Saturday, November 11, 2017

Short and sweet

That's the way it has to go for the next little while, as I want to get back to blogging regularly but something is holding me back. So I'm going to attempt to post at least a few times a week but maybe not more than a couple of sentences. No excuses that time is too short.

Time will be short but that's because I said yes to a huge translation job that I really should have turned down. Getting it done would mean at least two or three hours a day plus all weekend and it is now threee o'clock on Saturday. Since I got the job (on Wednesday) I have spent just about two hours actually working on it. The excuse that I may be coming down with a cold is maybe good enough for having slept in so late this morning. And even for the fact that after waking up at eleven and reading for less than an hour, I took a nap for an hour. But I did actually get up and dressed then, all ready to pop out to pick up a parcel that I wasn't here to take in yesterday. But there is no good reason for me to be still sitting here two hours later.

My mood in general these days is pretty much one of self-loathing and it's hard to tell sometimes whether that's making me self-sabotage just so I can hate myself more, or if I'm just floundering because I feel so useless. Elaine from MFin3 posted a TED talk about procrastination a last week, which I've just watched. I've actually read the Wait but Why post on procrastination before but it was interesting to be reminded and also to hear the bit at the end about procrastination with and without deadlines. The shop I have to collect my package from closes at four o'clock on a Saturday so I'll definitely need to leave here very soon if I want to get my package at all. Short deadlines are definitely easier for me to react to than long ones. It's spreading the work of translating 70 pages out over the next ten days that's hard. If I had 10 to do tomorrow, I'd just do it. Makes no sense. My brain is just so messed up sometimes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In college, our organic chemistry professor did not collect homework assignments. He just assigned them and that was the end of it. Of course I had a full load of other work that was actually due, so the ochem hw sat, and sat ... and sat. Same with another friend/classmate. So, we "hired" a tutor ("hired" b/c the school offered them for free, but we had to meet with her at certain times each week). We told her that her only job was to collect our homework - ask us for it, she didn't even have to look at it, but she had to be disappointed if we didn't have it complete. That made all the difference. We had a deadline and someone who was going to hold us to it. Maybe you can have someone (a friend, neighbor) meet you for coffee at a specific time in the afternoon/evening and ask you for 10 pages, or however many, until it's complete?