Life Lessons You'd Be Better Off Without

I make a habit of tackling paperwork fairly regularly. I pay all the bills in our house, which means that I have to sit down with Quicken and wrestle the numbers into place. Mr. WG files all the bills after I pay them, in three-ring binders that for some reason are then stored in my office.

When I go through paperwork, I generally start by sorting it into two piles: file and pay/do. Then, after I file away what I can, I spend several days avoiding the pay/do stack. Eventually, I dig it out and make a stack of bills, which I then pay. That leaves me with the “do” pile.

Typically, the “do” pile moves around a lot. I stick it on a shelf or divvy it up into my little desktop organizer for the days that I want to tackle certain tasks. And I ignore it. Until I can’t stand it anymore, and then I try to do some of it really quickly to get it out of my head, and then I’m still left with a lot of it, which I continue to ignore, and this carries on for a while.

Recently, I had some forms for D. in the do pile. Forms that I need to fill out and submit to the developmental clinic so that we can get on the one-year waiting list. You would think that I would make an effort to get this done so that we could get on with the waiting.

You would be wrong.

It got to the point where, today, Mr. WG barged into my office and demanded that I hand over the papers. Which I did. And now he is filling them out.

The moral, of course, is if you ignore your work for long enough, someone else will eventually do it for you.