Why later seems right

Before I argue with later, I want to be fair to it, because every item in the heap got there by a decision that seemed sensible at the time.

It's small, so it can wait. A four-minute task doesn't need doing at the moment it arrives. It'll take four minutes whenever you do it, so do it when it suits.

It's dull. There's nothing in filling in a form that's worth interrupting a good evening for. You're tired. The form will be there tomorrow.

There'll be a proper chunk of time. Saturday morning. You'll sit down with a coffee and do the lot in one go, efficiently, instead of picking at them.

It's not urgent. The renewal isn't until the twentieth. The trip isn't until half term. Nobody's chasing yet.

There are more important things. The work thing, the children, the friend who needs a call. Admin comes after those, and there's always one of those.

And you need to be in the mood. Admin done in a bad mood is admin done badly, with a mistake in the form that you'll have to fix later. Better to wait until you're feeling capable.

There are needs under all this. To spend your evening on something that isn't a form. Not to be a person whose life is admin. To do dull things efficiently rather than piecemeal. To put the important things first. Those are good needs, and the method later in the book meets every one of them better than the heap does, because the heap is what takes your evenings, and makes your life feel like admin, and is the least efficient way to do anything. An earlier book in this series is about housework, and its argument is that "later" is a decision made by someone who won't be there when it comes due. The same is true here. What I'll show is that later is where the cost lives, and that the item you're protecting your evening from is protecting nothing, because it's in your evening anyway, as the carry.