Paying Bills

One of my clients procrastinated paying his bills. He made it into a real chore by letting them pile up so that it would take him over an hour of work to get them all paid.

When asked how he represented paying his bills in his thoughts, he told me that he imagined the hour plus of work involved and accompanied the images with unpleasant inner dialog and feelings of impatience.

As it turned out, a big part of the issue for him was all the time that paying the bills took. So I pointed out to him that the easy way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Now he is paying one or two bills every few days, it only takes a few minutes, and it's much more pleasant to have a feeling of accomplishment than to let the bills pile up.

Sometimes just changing the imagined size of the bites can make all the difference between getting a task done and chronic procrastination.