The phone call
Back in January of this year I finally made a phone call that I’d been putting off for nearly twelve months. When I hung up I felt like a total slacker and was going to have to spend several hundred dollars more than I would have if I’d made the call when I’d initially discovered it was necessary.
The phone call wasn’t a hard one. I wasn’t contacting an estranged friend or giving anyone bad news. I wasn’t talking to a struggling ministry leader or a friend going through a hard time or a family member who I was in conflict with.
I was calling a mattress store.
A bit of context. Kelly and I have been married for over 10 years now. Before we got married Kelly’s grandparents generously gave us $1000 to spend on furniture. We bought a dresser and a mattress. That mattress served us well, but in the last couple years or so it started to sag and get overly soft. Dramatically so.
One of the reasons we’d bought this particular mattress from this particular company is that they had a 10 year warranty. If there was any noticeable sag in the mattress within that period they’d fix it free of charge. Awesome, right?
Well, turns out that 10 years expired July of 2022. I found that out when I called them in January of 2023.
Procrastination isn’t free
I kept putting off calling the store because it was a small, seemingly insignificant thing. There were other, more urgent tasks to be done. Plus there was a level of uncertainty…I didn’t know if I’d need the receipt from our purchase, didn’t know where the receipt was, didn’t have any easy way to transport the mattress to the store…the miniscule mental excuses abounded and made it a simple matter to just say “ahhh, I’ll do that later.” For over a year.
If I’d taken the 5 minutes to call the company when I’d first decided I should (or even within the two months following), we’d have gotten a replacement mattress that likely would have lasted another 10+ years. Instead I kept procrastinating and, as a result, will now either need to stick with our increasingly uncomfortable bed or spending multiple hundreds of dollars to buy a new mattress.
It may feel like you’re taking the easier route when you put off a task that seems difficult, but the reality is that you’re merely compounding the costs you’ll pay later.
If there’s a hard conversation you need to have with a friend, putting it off longer won’t make it easier. If you need to deal with credit card debt, putting off taking the necessary steps to budget well will (literally) cost you. If you’ve been meaning to quit a bad habit but keep putting it off, realize the cost.
What is your procrastination costing you?
My procrastination of the tiny task of calling Mattress King last year will likely cost me over $500.
What is your procrastination costing you? It may not be a direct financial cost. The costs may be:
- Relational
- Emotional
- Spiritual
- Physical
Or something else. Regardless of what category it falls in, there is a cost to putting something off. Are you willing to pay it?
De-procrastinate
If you’ve read this far you probably have one or two things that have been in your mind – things you know have been on your to-do list far longer than they ought
Well, it’s time to de-procrastinate. Pick one of those things and take action on it TODAY. Ask yourself, what has putting off getting this done cost me? Let that cost motivate you to act.
You won’t regret it. In fact, even though I’m going to have to pay something in the long run due to my slacking on the mattress situation, simply having that task off my mental to-do list is almost enough to balance out the sunk cost. Now if only that relief could have been combined with the satisfaction of taking advantage of that warranty….
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