YOU have to pick which side you’re on; there is no middle ground. And no, I’m not talking about a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexit, you’ll be pleased to know. I’m talking about procrastination… On the one side, the ‘do it now’ camp, ably articulated by Charles Dickens: “My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!”

On the other, Aaron Burr: “‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.’ It is a maxim for sluggards. A better reading of it is, ‘Never do today what you can as well do tomorrow,’ because something may occur to make you regret your premature action.”

I’m with Aaron. I have a ‘to do’ list as long as my arm. Everything from cleaning the Velux windows to getting the garden ready for winter. The jobs I don’t want to do (those two in particular) never seem to get done, so they hang over me like a sword of Damocles; a constant reproach every time I look out of a window. The trouble is that the jobs are neither urgent enough, nor the reproach big enough for me to move them up the ‘to do’ list, so they never reach the top.

I was trying to explain this to a friend, who was not at all sympathetic. She has recently become a Dickensian convert; comfortably and smugly on top of everything. I explained that I always found myself doing the things that had to be done rather that the ones that I wanted to do or the ones that I thought were important.

“Rubbish,” she said smugly, “You make time to do the things you want to do.”

Not my experience. My life seems to consist of a long list of jobs that need to be done; I cross off a few from the top while adding more to the bottom. The secret, she told me, was not in doing things but learning how to not do things. Accept your limitations – you’re not superhuman, some things simply aren’t going to get done. Who says the Velux’s have to be cleaned or the garden needs to be got ready now? No-one’s going to send you to prison… You made the rules so you can break them.

And if you’ve done the things that are at the top of the pile, well, you’ve probably done the important ones and the others will either make their own way back or simply disappear. The secret to being on top of things lies in learning not to do them. In fact, there is only one real reason to do things. “You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet,” said Bill Watterson, the American cartoonist “You have to be in the right mood. What mood is that? Last-minute panic.”