What's Your Procrastination Tax Bill?
I have to be honest with you about something before I get into this essay.
I procrastinated writing it.
Not for hours. For days.
I know writing these weekly essays takes time, yet I still found a bunch of reasons to push it off.
And yes, the irony of procrastinating to write an essay about procrastination is not lost on me, but it’s also part of why I had the idea about writing it in the first place. I too struggle with procrastination, and if I’m going to be honest about what gets in the way of intentional living in my own life, I can’t pretend I don’t succumb to the very thing I’m describing.
Your procrastination probably looks different from mine. But the pattern is the same: something you know you should do, something you've been telling yourself you'll get to, something that keeps moving from one day to the next.
What Procrastination Actually Is
Procrastination is the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it. The longer you stay in that gap, the more it starts to feel normal, and eventually procrastination becomes the rule instead of the exception.
Procrastination isn't a single act. It's countless small decisions of "not right now" that quietly add up. And the cost is not just the thing left undone. It's the mental load, the self-doubt, and the growing distance between the person you say you want to be and the life you're actually living.
How It Shows Up
Procrastination is not just a scheduling problem, it’s an intentionality problem. Here are some commons areas where procrastination could quietly (or loudly) live in your life right now:
Diet. The calorie-bomb coffee on the way to work, the fast food lunch, the late-night snacking in front of the TV. You've been telling yourself you'll start eating better for months (maybe years), and the better diet keeps getting moved to a future version of you with more willpower and fewer obligations.
Fitness. The gym membership or exercise equipment you barely use, the walk you said you’d start taking, the mobility work you know your body needs. You’re slower, weaker, and out of shape, and you find yourself consistently postponing the version of yourself that takes care of your body.
Hobbies and growth. The book on your nightstand you’ve been meaning to read, the skill you said you’d learn this year, the instrument collecting dust in the corner, all traded for binge scrolling, binge watching, and/or binge gaming. You haven’t lost interest in hobbies, you’re just letting more fulfilling ones get displaced by something easier and more mindless.
Career. The conversation with your boss you’ve been avoiding, the skill gap you know you have but haven’t addressed, the career pivot you’ve been wanting to make but you’re too afraid to. You’ve indefinitely deferred the harder, slower work of becoming more fulfilled in your career by staying busy and comfortable with work that is unfulfilling, frustrating, and/or boring.
Finances. The budget you’ve been meaning to set up, the retirement account you haven’t opened (or don’t fund), the realization that you’re over deep in credit card debt because of years of unmonitored spending. You look at your financial life and realize you have work to do, but you keep saying you’ll start next month or after the next (fill in the blank), and you never seem to get ahead because you keep pushing out the starting line.
Relationships. The friend you haven’t called in over a year because you’re too busy, the apology you owe but are afraid of the potential reaction, the conversation with your spouse you’ve been postponing because you’re not sure how it will go. You want deep relationships and more friends, yet you find yourself unwilling to start cultivating it today.
Spiritual habits. The devotional time in the Scriptures that you’ve been neglecting, the deeper prayer rhythm you’ve been meaning to start, the questions you’re avoiding because you’re not sure you’re ready for the answers. The Christ-centered foundation underneath everything else ends up postponed and/or neglected in favor of things that feel more urgent.
The reality is that each of us have areas where (if we’re honest) we have room to improve. But the danger is that each one feels small enough to defer, and when you’re procrastinating across multiple areas of your life, what you’re actually looking at is a life being lived almost entirely in the gap between intention and action.
The Lies We Tell Ourselves
The thing about procrastination is that it always has a story attached to it:
You’ll start when work slows down.
You’ll start when the kids are older.
You’ll start when you have more energy/clarity/time/motivation.
You’ll start when you feel ready.
These are all variations of the same lie: that some future moment will arrive and make the hard thing easier.
It won't. Your future doesn't arrive without you, and if you keep procrastinating in the present, the future will look like a slightly worse version of the life you already have.
The conditions for starting almost never feel perfect, and you and I can always find a reason to defer, but every day of procrastinating is another day spent rehearsing the habit of not doing, which makes doing harder the next day.
The Costs
After reading this, you may feel a bit uncomfortable. But if you’re honest, the thing you’ve been putting off hasn’t actually gotten easier with time. It’s gotten harder, and the longer you procrastinate, the more it costs you in ways you haven’t even thought about.
Most people never sit down and count the cost of their procrastination tax. They just feel a low-grade weight that becomes normalized.
Except it’s not normal and the tax bill just gets larger as time passes.
Procrastinating takes up mental space whether you acknowledge it or not, and every “not today” is teaching your brain that you are the kind of person who waits. And that lesson is harder to unlearn (and more expensive) than you might think.
The version of your life that exists on the other side of the things you’ve been putting off is the life most of us actually want, but it doesn’t arrive just because you or I want it to. It’s the result of doing small, specific things you’ve been postponing for years.
Look honestly at what you've been procrastinating across all seven areas of your life. What is sitting in the gap between knowing and doing? What have you been telling yourself you'll get to "tomorrow" for so long that tomorrow quietly became "someday," and someday quietly became "never"?
In the next essay I’ll come back to some tools for overcoming procrastination. But for this week, just notice, and sit with the discomfort that surfaces, because you can’t address something you can’t honestly acknowledge.
There’s a phrase that has stuck with me that I heard a while ago, and it captures the cost of all of this in a single line:
Someday is the most expensive word in the English language.
So what’s your procrastination tax bill, and what are you putting off till “someday” what you can start today?
