Horrible, horrible, horrible.
Time management is the worst thing in the world for me.
I often think I actually have a mental disability or mental health issue regarding it. Seriously. It's starting to screw up my life.
I procrastinate. I dither. I waste time. I fail to prioritise. In fact I often reverse-prioritise. I have tried lots of strategies to deal with this. I suspect that the key is probably something to do with self-discipline and commitment. I really struggle (yes really really struggle, not just like normal people do) with that stuff, and I don't know why.
I have gone through my last two jobs struggling, hanging on by the skin of my teeth, letting people down, stressing out myself and my family, damaging my health, making myself grumpy and frustrated with my lack of achievement and fulfilment of my potential and abilities. The number of occasions on which I have seen a job sitting on my desk which should be done, and left it in order to do something more fun instead. Weeks later it's still there. I have a meeting with my line manager. I'll do it. _It really needs doing._ I know, I'm sorry. It's fine, I'm organised now. I'll do it by Thursday. Monday comes - Sorry I was busy Thursday (and I got in so late on Friday it wasn't even worth coming in but luckily you didn't know that and I'm certainly not going to tell you and I'm going to pray you don't ask me to tell you what I did on Friday) so I should be able to get it done this afternoon or maybe tomorrow morning at the latest. Line manager gives up.
I don't want to do that to this job too. But at the moment I'm sliding, sliding down into a mess of work half-done, poorly-done and often not done at all. A chaotic crisis of late nights, lack of sleep, short temper, apologies, cover-ups, sickies, excuses and just too much pressure and stress.
Even the stuff I enjoy doing I have not done. Why? What have I done instead? Messed around. Played my guitar. Listened to music. Browsed random websites. Like a fucking teenager. Spent 2 hours creating myself a 3D avatar at meez.com when I had set aside the time to get some work done before a deadline. Why? I'm easily distracted, and when I see something shiny or fun I jump at it. I need to keep my feet on the ground more. I have ambitions to build an online persona with lots of contacts and logins and interactive Web 2.0 web presence in all the right places. I have spent time tinkering with my wiki, which frankly can wait. My "personal website project" is a mess which based on all the evidence of the last seven years is never going to materialise into anything good or worth while or stylish. Will Francis ever choose a domain name and stick with it? Will he ever settle on a CMS, a colour scheme, an aim or theme that actually holds the whole site together? Or will he just piss about for ever?
I'm a tinkerer, but one without the class, skills or artistic talent to make something good. Just as I tinker with bikes because it's fun - it does something right for my brain chemistry I guess - but then I spend too much money on bits and still end up with a bike that's not great and not necessarily very reliable. And then the next week I'll find something else to tinker with and a new reason to strip the bike down and play with it rather than actually, say, ride it. I tinker more than I ride. The same principles apply to my "website" that I have spent countless hours, not to mention money, messing about with instead of actually creating content and getting stuff up there which represents me and gives me satisfaction to publish. No, it's much more important to play with CSS attributes such as the hex colour values for the border-top of div.footer. That's my life's project. Great. It's really up there with Pynchon, Amis and Greene.
I think I need to come back to this and reflect on it when I have calmed down a bit. Definitely a prime piece of writing to work on and then set some SMART targets from.
Labels: disaster, failure, life, personal, time management
