I’m a notorious procrastinator. I put things off untill the very last minute and then either come up with an excuse as to why I haven’t done what I should be doing or I’ll go into a panicked frenzy to complete the task just before the deadline.
Although this has worked for me throughout most of my school career I’m noticing that it’s a really hard pattern to keep on following throughout adult life. It’s not fun to be off during the weekends and have to work your way through a mountain of laundry, where you could have just done the small piles they initially were during the evening as you got home. The same behaviour follows me into games where I tend to save events, weekly quests and roulettes (in the case of FFXIV) untill the last possible moment to do them. This has cost me atleast a few Yo-Kai weapons to name an example but also caused me to not get the maximum out of my characters in World of Warcraft.

Normally I don’t really do New Years resolutions. Mostly because I know I don’t stick to them. If I want to lose weight I’ll do it immediatly and not starting January 1st. I do however feel that the procrastinator side of me deserves to die a slow death. It’s just so stressful for me personally to feel like I’m having to do everything at the last moment. At work I’ve noticed that I forget to do stuff when I don’t do something immediatly, sometimes to the detriment of the company. At home I let my room become a rather big mess during the week because I’m too lazy to clean up after I get home from work, so when Thursday or Saturday arrives I’m filled with a room that is full of clothes, both clean and dirty, dishes and other random crap. It’s not a healthy way to live.

I have made a small start with my new behaviour by just making sure I immediatly fold all the clean laundry that my dad deposits infront of my room. I make sure that all the dirty laundry is in the laundry basket before I go to sleep at night and that I don’t have any dishes left in my room either. It’s a routine that needs a bit of work, but once it becomes just that I’ll probably do all of it without thinking about it, and enjoy a cleaner, emptier room and as a result a cleaner and emptier head.

I will probably do the same with games. Tackle weekly quests early in WoW. Do the Worldboss the first day. Do Archaeology the first day. Make time for LFR on Thursdays (that’s my day off) when I have quests to go into there. Make sure I cap on tomes in FFXIV. It’s really not hard, it only requires me to do five ex-roulettes a week, something I can just sit down to do after dinner on nights where I don’t raid on WoW. On days off I can do a bit extra. Do a level roulette. Play some different games. Get stuff done the moment you see it pop up. And plan my gametime better.
I know how much time I need to do a roulette in FFXIV, including the wait for the dungeon queue to pop. I know how much time my emissary quests take in WoW. I can sit down and do those before dinner if I want to, under the condition that I’m not completely exhausted like I was today.

I may look into a reminder app on my phone that will just beep me at 23.00 to get me to start my evening ritual. Something where I can tap off the things I want to do before I close down the day. Which is mostly making sure my room is clean, making sure I’ve put on my lotions so I don’t wake up with a skin like sandpaper in the morning and the whole cleaning my teeth and taking my pills. It shouldn’t take long and it makes it so I’m properly closing out the day.

So yeah. Even though it’s not really a “new year, new me” type of thing… I do want to better my behaviour for my own good and make my life as stress free as possible.