Sunday, January 24, 2010

Bombs Bursting in Air

I suffer from multi-taskitis and project-overload. No matter how I try to trim down on activities and interests and procrastination it seems I keep on piling them on my head until I'm in danger of drowning. When that happens I find myself stuck on mindless distractions (anyone that is a FaceBook friend of mine will know exactly what I mean) to turn off the anxiety or napping, but of course both of these end up giving me twice as much anxiety in the long run because I become more self-critical of myself for wasting valuable time. I feel like I'm on that proverbial treadmill at the gym, going nowhere fast.

Another symptom of my over-involvement and the impossibility of focusing on one task at a time is the increasing tendency towards losing the thread, brain stutters, and memory lapses. When I sit down to work I make repeated resolutions that this day I will start to focus my energies, cut out my time-wasting activities, and structure my day. I never follow through. The miracle remains: I still get shit done.

I'm like a poor mule beaten about the back to keep on pulling in the traces, but the whip hand? That's my own. I beat myself black and blue every day just to get through the day and get something accomplished of the long list of projects I have set myself due to the incredible firing of my brain. Basically I get ideas. It never stops. Day in day out, night time too, I'm getting ideas. I find almost everything interesting. Inspiration sparks me where ever I go, from the slow times when I actually walk somewhere and have time to smell the gardenias, to the crazy overload times where my fingers are racing across a keyboard to get the ideas down somewhere before they vanish in the ether.

Of course the key to all of this is two-fold: make a plan and stick to it; and pick less projects. Maybe even schedule projects to be consecutive instead of all at once? How to reject great ideas though? It seems such a shame to consign interesting little tidbits to a murky "might never get around to this one" file.

Hey, I know. I could gain 32 hours a week if I quit my job.

2 comments:

Viridian Green said...

Sadly, I've discovered from personal experience that having the extra hours doesn't necessarily mean you get any more done - it simply means there's more time to prevaricate and waste unproductively. So I shouldn't give up the day job just yet! *chuckles*

Pan Historia said...

You know I wasn't really planning on giving up the day job just yet, but the funny thing is that before I worked for the 'man' and worked for myself, I couldn't imagine how I would could get a job, because I simply didn't have time for it.