The curse of inertia

All of us come under the curse of inertia in our lives to a greater or smaller extent. How often have we postponed something, procrastinated or just felt downright lazy in doing something.  All of us are guilty of indolence and we keep accumulating a list of things to do. We are soon left with a long list of things to get done.

In fact we can rephrase Newton’s 1^st law of motion and safely claim that “A person under the spell of laziness will continue to be lazy unless acted upon by an external agency”. What typically happens is that we tend to avoid doing something because it appears distasteful. When we postpone doing it this distaste soon turns to hatred and we cannot get ourselves to doing it. We either avoid completing our tasks or just try to ignore. But it always tends to lurk in the back of our mind. Eventually this task which we chose to ignore suddenly becomes extremely urgent and we undergo enormous tension.

Then there are some who tend to keep a “to do” list. Unfortunately to a lot of people this remains a “to do” list for a long time. The list just keeps growing longer. Sometimes we just convince ourselves that certain things are unimportant and remove items from the list rather than completing them.

In my mind having an unfinished task is like having a weight attached to a chain around your neck. As you accumulate more tasks you are in reality adding more weights to this chain.

What is required of us is that we just get on with any task that we are faced with. We may face an initial resistance because of an assumed distaste for the task.  Once we get started we may find that our initial distaste was really only imagined. We may actually find that we like doing the task. It is all just in the attitude. It is really important that we do not procrastinate but get things done as soon as we can.

Completing tasks that come to us on time helps us in 2 ways. For one it keeps us light. We don’t have to live with the burden of nagging thoughts. We can live lightly and in the moment. Secondly completing tasks also gives us a sense of achievement and helps us to get more things done.

Prudence requires that we tackle the issues in a timely manner and not spend time now in completing tasks that was supposed to be done ages ago. We need to stop procrastinating. We need to build efficiency and alertness into our mental attitude and complete tasks as they come to us.

When we are more efficient we also become more effective in our lives.