If you want to grow beans, its no use planting potatoes

Sounds obvious doesn't it? If you want to grow beans you don't set about planting spuds. You dig over your ground, buy your bean seeds and make some nice little holes for them, pop them in, watch the rain water them and wait for them to grow. A couple of months later you have some lovely little bean plants coming along nicely, fixing nitrogen in your soil and promising a bean feast.

So if all that is so obvious, how come we don't apply that to other areas of our lives?
How come we are perfectly capable of convincing ourselves that in order to paint a painting, write a novel or compose a sonata, we first need to check our email, reorganise our desktop, sort our books by spine colour, do the weekly shop, spring clean the bedroom and shower the dog?

Of course, we are procrastinating and that's easy to spot when its a case of having spent the entire morning in gmail. However, its another thing entirely when it comes to doing the weekly shop because the weekly shop NEEDS DOING. There's no getting round it. We'll go hungry if we don't (unless we can live only on the bounty of our veg plot – which in my case, at least, is unlikely) and so its perfectly justifiable and reasonable. Or so it seems. What isn't justified and reasonable is doing it WHEN we had promised ourselves to work on the painting, the novel or the sonata. Just as it wouldn't be reasonable to go down to prepare the bean bed and come back up to the house having cleaned out the shed, planted some potatoes and weeded around the plum tree (unless that's where we were planning on planting the beans).

So next time you find yourself cleaning out the fridge or grooming the cat at 10am, stop yourself in your tracks and ask yourself whether that was really the appointment you had with yourself this morning? Or were you supposed to be planting beans?