Online medical information on aging and aging-related conditions.

Home is where the Procrastinaging™ happens.

Most of the work of putting aging off does not happen in a clinic or a gym. It happens between the kitchen and the front door, in the small, repeating rooms you already live in.

I have spent the last year asking older clients a slightly awkward question. Where, exactly, does your aging happen? Not in the abstract. In the literal house. Which room. Which doorway. Which chair.

The answers are very consistent. The bedroom, because of sleep. The kitchen, because of food and pills. The hallway between them, because of falls. And the chair in the living room. Always one specific chair. That is where the slow, quiet hours collect.

If we are going to take Procrastinaging™ seriously as a practice, we have to take the floor plan seriously. The house is where this all plays out. The Procrastinager™ is the person who helps you set it up.

The four rooms a Procrastinager™ pays attention to

1. The bedroom. Sleep is the first medicine. If sleep is broken, every other fix is renting a result that the bedroom is undoing for free.
2. The kitchen. The pillbox lives here. So does breakfast. So does the table, which is the social half of food. All three matter for more conditions than I can list.
3. The hallway. Lighting, rugs, and the path between bedroom and bathroom at 3am. Some of the cheapest fixes in medicine still happen with a roll of tape.
4. The chair. The quiet chair. The one with the best view of the television. We are not against it. We are against only it.

What this looks like in a consult

When a new client books a Procrastinaging™ consult, the second session is almost always a walk-through. Sometimes literally, by video. Sometimes by photo. We are not redecorating. We are checking the room. Where is the light. Where is the rug. Where is the pillbox. Where is the chair.

The most common Procrastinaging™ fix I suggest in year one is not a supplement, not a lab test, and not an MRI. It is a lamp.

The point is not to turn the home into a clinic. The point is the opposite. The home has been quietly handling about 90 percent of your aging on its own. Some of the easiest wins you will ever make are sitting in plain sight.

Three things to try this week

• Walk the path you take from bed to bathroom at night. Do it in the dark. List what is in the way.
• Open the cabinet where your pills and supplements live. If the order they are in is not the order you take them in, fix that today.
• Sit in the chair. Set a timer for one hour. Notice, honestly, how often it is two hours.

If any of this is interesting, the Procrastinaging™ practice runs private consults on exactly this kind of work. That covers the diagnosis and treatment of aging-related conditions, including the ones in your floor plan.

Originally published on Age Against Machine. Republished here with light editing for the Procrastinaging™ Journal.

Procrastinaging™. When procrastination is finally useful.

For most of your life, procrastination has been a vice. There is one situation in which it is, on the medical evidence, a virtue. This is that situation.

I want to be precise about a word, because the Patent and Trademark Office is making me be precise about it. Honestly, the precision is good for the practice too.

Procrastination, in the everyday sense, is putting off something you should be doing now. It is an act of avoidance, and it usually costs you. Procrastinaging™ is something else. Procrastinaging™ is the careful, evidence-based practice of putting off the symptoms, conditions, and habits of aging. We do this for as long as the science will let us. A Procrastinager™ is a consultant whose job is to help you do exactly that.

One word delays your taxes. The other can delay your heart trouble by, in some studies, a decade.

The case for putting one specific thing off

Most of what we call "aging" is a stack of conditions that mostly show up on a schedule. Memory shifts. The way your body uses food shifts. Mood and sleep shift. Your heart and blood vessels shift. They don't all arrive at once and they are not all equally avoidable. But a striking number of them respond, in real numbers, to small fixes. If you started those fixes ten years earlier, people would have called them paranoia.

The Procrastinaging™ practice is built on a simple, slightly contrarian belief:

The right time to procrastinate is not when something is due. It is when something is arriving.

What a Procrastinager™ actually does

This is the question I get most often, usually after the laughter. Here is the honest answer.

1. We diagnose. Real labs, real history, real medical review. Procrastinaging™ is not a vibe. It is a practice in the field of aging-related and psychological conditions.
2. We plan. A written, dated, six-month Procrastinaging™ plan. The plan is in plain language. You can show it to your doctor. You can show it to your spouse. You can show it to your CFO.
3. We schedule. Working sessions every two weeks, sixty minutes each. By telehealth or in person. The sessions are short on purpose. A Procrastinager's™ job is not to be your new hobby.
4. We measure. Every quarter, the same four questions. What changed. What didn't. What surprised us. What to do next.

