touchy balance in a persons’ body and all it needs is a gentle push in a bad direction to let all levels of disease to invade, and procrastination can be a big stepping stone in the gentle push.
Who would have thought the little act of putting something off could have such a giant impact on a persons’ career, personal and professional relationships, emotional well being, and health? Yet the constant act of putting one thing off can lead into another and another until something gives. Be it the career through a performance rating at your job and loss of advancement, a growing divide in a relationship leading to divorce and the separation of a family, or the mounting stress combined with poor health that can lead to a heart attack or even death. These are all just a small sample of the numerous things that can happen with just the small innocent act of saying “I’ll do it tomorrow”. Though procrastination is a process that we all do now and then in our lives its effects can be from the very mundane all the way to an inevitable life changing moment, it all depends on how often and to what extent you are doing it.
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