If Not Now, Then When?

The time is 8:24pm, Sunday evening. The weekend is over, more or less. Tomorrow is back to work. I have a low key weekend but this one I had an excuse in that I am getting over a cold. But there have been numerous, too many to count, Sunday evenings when I have felt depressed at not having done more with my time.

The other part to this is that I am a serial planner. I am going to do this, I am going to do that. I will even start planning out the details but that is as far as it goes. Something seems to get in the way. The timing is not right. I need to do this thing first. I can’t because I don’t have this or that. Sound familiar? But in reality it’s me getting in the way of me. I need to get out of my own way.

I am approaching 50 pretty fast. All my life I have not been worried about age. Age is just a number. I feel like I feel when I was 30 or 40. However, I do know that the older we get the harder it is going to get to do certain things. I have a good 20 years left to tick of my adventure list but I need to get smart and prioritise what I need to do sooner rather than later. Its going to get harder to get strong and fit and keeping it.

James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits, talks about having systems, rather than goals. This is what I need to do, focus on my systems. What am I doing in order to position myself in order to activate a goal. Do I have systems set up to orientate my thinking and activities towards making these things happen? This is my challenge going forward, to start steering the ship using systems to orientate myself towards my goals. Over the next few weeks I will provide updates here on what I have done.

I have a sticky note on my computer which on it I wrote ‘If not now, then when?’ I stuck it up there a couple of weeks ago to prompt myself into action, to write this blog post. It’s taken two weeks of procrastination to get me to do something which took me all of about 20 minutes to do. I now have realised that just by making a start I can get things done.

Do you need to ask yourself, If Not Now, Then When?