A sense of overwhelming dread looms, engulfing its victim in terror. What anxieties this horror brings! Enter procrastination.

It’s one thing to put something off when you have nothing else productive to do. It’s another thing entirely to try and avoid another thing you have to do. When you have nothing else to do, it’s being lazy. But when you’re incredibly busy like a normal adult, procrastination looks like rest.

If you’re anything like me (and I’d be willing to be a few of you are), you deceive yourself. We have a lot going on, a never ending list of responsibilities, commitments, and to-do’s. Yet we deceive ourselves, saying that we need to rest or take a break for a moment before crossing the next task off the list.

Every time we say “I just need a moment, then I’ll…,” we’re procrastinating. We’re putting off something we each know we’ve got to do before we could possibly feel rested. Here’s an example.

I had a long work day with more things to do than I could get done. You can relate to this. As soon as I got home from work, my wife and I ate dinner, then headed to the crafts store. We got back, and three hours of How I Met Your Mother later, here I am writing this post on procrastination.

It would be fine if I had thoroughly enjoyed those few hours. Or if I had just written as soon as we got home. But what happened instead? I spent three hours moaning to myself about how tired I was, and how I still had to write a post before I could sleep.

Procrastination is the absolute worst, because it takes things we enjoy doing and turns them into these fearsome, eerily approaching giants. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Yes, you need time for you. But we also each need the wisdom and discernment to look at a situation and say, “I’ll be much happier later if I go ahead and do this now.” Then we need the discipline to follow through with that.