Transcript
Maggie Smith (0:00)
Lifelock. How can I help? The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
LifeLock Advertiser (0:04)
One in four taxpaying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud.
Podcast Listener (0:08)
What do I do?
Maggie Smith (0:09)
My refund, though. I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this.
LifeLock Advertiser (0:12)
LifeLock fixes identity theft guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage.
Podcast Listener (0:17)
I'm so relieved.
Maggie Smith (0:18)
No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way.
LifeLock Advertiser (0:21)
One in four was a fraud. Paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com Specialoffer terms apply foreign.
Maggie Smith (0:36)
I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the Slowdown. I'm going to begin with a confession. I can be a procrastinator. I don't think that's unusual. A lot of my friends, including plenty of writers, also find themselves putting off tasks until the last minute. Sometimes it's because the task just isn't that appealing, so it's hard to feel motivated to do it. Sometimes the project is so enormous it's hard to get started. Recently I told a friend that I had procrastinated a task and so I had to really hustle to get it done on time. And she kindly corrected me. Or rather, she reframed what I was calling procrastination as something else. Triage. That's what she called it. She said, you have so much to do. You have to triage tasks. Tackle the big and immediate ones first and let some of the smaller ones go for a bit. She had a point. I didn't have a time management issue or a lack of focus. I was juggling multiple tasks and and that meant that some of them naturally had to wait. Our conversation spurred me to do a little research into the positive side of procrastination, if there is one. And there is one upside to delaying completion of a task is that you have more time to think about it and gather information. So procrastinating can actually lead to better decision making. You're also less likely to put off projects that you're passionate about, meaning that procrastination reveals what's really important to you. Delaying a task is telling you something about what you do and don't want to be doing in your life. Today's poem calls itself an essay, the first kind of essay most of us learn to write in school. It uses the idea of a now faraway form to explore memories and places that feel far away too, yet all against the urgency of procrastination. 5 paragraph essay on Time by Kathleen Flanagan More than once I blew off my high school essays to watch TV, set an alarm for 5am and dragged out of bed to a desk in the still dark living room window. Nervous about finishing, no chance to revise, I launched sentences with my blue pen like bodies jumping out of buildings on fire. The scene outside when I lifted my head, shifted from my own reflection to a pencil sketch of a street and front yard framed in my mother's proud bay window. In our otherwise plain faced house, the loops of my words leaned like they meant what they said. I'd look up to catch a light, blink on beams of a passing car, our big sycamore, then plunge again into my evidence essay and mourning emerging like bean sprouts in a milk carton. Fifty years later, a car smashed through the bay window where I wrote and watched the dawn. We sold the house years ago. No one was home but I sit at the center of destruction, writing and running out of time. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. And find us on Instagram @downdownshow and bluesky@downdownshow.org.