It is Tuesday morning, and I am starting the day off with failure. I am staring at six unfinished timesheets. It is our billing paralegal’s day in the office, a pandemic response rotation that we instituted in March. To avoid scanning and emailing her the reports to input into billing software, I need to finish them this morning.
In April 2019, I confronted my time records procrastination head on, like a tax dodger hell-bent on coming clean with the IRS. I vowed to create a timesheet completion routine. As I wrote in my April 13, 2019 blog post:
This week’s epiphany was that completing and turning in a timesheet every single day was just a habit I needed to establish. SO easy, right? It’s just a matter of deciding to do it, setting up a trigger to make sure it gets done, recording my daily accomplishment to encourage the routine, and, of course, rewarding myself for doing it. Like any other habit, it will take a while before it becomes automatic, but I’ll get there.
I am a self-proclaimed queen of habit. I have studied the science of habit formation, and I have assiduously practiced healthy and efficient lifestyle routines. It has been decades since I failed to brush and floss my teeth at night or gone to bed with an untidy kitchen. I have written a blog post every Saturday for almost two years. I have worked out (or moved around actively) for at least thirty minutes every day for over ten years. But for whatever reason, after recording my billing entries diligently every day for over 90 working days in a row, I fell off the wagon.
Habit formation researchers have a phrase for what happened next, the What the Hell Effect. The dismay of defeat promotes a freefall from a strict regime, a relapse of mammoth proportions. For dieters, it might mean over-indulging on pizza and cookies with a nightcap of nachos. For exercisers, it might mean laying on the couch for days in a row binging on Seasons 1 through 6 of Downton Abbey. For me, the disappointment of failing caused me to stop trying, half-heartedly jotting down cases and administrative tasks on paper and post-its, comforting myself that my email inbox would remind me of everything I had worked on over a period of days.
I was back to where I had been before – or worse. Like a dieter who regains all the lost weight plus an extra five pounds, I ignored timesheets like worn out towels crammed into a seldom used linen closet. I would round them all up in time for monthly client invoicing, of course, apathetically filling out details gleaned from memory, calendars, and cryptic notations like “conference call with” or “edit pleadings.”
I now solidly identify with broken-promise keepers, searching for meaning in failure as the means to finding success. I have a couple of clues. I botched the most basic formula; I did not create a trigger, I did not set a time of day to do it, I did not log my success, and I did not reward myself. I merely aspired to do something disagreeable every single day. If aspiration equaled accomplishment, we would all be fit, trim, and debt free, with fully funded 401(k)’s. Our diets would be nutritiously balanced, our closets tidy, and our thank you notes timely.
Come to think of it, that sounds boring. Maybe my timesheet procrastination is a karma-like reminder of the beauty of imperfection.
If so, I am looking more gorgeous by the day.