I am easily distracted
Though my school/work schedule varies from day to day, my at-home schedule is consistent like molasses*. The procedure is as follows:
- Get home. (This can be any time between 6:30 and 9:30. Today, for instance, I got home at 7:15.)
- Walk/feed/play with the puppy.
- Eat something. (optional)
- Open up my email and RSS aggregator to catch up on what I’ve missed during the day.
- …
- …
- Walk the puppy again.
- Sleep.
It doesn’t take an “efficiency engineer” to see that the problem in this routine lies entirely in Step 4, that problem being that Step 4 has the near-magical ability to expand to fill whatever amount of time it is allotted. I could conceivably read my email and all the feeds I subscribe to in about half an hour, leaving plenty of time for homework, blogging, laundry, etc. But invariably there’s an interesting article to read, which links to an essay, whose author has a blog…and all of a sudden it’s 1:00 in the morning and I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. You know how it goes**.
This evening is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Early on in Step 4 I read an essay*** to which I planned to blog a response. I composed about half of the post in my head as I was reading so that it’d be ready to go and I could publish it and get back to work. But when I got to the end, I decided to realquick check out some of the other essays this guy had written…and three hours later here I am*^. As you can see, this is not the essay-response post. That post will never be written.
Fortunately I finished all my homework for tomorrow while I was at school today, but some days (yesterday, for one) things don’t work out so well. I know it’s still early in the semester, plenty of time to change, yada yada, so I hereby commit, for the next week, not to open my email or read any feeds or blogs or news sites until I have completely finished my homework. Hopefully that will create the positive motivation I need to get things done. (Getting to bed on time is another story, but I’m hoping this will help.) A week isn’t much time, I know, but saying I’m going to keep it up for the whole semester is just silly—I need something short-term and feasible.
Um, so that’s the plan. The end I’m done bedtime.
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* In place of ‘molasses’, feel free to insert a witty simile-object that retains the same casual folksiness but actually makes sense.
** And if you don’t, I hate you and you should never talk to me. Just a heads-up.
*** How to Do What You Love, by Paul Graham. I read another of his essays (Why Nerds are Unpopular) a couple years ago and found that it changed my perspective slightly, and this new essay did as well. I recommend his writing in general, though most of it doesn’t apply to people (like me) who are not hackers and/or running a startup.
His writing style seems to be designed to affirm things the reader already believes (at least in my case) and make one feel better about oneself. This is, I think, part of the reason I enjoyed reading these essays, though I’m not sure that’s a good thing, objectively.
*^ Oh, and I also spent part of that time transferring my music files from desktop to laptop and ‘rediscovering’ my electric piano. SO PRODUCTIVE I COULD CRY.
Tags: miscellany