Today is an unusual day.

It’s Monday morning, 8.43am, and instead of dodging the foot traffic around the City of London on my way into the office, I’m happily sitting at my kitchen table, coffee in hand and eggs on the stove, tapping away at my laptop.

All because today is May Day Bank Holiday here in the UK.

My extensive research (i.e. spending 5 minutes on Google) tells me that the May Day Bank Holiday is closely related to May Day itself, the 1^st May.

It also tells me that traditionally on the 1^st May, people all across the country would dress up in breezy costumes, place a garland of flowers on their head, grab hold of a ribbon attached to a tall pole and dance around this maypole to jaunty music.  

The ribbons would then make a pattern as they weaved in and out of each other.

(I’ll stick with my coffee and eggs, thank you very much)

So why am I telling you this?

Well as it happens, it’s not just dancing round the maypole where we go round & round in circles and end up in an almighty tangle.

Take procrastination for instance.

Ever feel like you delay acting on tasks or activities you’d love to do?  But that this delay leads to pressure & anxiety so you watch a cute puppy video on YouTube or grab a kit kat to relieve that pressure & anxiety, but all that means is you procrastinate more, leading to more pressure & anxiety, and round & round you go?

Then you end up back where you started having made no progress whatsoever or you’ve even gone backwards because you’re in such a mental tangle.

This can happen to anyone.

I’m certainly not immune to procrastination.

But I do it a lot less than I used to.

Cooking up an email each weekday for almost two years is a good example.  So is running 10 weeks of Mindset Workshops for colleagues at work this year.  I didn’t dilly-dally or hum & haw about running these workshops.  I just got on with it.

Thing is, I never set out to scale back my procrastination.  It wasn't my aim when I went on my quest to figure out why I was so fed up at work back in 2021.  Nor when I signed up to my 7 month certification training last year.

But both have led to me procrastinating less and it's been a nice surprise.

Anyway, I’ve learnt a few ideas that have helped me get off my backside and I suspect they might help any procrastinators out there too.

So if procrastination is something you’d like a hand with, just hit reply.

In your reply say “Mayday! Mayday!”. 

And we’ll take it from there.

That’s all for today.

 - Tom