Who hires a Procrastinager™

• People in their fifties and sixties who have noticed something, usually small, and would rather notice it twice than ignore it once.
• Adult children of aging parents who want a third party in the room.
• RIAs and family offices who have run out of things to optimize on the spreadsheet and have quietly started to optimize the person.

If any of those sound familiar, a 30-minute Procrastinaging™ consult is a low-cost way to find out whether the practice is for you.

Originally published on Age Against Machine. Republished here with light editing for the Procrastinaging™ Journal.

Tom here. I’m handing this week’s post over to one of my oldest friends, Brandon Trissler—a content marketer who’s been helping me edit and prep AATM posts since we launched.

Brandon, unlike me, is a self-professed procrastinator, so I asked him to try out some approaches to reality checks and resolutions that I wrote about previously. We can see if these frameworks might, or might not, help with procrastinaging.

Meet the new me, same as the old me?

I’ve never put much stock in New Year’s resolutions, primarily because I am in the group of 9 out of 10 who fail to keep them. Over the years, I convinced myself that resolutions were a waste of time and an arbitrary invention like Valentine’s Day or nu metal.

Tom’s take on resolutions made me reconsider my humbug attitude. His approach to do a reality check and then take a step-by-step process to achieving resolutions made me think this year could be different.

Would I have a road to Damascus moment and be reborn with my resolutions? Or would old habits die harder than John McClane?

Goodbye optimism of Past Me, hello reality of Future Me

The reality check step was the part I’d always skipped. Rather than telling myself to “get healthier” or “write more,” I had to realistically assess where I was in terms of physical function, work stress, and work-life balance.

The other change was in how I formed the resolutions themselves. Instead of the traditional aspirational approach that nearly always fails because we’re overly optimistic about what we could do, I visualized my future self at the end of 2026, focusing on the how over the what:

• Step 1: Get in the head of future you. I visualized a retrospective narrative of how I achieved my goals, which illustrated the steps to get there. Basically, I would look ahead to write the story of my success (easy when you’re already a writer, right?).

• Step 2: Extract process from the story. Along the lines I mentioned, you write a resolution that includes behavior, a system, or decision. Instead of “I need to do more retirement planning,” it’s “I am going to use retirement calculators to assess different retirement scenarios and talk with a financial planner about those different options.”

• Step 3: Succeed through quarterly check-ins instead of failing to keep daily promises. Which is what I’m doing now!

• Step 4: Visualize your freedom from your resolution. This is a big but important change, because you gain mental bandwidth back once you accomplish your goal.

The resolution scorecard: One A-, one C-, one D+

With all this self-assessment and future visualization in place, here are the resolutions I set and how I graded myself:

Resolution 1: Planning for my daughter’s transition to college this fall (A-)

Future visualization and extracting process from the story worked well for this very important resolution. I could start with visualizing my daughter being at campus and work backward to determine the steps: deadlines, aid packages, researching outcomes and support services, and all those important conversations about what she wants out of college.

As far as paying for college, we are also navigating two options: taking a full-tuition aid package at one school vs. taking a lesser financial aid package at my daughter’s top choice. Again, we are using future visualization to help: What does it look like to have loans vs no loans? Do we see a brighter future and more ROI from the top choice? We have until May 1 to make a final decision, but for the first time, a resolution felt more like a planning process instead of a wishful thinking exercise.

Resolution 2: Make a real plan for pre-retirement (C-)

Having the goal of successfully choosing and paying for college nearly complete, I visualized having freedom from a resolution: what would my wife and I do after our daughter leaves? That visualization made me realize that we have not taken the right steps toward planning for our next ten years or so before we want to retire.

I have become more aware of this since I started working on AATM posts with Tom. My wife and I have been good about contributing to our 401ks and are pretty sure we’ll be fine in retirement. That, however, is more of the makings of a plan than a plan.

