Getting Sh** Done

“All of my favorite underpants are gone!” my son exclaimed in frustration last week. And rightly so—they were indeed all missing. Confession time: I’m a squirrel. (Some of you might remember my newsletter about packing strategies…). I start gathering items weeks before any trip, stashing my family members’ favorite socks, t-shirts, and trousers right from the laundry, and piling up games and equipment in different stacks. At times, various upcoming trips simultaneously occupy different corners of our house…

“Why on earth would you do that?”, you might ask. It’s simple. I’m a precrastinator.

We all know procrastinators: They wait until the last minute to submit their taxes, buy a gift, book vacations, hand in their reports at work—you name it. For some, it works out quite well (like one of my beloved family members who is known for not studying at all, yet passing exams by finding solutions in the trash next to the classroom or through some other form of last-minute miracle…). Others beat themselves up, thinking they could have avoided stress and achieved better results if they had started earlier.

And then there are precrastinators like me: The moment someone mentions a task, we jump to the rescue and start working on it. We don’t like surprises (unless it’s an present 😉), and we tend to prepare for the worst. Hence, the premature packing—to be ready for unexpected meltdowns from the kids, additional workload, or last-minute changes. Friends and family love us for being organized and well-prepared. But there is a price: Every task I pick up immediately goes onto my to-do list (yes, I even write down things I’ve already accomplished, just to cross them off…). My mental load is always skyrocketing. The further in advance I try to tackle my tasks, the more vulnerable I become to changes in plans: I’ve baked and frozen cakes for parties that got canceled, packed for trips that never happened, and created slide decks for client gigs that were postponed so many times they became obsolete.

Precrastinators pay the price of premature action, endless planning, and anxiety about the things they can’t yet tick off their lists due to third-party dependencies. Procrastinators, on the other hand, often suffer from ongoing guilt and second-guessing about their performance.

When a precrastinator marries a procrastinator, guess who ends up doing the packing, buying gifts, and handling urgent paperwork? Sometimes I feel taken advantage of, so once I forced Tobias to be in charge of buying a gift for one of his relatives. For weeks and weeks, I kept asking him about it every other day, stressing us both out, only to find out that the day before the party, we were still empty-handed. That’s when I lost it and bought a big gift basket myself.

Why am I writing about this? Well, first of all, to share the fancy new word I learned 😊. But also because understanding why we act the way we do is helpful. It allows us to talk about it with others and come to terms with certain personality traits. Maybe it boils down to combining our strengths: letting precrastinators handle anything that can be done in advance and letting procrastinators deal with last-minute stress, since that’s where they often shine.

In any case, I hope you get to take a break soon. Enjoy the summer wherever you are!

Lots of love,
Tanja

This text was first published in my though-letter Tanja’s Butterflies (July Edition 2024 ). If you are interested in receiving the next editions in your inbox including additional resources such as inspiring quotes, books and more, you can subscribe here.