You say the usual words, sure you have time, but then you blink -- and it's too late. Something came up. Something else happened and the opening you were counting on is gone. Windows of opportunity close, the fork in the road disappears and you have no other choice. You blink, you stutter, you swear...and then you put your shoulder to the wheel and push. Grudgingly, resignedly, you push. You've got no choice, right?

But what if you do?

Procrastination is a mind-game you play with yourself, pure and simple. All the pressure and obstacles that you're experiencing? They--and their supporting structures -- are all happening in your head. It's rare to find anybody past college not haunted by the Ghosts of Projects undone, or weighed down with the unwelcome realizations that they have a Lot Of Things To Do.
And it's even more difficult when you forget to factor in human nature.

Triage. The term comes from the French verb 'trier', "to separate, sift or select." In the medical field, there are  two types of triage:

• Simple, for accidents and mass casualties, used to see who needs immediate medical attention and transport to the hospital soonest.
• Advanced, which is " used to divert scarce resources away from patients with little chance of survival in order to increase the chances of survival of others who are more likely to survive."

Triage is used to determine the order and priority of emergency treatment, transport, and-or the transport destination for the patient. In the hardest cases, triage decides who gets prioritized based on their chances of survival.

You already prep for triage when you sort your prioritizes for the day. You commit to triage when you attend to them to get the best results. Triage in this context is commitment to success in action. In our everyday work, the term triage can be used to describe the "the assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of where funds and other resources can be best used, are most needed, or are most likely to achieve success."

If you've ever watched any battlefield scenes where soldiers scream for a medic, you already have an idea of how the pressure in those dire circumstances forced the evolution of a medical process meant to save people. You can apply the principles of this process to your own battlefields. You assess the field, check the quality and availability of the resources at your disposal, your window of opportunity, and your own personal resources.

Like, duh, we live in the Age of Information ? Oceans of data at the click of a mouse? 24/7 broadcasts? Podcasts, RSS feeds, alerts, Tweets, streaming, pokes and 'likes'? Movies and radio on demand?

When the amount of available knowledge out there is less like a little pond than it is like the Amazon (the river, not the store), it's easy to get mesmerized into fishing out as much information as you can from that vast source than actually being able to truly use what you get. There's just too much. It's overwhelming.

You're not just a brain and eyes parked in front of a computer screen. You are a person with a body and you lives in the world. This world. You have relationships, you have things to do, you have stuff to share...and a whole life to live. You can't live a whole life in a little area --whether that area is in front of the TV, or the PC. You gotta get fully involved. It's not as if you can save up enough unused time (or unlived life) to tack on at the very now, is it?

Active living, like active learning, involves all your senses, not just the ones you utilize sitting in from of a screen (computer or TV). It's active doing, or just consciously being. You're not being fed information. You're not filtering. You're being.

You want this.
You want that.
You want, waant, waaant.
What are you doing about it?
 
We want. In the back of our heads, even if we rarely truly pay attention, we're always on the alert for the next shiny, the next new thing that catches our eye. Something new comes up -- a bit of hot news, the next-gen incarnation of your fave whatever, the latest widget -- we come closer. We dream of what we can do with it. We eye, examine, fondle. If we like it, we spin madly glittery tales about what we can do with it.
And we covet.
We waaaaaaant.

Human beings are built to have an ever-present need for stimulation, but it takes experience, training and a little bit of heartbreak --okay, more than a little bit -- to get past all the bright and shinies distracting us and focus on going after what we really want and need.

Say you want things to be better in your life. Something along the lines of "My life will definitely be easier if-when I ______." That time isn't now, or even next week, (next month?) so...
 
 What are you doing in the meantime?
 
You want change to happen but you're nervous about what it will mean, and how much it will cost.
Big change breaks down into incremental (read: small) changes carried out in consistent actions.
Fears can prove themselves true or not with the passage of time, but you shouldn't let fear stop you. Fear is an internal  mind-game. If you let fear override you, it chips at your agency.

Examine your life and look at the decisions you've made, the actions you've taken. Do you see any trends? Are you just filling in your "in the meantime" or are you making your time count until you realize your desires?
 
What are these small steps you can take each day to make a difference?
Perhaps it's just pulling away from all the soda. Or cutting down on the TV. Maybe it's taking the stairs instead of the elevator, for two floors, just to start. Maybe it's taking a deep breath instead of snapping back when your parent/significant other/sibling/friend opens their mouth about your 'issues'.

Maybe it's cutting loose a partner who's no longer helping you progress...or just adding three more customer follow-ups than you feel you can answer each day.  It's up to you to take a good long look at your life and examine what needs shaking up.

What's a good habit to have?

It's easy to come up a few examples. Just look at the cover of any popular magazine at the newsstand, or listen to the news...or even a few infomercials. Pay attention to what people talk about at lunch. Look at the articles you read on your favorite websites. Think of all the things you put off to start doing, you know, for later...any day now...someday real soon.

• Weaving exercise into your day -- to keep yourself as healthy as you can be for as long as you can.
• Keeping to a budget -- to make sure you don't get into financial trouble and so you know what you have and haven't got.
  
• Recognizing and protecting your own boundaries -- so you can  defend yourself won't be as stressed-out as when you let others run all over you.
• Not keeping a record of grievances -- which can keep you tied to the past and unable to move on with your life (which is stress-inducing as well.)

A habit is a pattern of behavior. Patterns are established by repetition, and they can be rerouted by repetition as well.

How do you develop a new habit?

When what you want  --and the feelings behind the object of your desire-- rules you, you have to set your system up to remove any obstacle that you can seize as an excuse when you don't feel like doing it, but you have to do it anyway. Don't believe me?

When you have a dream about making money from following your passion, sometimes the passion can get in the way of realizing the dream. So what more if you  don't know what your true passion is? What do you do?

