Procrastination doesn’t make the job any easier

Growing up with my two sisters and three brothers had its challenges especially on Saturday mornings.  Each Saturday morning before I could go and spend time with my friends my room had to be cleaned.  Dad always checked our rooms in a Drill Sargent sort of fashion.  I shared my room with my two sisters.

We would get up each Saturday and sit on our beds after breakfast.  We would survey our room and the mess that had happened over the past week.  I was the oldest and was not a pack rat.  My next youngest sister wasn’t a pack rat but she wasn’t very neat in general.  My youngest sister was definitely a pack rat.  She saved everything all week-long and strategically stashed it under her bed.  Always overwhelmed by the mess we would begin complaining about who made the biggest mess.

Eventually we would get down to the business of cleaning the room.  We would start with making the beds.  The room always looked cleaner with the beds made.  Next it was on to the floor.  We would put all the dirty clothes in the clothes chute and the garbage in the trash can.    The room looked great.  Time to tell Dad we were ready for him to check our room.

Dad would come to our room and look around.   “Looks pretty good”  he would say and then we would hold our breaths waiting to be told we were done.  Almost in the clear and free to go and then the unthinkable would happen.  Dad would look under my youngest sisters bed.  An entire week’s worth of junk, dirty clothes and whatever else she crammed under the bed remained to be picked up.

My younger sister and I would get at each end of our youngest sister’s bed and lift it up and move to the side so we could start on the mess.  We would divide and conquer the mess.  We told our youngest sister to pick up all the dirty clothes and put them in the clothes chute and then the two of us would sort through all the trash and toys until we were done so we could put her bed back where it belonged.

It didn’t take that long to finish but it was the getting started that was always the hard part.  It was so easy to start with the blame game and tell our sister that it was her fault that we weren’t outside yet.  We could sit and refuse to help her with her mess but that wouldn’t get us outside any sooner.  The easiest and quickest way to get what we wanted was to pitch in and help her do the job.  Eventually she learned how to do the job from us.  She would choose to pick up toys, laundry or trash and we would do the other parts.

When I was working at McDonald at the end of the day when we closed each of us had a job to do.  When we were finished with our job we were expected to go and help others who weren’t finished with their job.  It was a team effort.  No matter what the job is around home or at work, it always goes better with an extra set of hands.

Advertisement