How Procrastination Can Kill a Business

My co-author, Diane Kennedy, turned me onto the book “Eat That Frog! 21 Ways to Stop Procrastinating”. I love the slogan, and the idea behind it.

There’s always a call we don’t want to make, a file we don’t want to work on … a bill we don’t want to pay. That’s life in business. Yet, by tackling that thing you don’t want to do as your first order of the day’s business, you mentally and emotionally set the stage for the rest of your day to flow smoothly along. It’s a great way to redirect emotional energy to positive things that help your business move forward. How many of you have watched someone dance around a task or issue, constantly finding something else to do, prioritizing other things, or otherwise justifying why they couldn’t get to that thing today.

The thing I’ve found about procrastinating is that it doesn’t making things any better. Clients aren’t going to get any happier if you delay responding to an issue or a concern. Plus it’s a lot of energy to spend avoiding something that’s going to happen in any event. And, the funny thing is, when you do meet your challenge head-on, especially first thing in the morning, it often turns out to be far less stressful that you thought it would be. Plus it’s done. I love the feeling that the rest of my day is open to possibilities.

So can procrastination kill a business? I think so. It can certainly kill a career.

Back in the early 90s I worked at a busy law office, in the litigation department. There was an attorney there who practiced in the area of personal injury. He had a heavy workload, and things were slipping, but he didn’t ask for help (and no-one noticed until it was too late).

Long story short, he blew a limitation date for filing a client’s claim. In law there’s something called a “statute of limitation”, which means you’ve got to sue within a certain timeframe or you lose the right to sue. The timeframe changes depending on the nature of the suit.

So, the attorney had a pretty big frog to eat. Making the call to the client was only part of it. In this case there would be another call to the senior firm partners, and then another call to the malpractice insurance company.

But he didn’t make that call. Instead, he did something that none of us could have anticipated. He pretended that the claim had been filed and assured the client that everything was fine. He falsified court documents, correspondence … he even falsified a 100+ page transcript of a deposition where he pretended to question the Defendant. It took 18 months before he backed himself so far into the corner there was nowhere else to go and he had to fess up.

When it all crashed down, it cost him everything. He was disgraced, disbarred, and fired from his position. The law firm’s reputation suffered too, as they had to deal with the fallout, and the questions of how they could have allowed this to happen in the first place.