More importantly, it’s the period between now and retirement that seem more murky financially. Fifteen years into owning a home that’s nearly 100 years old, a rash of needed repairs revealed the softness of our monthly cash flow. That’s okay, we can always sell the house at a tidy profit and buy a condo in the city like the hipsters we are, we told ourselves. Except after talking with realtors about what we’d need to do to get the condo we wanted, we realized that would not happen if we had to buy on contingency.

I’ll give myself a C- because we learned what else we need to learn. But I realized I have to get more analytical and less aspirational in planning our financial future…and consider getting some professional advice to secure the retirement we want and still be able to help our daughter post-graduation.

Resolution 3: Improve my physical function and reduce my stressors (D+)

This is the one where I fell down completely. It’s April and I have not touched my Peloton. I spend 12+ hours a day in my office chair, which is terrible for my functional health. And I’m still back at my desk after dinner most worknights.

Why not an F? Because the GLP-1 medication I started a year ago has helped me lose five more pounds this year – 20 overall – and my blood pressure has dropped to near-normal. Tracking both my weight and BP in an app has helped me make sure those numbers stay manageable.

But just like needing to plan my financial future in the next ten years, I need to plan my physical one as well. What good will it do me to strengthen my financial position only to have poor physical health from a sedentary lifestyle? Or worse — that hypertension lives up to its nickname, “The Silent Killer.”

So I am making changes to limit those late-night work sessions to no more than two nights per week and schedule three days of workouts that are as locked in as a doctor’s appointment.

The big lesson: Check-in and move on

As I put this together, I realized how much of my new approach to resolutions still resembled my old approach (again, Procrastinator here). Previously, I would have said humbug and ditched the resolutions until next New Year’s. However, that’s what I like about this quarterly check-in approach. I haven’t failed, I’ve assessed, and now I can recalibrate. I can still shape my 2026 story that I’ll be happy to reflect on by New Year’s Day.

Tom again. One of the things I’d hoped this post might do is show how quarterly check-ins aren’t performance reviews. They’re a chance to take an honest look at how we’re doing and recalibrate. Exactly how Brandon’s C- and D+ on Resolutions 2 and 3 are more helpful to him than an easy and fake A would’ve been.

If you’ve been tracking your own resolutions, we’d love to hear from you. What’s working, what’s still a struggle, and what adjustments have you been making?

Reviewing my resolutions, checking in at quarter one.

A Procrastinager's™ year-in-review, performed at the right cadence: every ninety days, in writing, with a pen.

Most New Year's resolutions die in February. They were never resolutions. They were wishes dressed up in a January coat. A Procrastinager™ does not write resolutions. A Procrastinager™ writes a plan, and then reviews it on a schedule. This is mine, ninety days in.

What I said I would do in January

1. Sleep seven and a quarter hours, on average, on workdays.
2. Walk an hour outdoors before any screen, three days a week.
3. Lift twice a week. Real weight. Real form. No phone in the room.
4. Get the lab panel I have been putting off since 2024.
5. Talk to one client per month who is older than I am about how the second half is going.

What actually happened

Q1 is the cleanest report card a Procrastinager™ ever gets, because nothing has had time to drift. Here is the check-in.

• Sleep. Hit. 7h21m on workdays, on average. The fix was a single lamp on a timer, exactly as I prescribe in the home walk-through.
• Walks. Partial. Three days became two. The variable was weather, which I had under-weighted as a real medical input.
• Lifting. Hit. Two days a week, no exceptions. The phone-out-of-the-room rule was the unlock.
• The lab panel. Done in week three. Two numbers were boring. One was interesting. We are working on the interesting one.
• The client conversations. Hit, and the most valuable item on this list. Three of those conversations turned into the Procrastinaging™ practice you are reading.

What a quarter-one review actually does

The point of the 90-day review is not the grade. It is the second column. That is the one a Procrastinager™ writes next to every line: what to do next.

The Procrastinaging™ year is four chapters, not one. Most failures are written in the first one because nobody reads it.

If you would like the Procrastinager's template for a 90-day review, it is the first thing every private consulting client gets. It is also the spine of the Procrastinager's Toolkit cohort.

Originally published on Age Against Machine. Republished here with light editing for the Procrastinaging™ Journal.

Why a Procrastinager™ starts with sleep, not supplements.

