The Cost of Procrastinating

My wife and I just got finished doing our Christmas shopping online. Yeah, I know, it is a bit late, but we’ve been a little busy.

Last year we shopped early and often – watching for sales whenever we could, thoughtfully picking each gift for our kids and other loved ones. Of course I bought a number of gifts online last year. Most were here and wrapped weeks before Christmas. Basically, it was a relatively cost-effective, stress-free Christmas season.

Not this year, however. After two days of perusing the web and making endless phone calls to mail order companies, we’re finally done. Way too much stress. And way too much money spent on overnight shipping. Yet even though we’re ‘done’ shopping, the stress doesn’t end – we’ve still got to wait for all the gifts to arrive.

I can tell you, first hand, we’re really paying for procrastinating.

The same is true in business – when we procrastinate, we pay.

Think about it. How many times during the week do you put something off? Put it off til later? Or tomorrow? Or the end of the week? Or next week? Or…wait, maybe it gets put off forever.

And it can be worse if it doesn’t ’seem important.’ How many times have you said to yourself, “I should give so-and-so a call?” This happened to me just recently – and it cost me.

For weeks I’d been thinking about a past client of mine. In mid 2006, I had helped her reshape her business and she had seen great success. A few months later she referred me a friend who got similar results. Then early this year she brought me into a business contract as an advisor on web strategy. It was great working with her in this way. And we talked about doing it again.

But now months had passed and we’d not been in contact; both of us being busy with our business. So when the thought of calling her was gnawing at my mind, I knew I had a chance to reconnect with her. So I put it on my task list for a Tuesday morning. That led to Wednesday, then Thursday, then early next week. Eventually, two and a half months went by and I still hadn’t phoned her.

Enough was enough. I finally made time on a Tuesday afternoon. We immediately reconnected and started into a great conversation about our families and personal lives. As we shifted to business she told me about an opportunity I had missed with her. She was elbow deep in a job with a large law firm who hired her to completely rebrand their firm. They wanted her to work with their web guy, yet she still pitched me. They were game, but since they wanted to move quickly, the needed to meet with me in a very short timeline. She had tried to reach me by phone to setup a same-day meeting, but my voicemail was full (it holds 300 messages and I always check them through email, so my box can fill up sometimes for a few hours). She tried a few times but couldn’t get me. Her email didn’t hit my inbox until the meeting time had gone. So they went with their web guy and the project was moving full-steam-ahead.

Now she was negotiating this project for a few months. The few months that I had had this inclination to phone her. She didn’t initially phone me because she didn’t know they were open to looking a different web guy until they were deep in already.

If I had followed my feeling to call her I wouldn’t have missed a pretty sizable contract for redoing their website and creating their web marketing campaign. It cost me pretty – at bare minimum, $25K. Boy that money would have made paying for all the overnight shipping for Christmas gifts easier to swallow.

Oh well. You win some, you lose some, I guess. But you don’t even have a chance if you procrastinate getting in the game.

So the next time you have that feeling, that need, that desire, or simply that necessity to get something done for your business. Don’t wait. Take a step toward getting it done. Especially if you can get paid from it.

endnote: We did work out a plan for staying in closer touch, both for the friendship and for the possible business opportunities together. So far, so good.