Recipe For Financial Freedom

I have never come across procrastination as a positive term till date. Procrastination as I define it, is nothing but not sticking to your commitment made to yourself. As per Wikipedia it is defined as:

Procrastination is a type of avoidance behaviour which is characterised by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time.

I committed to myself that I ll go for a morning walk to keep myself healthy. My behavior in the morning, “May be tomorrow” or, “let me sleep half and hour or so”. Same is with other commitments like avoiding high calorie food etc. It can be work related like, “I have to complete X job after 3 days why not start tomorrow, anyways its just a days work”.

Finally from any angle I look at it, procrastination is a negative term. I found debt is a kind of procrastination, well procrastinating your payments, but in this case there is a cost attached to it, ‘the interest cost’! The more you procrastinate the more expensive your debt becomes.

But I feel that we can use the very nature of procrastination to our benefit. Why not procrastinate our purchases? Say I will buy that tomorrow and pay tomorrow to avoid the cost. Sounds like postponing the purchase. One can say it is similar to postponing things, but I want you to put this as a behavioral change. Procrastinate purchase of things indefinitely unless the sword is on your head to buy that thing.

This is a shift in attitude to purchase things. For example, what I have read many a times on blogs, that prepare a list while going for shopping, in this way you will avoid any extra purchase. But look it at the other way round. Prepare an exhaustive list to purchase and the remove the not so necessary things from the list or set a later date (Procrastination) for those things to purchase. This way you will be using your list to the fullest. If this comes to practice then you are attacking your debt from both sides of your financial management sword.

I want to use procrastination as a tool not to reduce debt but to increase my money management skills or to control my anxiety/impulse to purchase things.

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