The Arch Enemy of Time

I have a perpetual nail running down the centre of my foot that sometimes roots me into place and at other times has me spinning on the spot. The main symptom I suffer from when it rears its pin sized head is it makes me dither and dally, hesitate and vacillate, shilly and shally and not even the most sophisticated pair of pliers can get a purchase on it. This nail is procrastination; the Joker to my Batman, the Lex Luthor to my Superman, the Ares to my Wonder Woman.

Procrastination has a sophisticated arsenal of weapons and superpowers that render me incapacitated when I have the rare luxury of endless minutes, have the to-do list downloaded from my inner hamster wheel, when I’m free from other humans and animals.   It slithers up behind me, places the tantalising smart device in my hand and hoovers those minutes away. It sends a laser beam of light directed to the refrigerator and pulls me in a trance to its open door, consuming thousands of further seconds in the process. Its hypnotic stare sprinkles poppy fields full of daydreams in my direction, propelling those final few containers of time into the ether.

What’s the antidote then to this exasperating enemy, this thief of time? Simple, procrastination is an antidote to itself. As the hours, seconds, minutes are obliterated by its vast range of devices, the target for completion of each task moves even closer and therefore I have access to the super hero elixir to render this arch enemy toxin sterile and fruitless. In the reduced time and space created by procrastination, I have now entered the zone of stress. All thoughts, food, smart device temptations are blocked by the super-shield frenzy of pressure, focus, activity and hyper-productivity. So take that Ares, Joker, Lex, you may have sucked the seconds from me shopping for necessities, munched the minutes from my mandatory paperwork, torn the time from my task completion but in doing so you’ve replenished the rocket powered fuel up my arse, giving me the super strength to remove the trusty nail of procrastination from my foot, resulting in me bloody well getting the job done in super hero time.