Recently, Jemima Kelly, a columnist with the Financial Times, wrote an essay titled “Procrastination will not boost your creativity.” (Financial Times, Oct. 13, 2022). She wrote that, according to the American Psychological Association, some 20% of the population are procrastinators. Ms. Kelly’s very interesting article served to remind us that many lawyers live day-to-day under the pressures of the calendar. So many of the tasks that regularly confront us carry deadlines. It is often necessary to organize the various obligations according to the amount of time necessary to complete them. And frequently, there is a tendency to defer the most difficult or complex assignments to a later date. Those later dates seemingly come around more quickly than appeared likely. Occasionally the delay in attending to a deadline will generate a rule sanction for tardiness. In an extreme, such as failing to file a complaint before the statute of limitations runs, a malpractice complaint may result. Almost every type of legal proceeding has associated with it a time-compliance requirement.

We mention the foregoing not just to state the obvious but rather to suggest that renewed attention to deadlines is a good idea. In ordering priorities, it’s not a bad idea to put the most difficult or complex obligations at the forefront of the attention list, even if the time deadline associated with the matter is the farthest out at any given moment. There are many tools available that can help with that, including various apps that can be easily downloaded and employed. One Google definition of procrastination explains the term as “a self-defeating behavior pattern marked by short-term benefits and long-term costs.”

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