To all of you who told me I would never amount to anything because I’m always procrastinating: Just you wait! I didn’t think of this pithy remark myself. I noticed it on a T-shirt being offered on Facebook, and I thought it would be a perfect lead-in to my article.

Barbara and I were sitting in the waiting room at the vet’s office with Shekhi and Lucky, both of them needing their annual vaccinations. Our appointment was for 4:30, and it was now more than an hour later. There were four dogs ahead of us in the examining room, their owners having been scheduled for 4:15. (Donny is a great vet, but his time-management skills are somewhat deficient.) We have learned from bitter experience (Is there any other kind?) to bring copious amounts of reading material, and so I had with me a bunch of articles printed out from various sources. What I was focused on at that moment was an article from the New Yorker archives, from the October 4, 2010 issue, entitled ‘Later,’ the first sentence of which reads, “Procrastination interests philosophers because of its underlying irrationality.”

That sentence would cause some among us to flee for the hills, but because –  as you have been informed on numerous occasions – my mind works in strange and wondrous ways, I plunged on, reaching the following: “You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time.” (I was? You were? I can envision more and more of you out there heading for the exits, like the attendees at so-and-so’s political rally or a rabbi’s drash that has gone on far too long.)

But before I will be accused of wasting my readers’ precious time – when you have something of the utmost importance to do that you are deliberately neglecting – let me explain why this matter is of some urgency. As some of you are dimly aware, the wife and I – plus our furry crew – are changing residences in a few months, and there’s lots to accomplish and little time to do it, the days dwindling down to a precious few, September, November. Even under the best of circumstances, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, but when are circumstances ever at their best? I ask.

I could spend a paragraph or two itemizing all the things we have to do, all the appointments we have, all the places we need to be, all the people who need our attention, but you probably can create your own list, as good as ours. And that’s just those occurrences we or you can’t put off, like making sure there’s something to eat in the next hour and that there is a clean set of underwear for the morrow.

Having nothing better to do until it was our turn, I continued reading the article. At least I was in a safe zone in the waiting room, knowing that, at least for the time being, it wasn’t ‘my fault’ that my ‘to-do’ list wasn’t being attended to. Perhaps I might glean a tip or two about the gentle art of procrastination and how to deal with it. At least there is the ‘misery loves company’ sense of satisfaction, as in: ‘Each year, Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because they don’t file their taxes on time.’ There was a time, decades ago, when Barbara, (with her M.B.A.) realized the absurdity of my being the one involved in paying the bills and took over the task herself, because I was invariably late in dealing with our credit cards, thus accruing the standard late fees. (What’s another $25 when we already owe them over $1000?)

But let’s get to the heart of the matter, ‘the planning fallacy,’ as in people underestimating the time ‘it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.’ Or perhaps because they never remember the limits of their attention span or the meager amount of energy they have. (Is that your hand being raised, Fred?) There was the time – as my wife will never let me forget, even if I could – when I was still packing my photography gear in the basement of one house while the movers were putting everything else on the truck, preparing to take our belongings to our new place of residence. To this day, there are these mental gymnastics I go through every Friday. Yes, it should take between two and three hours to prepare our Shabbat meals, but it will take me twice as long because I get distracted and because I need to stop and rest every so often. Will I ever learn? I’d better. There’s so much we have to do to prepare for our move to THE apartment. How will we keep track of everything and make sure it all gets done?

Why don’t we make a list; in fact, why don’t I make a spreadsheet? Call it ‘Move to-do list.’ This thought occurred to me several weeks ago when I had just returned from our mailbox, carrying three envelopes that I would invariably dump on Barbara’s desk, which is what I do when the item enclosed seems to be about anything to do with our finances. Each of these three envelopes contained standard information about our investments, insurance, or some such. We’re going to have to change our address with lots of organizations, periodicals, utilities, individuals. Plus all the government agencies that need to know where we are. Let me start listing them; then we can check each one off as we go. And so I started a spreadsheet.  Task: Change address: 1)BNY Mellon; 2)RBC; 3)Nationwide. Then I thought, is that what I want to do, list each institution separately, because there’s a lot of them? Or just a general: change financial institutions; change periodicals, etc.?  Do I want to list the items going across or up and down? Do I want to include dates in my spreadsheet or a yes/no box so we can check off when the task is completed? Maybe I should take the time to think about what I’m doing before I proceed. And so I left it, a spreadsheet with a mere three entries, and went about my life. Until that fateful moment at the vet’s office. As the article implied, this kind of dithering comes in many sizes and shapes. “Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination…” (Do they know me, or do they know me?) Back to the drawing board.

OK, we know about changing addresses, but we can’t actually do anything about that for two months. Then there are things we’re going to do, like putting in a kitchen in THE apartment, but until we speak with Tomer, we won’t know what or when. So there’s no point trying to itemize those tasks. BUT, the one activity staring us in the face at this very moment is Operation Downsize. Yes, I’ve been methodically going through my books, making heart-wrenching decisions to jettison some of them, but there’s a lot more to do. Not just the books; we have all these boxes in our storage room that we haven’t looked at in fifteen years. Plus all the items we’ve shoved into closets, cabinets, and pieces of furniture over the years that we need to go through. There’s lots of stuff we can give away, meaning we have to contact swap groups, organizations, even people we know who might want what we no longer need. Forget the fancy spreadsheet for now; how about a pad and pencil? Maybe put together a list one week at a time and focus on those tasks. There’s a limit – even if we can’t accept it – to what we can accomplish, but we can always do something. Maybe that’s the ticket to success.

Which reminds me: I was in Power Coffeeworks a week and a half ago, intent on purchasing some beans (300 grams of Ethiopian Light, if you must know), after which I returned to the counter to retrieve my drink (an iced latte with oat milk). There were two fellows sort of in the way, and, as I squeezed past them, the taller one said in good-old-fashioned American, By the way, we took a few sips from your drink. Of course, I realized he was ribbing me, but this is my home court, so I looked him in the eye and responded, You’re pulling my chain. Understand that I’m an old guy. If you keep pulling my chain, it might come loose, and we don’t want that. How about our own T-shirt, which we can also advertise on Facebook for a modest price. If you have any suggestions, feel free to so advise.