Today, I am updating my rolodex. It has been on my to do list for over a year. I doubt if I'll get it all done today, but baby steps are better than no steps at all.

So what tasks have you been putting off and for how long? Are you hoping it will take care of itself or go away? And when you finally sit down to do them, are you surprised at how easy/painless/quick it is and then kick yourself for procrastinating for so long?

-- Brad (brad@scriptbrads.tv), March 26, 2001

Answers

I have been putting off writing a treatment (and heh, I managed to finally get out of it by conning my readers into writing one for me, so that's off my list.) But I have really be procrastinating cleaning out the furnace filter and taking all the intake vents down to wash them, and washing the curtains to get winter mustiness out of them. I sincerely doubt I'll be able to con any of my readers into doing that for me. I know I will still hate doing it once I finally get around to it. Putting all that crap back up is such a pain in the butt.

-- Saundra (headspace@anywherebeyond.com), March 26, 2001.

taxes. hate them, hate the IRS, hate them, loathe the IRS. ugh, spit, ptooey, yuk. Don't find it easy, even when doing them, don't kick myself for procrastinating, just wish there was a way I could just go to sleep now and wake up April 16, all happily finished and no taxes owed. (sigh)

-- toni (toni@la-lagniappe.com), March 27, 2001.

Are they really complicated, Toni? As I recall there's self-employment involved, but it's been a loooooong time since Lagniappe was updated and I dunno. Anyway, if it's a fairly non-complicated return, you can do it right on the web with TurboTax, that's how I did mine. Soooooo easy, and it only took me about an hour (several W-2s, that was a pain in the butt.)

-- Saundra (headspace@anywherebeyond.com), March 27, 2001.

Saundra (uh, well, there's a new entry over at lagniappe... I don't know how to put links here)... I'm back. I'm going to be weekly or so until after taxes, but then I'll have a new design and sort of a new idea. It's not earth-shattering, but I hope it'll be fun.

Anyway, I'm heading out today to buy one of those programs just to help. I think the main problem is that my previous CPA did some dumb things with my general ledger -- which I've got to correct first and which I have managed to put off to this last minute. And I can follow my last year's taxes and probably do okay. There are a couple of things we did this last year that we'd never done before (buy a backhoe, for example, sell a piece of land) so I have to make sure I do those things right. I think the problem is not so much that it's hard is that it's...well... TAXES. ugh. Double ugh. And I'm sick of the batting average of the CPAs around here. (So far, we're six for six in the screw-up department, and we've had all size firms at one time or another. Literally everything from a Big 10 firm to a small, one-person firm, and still, there are mistakes. I figure I can make mistakes for free. (grin) )

-- toni (toni@la-lagniappe.com), March 28, 2001.

I've been procrastinating deleting old threads from this forum.

Ahem.

-- Brad (javagirl@scriptbrads.tv), April 03, 2001.

I have been procrastinating on many things.

1) Caulking the bathroom sink. (3 years)

2) Replacing the H/AC filter. (3 1/2 months)

3) Replacing the thermostat whose LED readout has long since faded and I've been staying warm this winter on faith alone. (8 months)

4) Taking those four "antique" Chinese plates that I thought were 400 years old and originally cost $50 each (though my practice mother-in-law bought them almost 30 years ago as a gift) and were probably worth maybe $200 each now (but recently, after a 4 year procratination, took to an auction house for appraisal and discovered they're actually 20th Century crappy Japanese plates worth approximately $10 a piece on the open market) to an antique store that I think is stupid enough to actually believe they're 400-year-old Chinese plates and will give me $50 each for them. (9 months)

5) Doing my tax calculations in preparation for our accountant so she can figger out how much the gov owes us. (2 1/2 months)

6) There's plenty more, but looking at the above I'm frankly too embarrassed t

-- Reginald Squirrel (rsquirrels@prodigy.net), April 04, 2001.

Again my post is truncated!

To finish my sentence, I'm too embarrassed to list the rest of my current procrastinations.

-- Reginald Squirrel (rsquirrels@prodigy.net), April 04, 2001.

Oh, and one more thing, this time from a past procrastination:

I procrastinated over divorcing the woman I refer to as my practice wife for ten years, though we were only married nine and a half.

(That's right, I wanted out even before the wedding.)

-- Reginald Squirrel (rsquirrels@prodigy.net), April 04, 2001.

whoa, squirrelly-mon, I think you've just won the crown. Wow. Well, fwiw, I really liked this mrs squirrel bunches, so at least you did right when you did finally make the move.

-- toni (toni@la-lagniappe.com), April 04, 2001.

Thanks, toni, I'm rather fond of my Mrs. as well.

-- Reginald Squirrel (rsquirrels@prodigy.net), April 05, 2001.