Is Procrastination the thief of time?

Or is it that time waits for no one?

I have never quite understood how time could be stolen. As a child, being told to get on with something and stop making excuses: procrastination is the thief of time, seemed rather strange. In youth, time was not something that I really worried about, I suppose the passing of time never really crosses your mind until you notice the clock ticking. And there we have it, a lesson in idioms of time and the mind. All of which, when dissected, seem absolutely nonsensical.

While there are studies about how and why teenagers procrastinate, rather late for me I fear, why do we all have a tendency in our modern Western world, to continually believe we never have enough time?

Of course we do. It is simply that procrastination gets in our way.

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Procrastination is a little man with a mask and a stripy t-shirt, trying to steal your time away when you do not look after it.

If time is precious, like a jewel or a golden nugget, does that mean it should last forever? And yet, people say that they ran out of time, or they had no time. So this raises the question, does time go away?

Victor Hugo wrote: “Time flees from my hand like sand in the wind". Does that mean that time passed Mr Hugo by? It hung out of the window of a handsome cab and waved: “Cheerio, Victor, I am a bit pressed, feel like I am being borrowed, or about to be killed. See you some time!”

On the other hand, some people seem to have all the time in the world. Which leads me to wonder whether you can buy time? after all: time is money.

Our language is peppered with phrases about time, (as I alluded to above). We watch time slip away; we count the seconds that seem like hours and then find we have wasted a day – wasted time; we tell our parents, and then our children tell us that we are behind the times, and consequently we pass the time of day wondering how time caught up with us.

We tell ourselves to never put off until tomorrow, what we can do today, yet we do. A marvellous excuse is to tidy our desk, because a cluttered desk means a cluttered mind.

All of these tiny henchmen of the master thief, Procrastination creep up when we have writer’s block, or merely do not feel like writing today.

Therefore, I compartmentalise my day – rather like a school timetable (there we are, another reference to time): a weekly display of bite-sized chunks of time, indicating when I should be doing this or that. It rarely works perfectly; calendar alerts serve as a gentle (or in some cases – rude) reminder that I should be focusing on a task. Naturally, I dismiss them and do something else…. unless I am booked for a tutorial, assessment or meeting. Time, as I may remind you, is money.

A timetable is self-organisation in a basic form; maybe even that clichéd term: time management.

Finally, after we pass the time of day, we may discover, that having completed everything so efficiently, we are left with time on our hands.

Perish that thought, in order to stave off boredom we need to do something to kill time.

Which leads me to ponder, how on earth do you kill time? With a sword, gun, poison, garrote, or should one squash it under foot? However we go about killing time, perhaps we should first pause, take a moment, and consider the wise words of the American author, Henry David Thoreau: “You cannot kill time without injuring eternity."

With that in mind, time is of the essence, I had better use it wisely, just in case it does run out.

Now I really should stop wasting time and get on with my story writing…..