Most aging-related decline begins with the eight hours nobody is paying attention to. A Procrastinager's™ first fix is almost always the boring one. It is also the most effective.

If a new client tells me, in the first session, that they are taking eleven supplements and sleeping six hours, I do not start with the supplements.

I start with the sleep. The supplements are renting an answer that the sleep is taking back every single night.

The Procrastinaging™ sleep audit

• Hours. Average over the last fourteen nights. Not the best night. The average.
• Time to sleep. How long it takes to fall asleep, in minutes.
• Wake-ups. Count, not length. Three is a number a Procrastinager™ flags.
• Light. First and last light of the day, in your eyes, on your skin. Most clients are getting almost none of either.

This is the cheapest, highest-signal piece of online medical information about aging I can offer in 400 words. The longer version is in the Procrastinaging™ workshops. The personal version is in the consult.

Procrastinaging™ your A1C. A six-week plan.

A plain-language piece of online medical information on metabolic aging: what an A1C number actually tells you, and what a Procrastinager™ does with that information.

Your A1C is not a grade. It is a rolling average. Roughly the last three months of your blood sugar, smoothed. A Procrastinager™ treats it the way a sailor treats a barometer: useful, slow, and worth checking on a schedule.

The six-week protocol

1. Weeks 1–2. Measure. Do not change anything. We are setting a baseline, not winning a race.
2. Weeks 3–4. One change, in the kitchen, at one meal. Usually breakfast. Always boring.
3. Weeks 5–6. Add a walk after the second-largest meal of the day. Twelve minutes. Outside, ideally.

This is not advice for any specific person. It is a template a Procrastinager™ would adapt for a real client, with a real doctor in the loop.

My wife and I recently became empty nesters when our daughter moved out. The house stayed the same, but our relationship with it didn’t. The questions of what we’re managing and why we’re managing it felt heavier.

When we moved in with our two small children, the house was really a container for raising kids, and our decisions to buy it were tactical: did it have enough bedrooms, was it close enough to schools, would it be able to accommodate all the activities and motion of raising kids.

Now the container feels overbuilt. It’s not the emptiness as much as the complexity. Managing a house at this stage of life is unlike anything we encountered at 35 or even 45. The decisions carry longer tails with fewer do-overs and more second- and third-order effects.

And for added complexity, both of my kids are opposed to any changes.

New wallpaper or wall colors? Four thumbs down. Downsizing? Opposed. Moving? Absolutely not, because why would you leave OUR house?

They see a connection to childhood, a fixed point they still orbit, even if they do it as satellites from their own places. Their perspective conflicts with our desire to adapt and future-proof our empty nest lives.

The sandwich generation problem and “place planning fatigue”

Now, what if we added a third generation to this decision tree: my aging parents. Many of us Gen Xers aren’t just thinking about our place—we’re also navigating place challenges with our parents.

A vast number of aging parents live in homes that no longer fit their changing needs, yet they have dug in about moving. They do nothing until circumstances force them to make a rushed decision.

That leaves us crushed between competing generations:

• Our children pulling us emotionally backward.

• Our parents pulling us administratively and operationally forward.

• Our own planning stuck in the middle.

This is one of the least acknowledged dynamics of Gen X aging: place planning fatigue. We tell ourselves we’ll deal with our situation after we help our parents “figure theirs out.” Except theirs often never fully resolves until the status quo can no longer be maintained and families scramble for the least bad unpreferred outcome. Procrastinaging becomes intergenerational and co-dependent.

When every option feels wrong, the brain treats “no decision” as a decision—and rewards it.

From housing crisis to place planning

Ryan Frederick has been working this terrain for the last two decades. Author of Right Place Right Time and the CEO of Here.life, Ryan’s career spans senior housing, real estate, and private equity. I had him workshop with clients last year and was struck by how late—and how narrowly—place decisions tend to get made.

Most conversations focus on cost, taxes, resale value, square footage, or similar things. Rarely do they focus on how a place actually supports daily life, health, and connection over time.

That’s where place planning comes in. It’s not about convincing people to move. It’s about shifting the frame from house as asset to place as system. For Gen X empty nesters, this frame shift is overdue—and emotionally loaded.