Everyone daydreams. All of us, at one time or another, entertained vivid mental movies where we get everything we want. Dreams, daydreams, fantasies -- or more specifically, visions -- are important because they give us the outlines of something we want.  They give us something to aspire to. They're symbols. They're like bright fluttery curtains behind which are hidden our true desires and deeply held convictions, and to make our dreams come true, to real-ize our truth, we have to work at pulling back the curtain. Keyword: work.

Now, when you've got a number of years under your belt and gained the maturity from those years, hopefully you've accepted learned a few things about yourself and your many dreams.  Some dreams you outgrew, some you realized weren't right for who you were growing into, and some were all flash and no substance -- and yet the flash was so, well, flashy and pretty and dazzling and fascinating it's hard to let the dream go. But looking past that it's not the dream but what the dream represents, that's linked to the flash and makes it so irresistible.

Dreams are fuzzy and free. Reality is more demanding. You want something, you can't wait for it to fall into your lap. I.e, you go for it. You make your moves. You act. You work.

But what if you don't know your passion? Even more, what if you have your passion, but you want it to stay a passion and not become, eww, work? If you still want to make enough money to keep body and soul together (plus a vacation on the side, a little sumpthin'-sumpthin' to fall back on,  and a few extras), what then?

When you do a cost-benefits analysis, it doesn't take that much more effort to think up worst-case scenarios, right? You're planning for success, you  might as well plan for failure -- in the sense that you try your best to keep it from happening, that is. "Failing to plan is planning to fail," after all.

It's A Mind Game
When you  think of the worst that can happen, you also have to remember that the worst-case scenarios are all in your head. It's your knowledge and your imagination that comes up with all these awful, oh-hell-no mini-commercials playing in your mental movie-theater-for-one.

• Your experience - This is the stuff that: you know, you have done, you have learned and you have absorbed.
  
• Your inexperience - This is the stuff you know you don't know, etc.
  
• Your ignorance - This is the stuff you don't know you don't know but you can find out. Whether you find it out the hard way or the easy way, it depends on you.
  

A quick solution is to exploit the first, address the second and counter the third with your ability and willingness to ask for help.  Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto , and John Wayne's solitary heroism is the stuff of movie reality, which isn't real life at all. To go even deeper,the hidden fear of failure or fear of success acts as fuel for even darker imaginings, which can then paralyze you into inaction. What follows are a few ways to deal with that.

Fast, Good, Cheap. You've heard of the entrepreneurial trifecta, right?  There are also other, prettier variations of this sign, like the ones here (for web developers) and here (for freelancers). Wikipedia's explanation of the project triangle also has a colorful diagram (but not as funny).  When you make plans and draw up time-line for your projects, what factors do you consider in your risk mathematics?

• When the emphasis is on COST, the aim may be to max it out where you feel that you have to get more than what you're paying for, if you get what I'm saying. A bargain. A steal, as it were. If you're serious about success and building a network, for example, and want to establish relationships you intend to be long-term, starting with a steal may not be the best thing.
• If the emphasis in on SPEED, how is your time-line? Congested? Open? Tangled?
  
• With an emphasis on QUALITY, you enter into craftsmanship, painstaking attention to detail,  precision engineering, no fudging, no cutting corners...you want the expected results.

What are you looking at, priority-wise? You want to save money, so you draw up a budget. You want to get the most out of the money you have earmarked and spend on quality. You want to get it done on time. What you want to happen decides what needs to be done. And how it's done is affected by your priorities.

"' 'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed." - David Foster Wallace, novelist   

What did you learn in grade-school? What about high school? What did you take away from college -- college college or community college? How to count, how to read, how to get along (or not) with your peers, how to diagram a sentence, rewire a house, or render a 3-D model of a chemical or molecular chain, the ins and out of accounting, sports law or event-planning...

In all that time, how did your education train you to think?

Educational institutions are also social institutions. Even as you learn your ABC's and 1-2-3's, you're also absorbing all sorts of things not directly listed in the lesson plan. Notions of cooperation and competition, following the rules, meeting standards, getting along with other people, playing fair....we're taught how to move and live in society -- but we are rarely taught how to think. (Read the quote again, please.) We memorize. We echo facts and figures. We follow, absorb, and more often than not, regurgitate the knowledge we absorb come exam-season.

How's your algebra? Have you been keeping up with earth science and geometry lately? Where are your prepositions at?

How many times in the past month have you used some odd bit of knowledge --aside from basic math, that is-- that you learned in school? The past three months? The past year? How are the dead poet's rolling nowadays, huh? Can you remember? Sometimes it's a wonder if you remember, not to mention actively use, all the things you learned in all those seemingly endless classes. How much of the knowledge you learned then are you still using now? Heck, how much are you learning now?

When I speak of learning, it's not only the stuff you cover to keep updated in your field, or the things you're sent on seminars to get certifications for, but a particular attitude towards life that keeps you open and involved.

Knowledge lies in theory.  Life lies in motion. Put theory into practice, you keep the knowing current. Applying what you've learned from the mistakes to real life, however, is what makes the knowledge alive.

• That's how sometimes it's easy to do the totals for the monthly utilities, but still encounter difficulties with paying off your credit cards. You can count the money, you can count on making the money and scraping up enough to cover the bills, but somehow you didn't think of making the money count over the long-term.
• That's how you can ace your English exams, and yet still have trouble getting the point across in a meeting that will decide the fate of your department. You may have passed the tests on paper, but retained little of the knowledge on how to get your message to strike home.

Bruce Lee knew what he was talking about. Outside the structured learning environment of school, when you're on your own it's a guerrilla-style method of learning. You take what you need, figure out if it works for you, and leave the stuff that doesn't help. Again: you take what you need and make it work for you.