Delaying Decisions

I read, on a blog, the other day, that procrastination is really just a way of delaying decisions.  As a lifelong procrastinator*, that statement rings true for me.

Case in point: right now, as I am typing, I have two wedding gifts sitting, unwrapped, in a corner of my bedroom.  I have had these wedding gifts in my possession for at least a month.  I will be giving one of these wedding gifts away on Friday.  But I haven't wrapped them yet.

Why?  Well, here's the deal.  I can't decide how to wrap them.  I'm pretty sure we don't have any wedding wrapping paper.  So my choices are:

1. no wrapping
2. gift bag
3. buy wedding wrapping paper
4. Christmas or birthday or camouflage paper

5. comics
6. wrap in plain white or brown paper, which has the additional subsets of:

• leave plain
• leave plain but decorate with pretty ribbon
• color or paint

There is, of course, also

7. "accidentally" forget to bring the gift to the wedding and ship it later, with or without wrapping paper (delaying the decision even further).  Can't do that, though, because we need it for the reception.

All of these options have merits.  All of them have disadvantages.  My brain cannot sift through the possibilities and decide on a course of action.  So I continue to procrastinate.

Procrastination = delayed decisions.

The author of this blog asserted that delaying the decision is not going to make it any easier to make, and if we keep delaying decisions, we will end up with a pile of decisions to make all at once, so we should just do it right away and get it over with.  While that's not true in every situation**, it's mostly true.  

I know that.  But knowing doesn't help.

You might be thinking that the fact that I have had these wedding gifts for over a month, for weddings in July and September, would tend to belie my statement that I'm a procrastinator.  A true procrastinator would buy a gift on Friday for Friday's wedding.  I guess I'm just a selective procrastinator.  I knew exactly what I wanted to give these beautiful couples in celebration of their unions, so those decisions were easy.  I procrastinate only when the decisions are difficult.  Like the wrapping paper thing.

{Source}

*I am a lifelong procrastinator, except for the time period starting in the winter of my freshman year of college and continuing until...well, I'm not sure when I stopped not procrastinating...but that's another story.  I think it's funny that I can pinpoint the day I stopped procrastinating.  It was ... memorable.

**Sometimes decisions are easier to make after a delay, like for instance, if one can't decide whether or not one wants to buy tickets to an event, if one procrastinates, there is a good possibility that the tickets will be sold out, which makes the decision-making super easy.


P.S. I'm going to wrap that present now.  Plain brown with pretty ribbon.  If I can find the pretty ribbon.  If not, I'm going with camouflage.