Author: Liz Dawes
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This week Liz Dawes is wondering if she is suffering from age onset procrastination

I’m not sure why this would be, but lately I really am having difficulty getting stuff done.  Whether it’s deciding what to do for the weekend, writing this column, or something as simple as choosing a lampshade (six months of bare bulb and I’m no closer to a decision), I just can’t seem to make up my mind.

In short, I’ve turned into a ditherer.  Faced with an urgent task that must be completed, I convince myself wholly and immediately that there are in fact fifteen other things that need doing first, and then go right ahead and do them.  I pop on the washing, tidy a cupboard, swap electricity supplier, re-landscape the garden and submit six research papers to a left of centre think tank devoted to economic change…  Anything, in fact, except what I am actually supposed to be doing.

I don’t claim, by the way, that these other things don’t need doing – it’s just that they don’t need doing right now.  Unlike the urgent thing, which really does.

These urgent things are not trivial either.  They cover such matters as responding to a parking fine before it doubles, renewing passports, writing lectures for my day job and getting my kids off on school trips before the coach pulls out without them.  But the plain fact is it doesn’t matter how important the urgent thing is, I still can’t quite focus on getting it done.

Of course, not completing the urgent thing in a timely manner leads to much stress and panic as I attempt to finish it within the allotted time, and without it being utterly rubbish – which it inevitably will be if I give it neither time nor thought.  Lectures might make no sense, parking fines might empty the bank, and there is as very real danger my daughter will end up on the wrong coach at some point.  Yet the threat of said stress and panic has made me no less likely to procrastinate.  I have a deadline for this column, for example, which is very much looming.  Notwithstanding that, I’ve spent the last hour and half reading a paper I found on the internet about displacement activity in humans.  The irony is not lost on me.

Why, then, has my decisiveness forsaken me?  I could put down to age, of course.  I’m experiencing a marked increase in instances of what is known in this house as “brain farts”: those moments when you head with determination towards a room, and in the time it takes you to arrive, completely forget what you went there for.  Perhaps there is such a thing as late on-set ADHD?  I’m loathe to ascribe it to my increasing years, but since I have historically been a decisive (some have said bossy) woman, I can’t imagine what else it might be.

Perhaps I’m lacking some vital mineral for brain function or processing or something.  In fact that’s a very good point.  I really might be.

Look I’ll finish my column in a minute but I just need to go and look that up…