Do any of these sound familiar? I will start dieting on Monday, I will start exercising next week, right now things are just too hectic, we will reconsider that project next year…
The problem with putting things off is the opportunity cost that goes along with it. I’ll use reaching your goal weight as an example. The reality is that reaching your goal weight is going to take a certain amount of exercising and dieting, so whether you start today or only in a month’s time, the amount of time that the process of reaching your goal weight will take is going to be exactly the same.
You’re not gaining anything from postponing. You may in fact be making matters exponentially worse. As you continue your bad habits, you may in fact continue to increase your current weight and being overweight can end up causing some completely irreparable damage.
Delays means costs
Also consider this example – you want to implement an improvement project whereby instead of printing only on a single side of a piece of paper, you will do all of your printing on both sides. From the point of which you implement this project you will start to yield the results (saving money by halving your paper usage), but every day that you delay implementing it, the saving that you could have made during that day is forever lost. So the longer you put it off, the more of your opportunity is forever lost.
As we approach the end of the year, many people feel their energy slowing and it becomes incredibly tempting to fall into the ‘Tomorrow’ trap, to start putting projects off until the new year.
Don’t fall behind
The frightening thing is that many people fall into this trap during the month of October already, just surviving the last few months of the year and then also spending the first few months of the new year trying to find their groove again. As a result they lose at least four months (a third) out of every year! Extremely successful businesses cannot afford to fall behind so far so fast, continuously.
Make sure that you get yourself ‘Ready’ to ‘Get set’ and ‘Go’ now already so that you can take full advantage of the full year ahead!