Dear LPG, 

I have a lot in common with my next-door neighbour.  We are both retired ladies of a certain age and have children who have moved away over the years.  We have found something else that we have in common too.

We were having a chat recently and I told her that I have noticed that I am not achieving as much as I did when I was even a couple of years younger.  She agreed that there seem to be so many more distractions now than there were before we retired.  I think that when you are working you have the ultimate goal of needing to put the time in and concentrate on the job in hand no matter what sort of work you do.  We both agreed that time always seemed to be in much shorter supply when we were full time working mums and time limits appeared much more important when you throw work and a family of dependent children into the mix.  It is as if everything that you do has a consequence that depends on them and time.  

Now, we both still have many varied things that we want to do but the need to get them done within a certain time frame has all but disappeared because no one is looking over your shoulder and retired people can depend on their pensions to arrive on time, whether we have a schedule or not.  Salaries and not getting sacked were the motivators when we were working.  Now that there is no consequence to missing self-set goals, I find myself extending my planned completion targets, if I bother to set one in the first place.

I know that the whole point of retirement is being able to please yourself about what you do with your time, but it is so easy to just not bother with anything and the past two years of being at home all the time has not helped.

Today is National Fight Procrastination Day and although I suspect that it has been put in place to motivate students, who need to be ready for exams on a certain date and workers whose projects usually are scheduled in some way so that they need to show results if they want to get paid and keep their jobs, we oldies need to keep focussed too and setting time limits may be a good way to do that.

Perhaps we need to pair up with friends (or a neighbour) so that there is someone to have a go at you if you are putting too many things off.  If your friends know when you plan to be finished with a project and you know about theirs, you will have someone to check up on you and feel justified in chivvying them up when you notice them lagging behind a bit as well.

My neighbour and I think that we have found a way to help each other with this problem.  We agree that it is really important to have a realistic and achievable time frame when working out how long any project will take, but we think that checking up on each other is a good idea and we plan to give it a try.  Perhaps this National Fight Procrastination Day might just be the time to find a friend and get started on a scheduled weekly check on each other’s progress. 

VM, Surrey