You didn’t mean to lie. You didn’t mean to be late. You didn’t mean to not do it. It’s just that, well, you forgot.

As we almost always do.

We plan to do it. We mean to do it. We just tell ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow.

The problem, as the Stoics remind us, is that we don’t control tomorrow. Stuff can come up. We get an unexpected email. We get bad news from a friend. We wake up to a sick child. And even when things don’t come up, distraction does. We delay, we drift, we forget. We end up failing to do what we genuinely intended to do—because we did what Seneca warned fools were always doing: “getting ready to start.”

The solution, then? Do it now! You can’t forget what you don’t put off. You can’t procrastinate something that’s already done. You won’t have to make excuses or apologize if you just get started…now.