Kicking the Can

We know we have something to do. Yet somehow, we drift into the most mindless distractions. Scrolling, clicking, wandering. Even distraction has layers. One leads to another, and before long, you’re further away than when you started. In a strange way, even the algorithm becomes an accomplice, quietly helping you keep kicking the can. Let me keep this on myself. When I delay something, I’m not avoiding it. I’m handing it over to my future self. And that version of me pays interest on today’s delay. In business, it doesn’t stop with me. My delay becomes someone else’s urgency. And urgency costs… time, money, energy, trust. So while it feels like I bought time, I’ve actually created pressure.

Not all delay is procrastination. Some of it is incubation. The quiet moments. The drive. Sitting still. Letting ideas form before forcing them into action. Incubation develops. Kicking the can delays. The difference is simple. You come back to one. You avoid the other. Here’s where it gets real. We tell ourselves, “I’ll come back to it.” And sometimes… we don’t. The idea fades. The urgency disappears. Out of sight, out of mind. Now it’s not even kicking the can. The can is gone. 🫢 One way around this is to make the work visible. Not buried in a notebook or tucked away in an app, but in front of you. A reminder that something still needs to be done. A mentor of mine often said, “Who will do what by when?” I’ve had to turn that back on myself: Raj, what are you going to do, and by when will you finish it?

Because last-minute assembly… we’ve all done it. You can call it done, but it’s hard to look in the mirror and say you gave it your best. Before going further, I should say this. I'm not immune to any of it. I've kicked the can plenty of times myself. In many ways, writing this is me catching it before it rolls any further.

Adrenaline works. You can get a lot done under pressure. You can pull things off. But something almost always gives. Quality drops. Details get missed. Other people get pulled into the pressure you created. It can even look productive from the outside, but in reality, it's covering up poor planning. And then comes the fatigue, lower standards and suddenly you are in survival mode.

In my own gallery, I'm working on a new 2026 exhibit. The idea is slowly incubating. I'm not rushing it, and some of that is intentional. There are pieces that need to come together in the right way. There needs to be flow. I don't want to cram everything in just to say it's done. In this case, I do have to "kick the can" a little, but with purpose. Not to avoid the work, but to gain clarity. To see how everything fits before committing to it.