Unproductive Puttering

“I’d go fishing, but…”

While there are many real and even important tasks that interrupt our fishing, there is also a list (sadly long and exponentially growing) of less important “To Dos.” All too often, we anglers accept these time-wasters and list checkoffs as reasons to stay home and not fish.

But if we identify these time sucks then plan to work around them, like serious writers, or hard-core fitness fanatics, or teenagers, we might get to the water more often.

Here are a few of those devilish unproductive puttering activities to be aware of:

~ Sleeping.

~ Changing the stickers on our water bottles.

~ Complaining about the weather.

~ Showing pictures of sunrises to people who are showing us pictures of fish they caught.

~ Explaining to someone how we can't get off work because we are (insert dramatic superlative here.)

~ Telling someone who can’t walk away how we met (insert famous fly fishing person here) before they were famous.

~ Complaining about the water levels.

~ Posting on social media that we’ve created yet another perfect leader formula, but not gone fishing.

~ Complaining about the low quality of our home waters, and/or the fish swimming in them.

~ Sitting on a long-expired fishing license.

~ Updating the contacts on our smart phones with pictures of fish they caught while we were at home.

~ Experimenting to find out how much coffee makes it impossible for us to tie knots.

~ Shopping.

~ Nibbling beef sticks while watching aquarium fish.

~ Going to fly shops and asking where the free coffee is.

~ “Enhancing” our grip and grin photos with expensive software purchased with money that might have bought a fishing trip.

~ Video games.

~ Golf.

~ Going to that event.

~ Hitting the snooze bar.

~ Watching fishing shows to figure out “how they do it.”

~ Going to a bait shop.

Let’s go fishing.