Buckle down

Buckle down

Time to buckle down and get some work done. Did you hear that? What does that mean? Buckle down and get some work done? To buckle down means to do a task with focus and determination . When you buckle down, you concentrate on the task at hand . You eliminate distractions . You work hard on that one thing. And you get it done.

To help you remember this, a buckle is something that keeps you in place . The part of your seatbelt that locks you in is a buckle. The part of your belt that holds the two ends together is your belt buckle . So when you buckle down, you hold yourself in place: you almost fasten yourself to the task.

When your kids come home from school, what do they do? When I was a kid, I would come home and rest and relax for an hour or two, but then I would buckle down and do my homework . I didn’t like to leave it until late at night. Wait, sorry— who am I kidding ? I wasn’t allowed to leave it until late at night! In my house, my mom made sure I buckled down and did my homework before it got too late.

I got some time to relax shortly after getting home. But after an hour or two—I would say, on most days, by four or five o’clock—I had to buckle down and do my homework.

That’s a very specific, tactical sense. You can also use “buckle down” in a more long-term sense. If you don’t buckle down this semester, you might not graduate . This semester means, this half of a school year. You don’t have to do homework 24/7 this half of the year, but if you don’t buckle down—in general, if you don’t concentrate and study—then you’ll be in trouble .

I read an article asking, “Is this the year you buckle down and finally get that promotion at work?” Is this going to be the year you do your best at work? The year you put forth your best effort , the year you waste the least time, the year you concentrate on your professional goals ?

Can you think of an organization that always wastes time, until they have to deal with a crisis at the very last minute ? If you guessed your national legislature —your Congress, your Parliament—then you and I were thinking alike . Our politics in the US are—have been— very divisive of late. And it’s been hard to get any type of agreement between the two sides in our Congress. But when the scale and scope of the coronavirus became clear, lawmakers buckled down and resolved their differences and came to an agreement on a stimulus package for the economy . Lawmakers buckled down—they set aside their made-for-TV moments (for the most part) and got a bill passed. An imperfect one, if you ask me, but they got something passed that was generally positive. They buckled down and got it done.

We have a new celebrity of sorts in the US, the 79-year-old Dr. Anthony Fauci. He’s the federal government’s main leader of public health and he’s the person to whom people are turning for the latest updates on the national situation with the coronavirus. Two weeks ago, he warned us that we were going to face the worst week of the pandemic so far. And it was a bad week. During the Monday briefing, he said: “Just buckle down. Continue to do the physical separation , because we gotta get through this week that’s coming up.”