Posting on a Sunday…
…is proof, somehow, that I’m catching up to that ideal schedule I mentioned last week. How? Well: Completing this post will mark the final task that I set for myself to complete today (minus laundry, but that’s been taken on by my helpmate, so it technically doesn’t count…I’m just trying to be honest [and to take up space]).
Today and last Monday are/were particularly productive non-day-job workdays, and if I can add one more weekend day to that list next weekend, I think I’ll be back on top of everything to a point where, in my estimation, I’ll be ahead of the game (acknowledging, hopefully without conceit, that my “behind” is “ahead of the game” for some, but since it ain’t for me, I keep on strivin’). Or if I just maintain a comparable level of productivity throughout the week then next weekend I’ll be free to fully indulge! If everything goes according to schedule that should be the outcome. Here’s hoping.
So even though my usually-up-on-Thursday blog post is, like last week’s, coming in later than normal, I count Sundays as the last day of the week (not the first) so technically it’s still within my once-weekly schedule—and to me that means a lot.
Essentially (enter the kernel of the post), I hate postponing. I also hate procrastinating, but that’s an entirely different animal, in my opinion, and so it will not be discussed here (unless it is further down, in which case, fuck it, I can’t predict the future and my brilliance will not be caged).
I like to schedule activities, be they work- or pleasure-related, and I like to complete said activities on schedule, or very close to on schedule. Having to cut and paste events within my iCal is not something I relish. I hate it, in fact. I think I’ve trained myself to an uncanny degree to schedule something, anticipate it, and complete it according to schedule. I’ve become so accustomed to this planning process that when things change I get upset.
This doesn’t happen as much with changing social plans, because usually one replaces the other and it doesn’t matter on any scale whether I’m out with friends for two hours or six, going to dinner or the movies, home early or late. It’s mostly just for work-related plans that I am stuck in my scheduling ways.
When I have to get ten hours of research done each week, lets say, and I plan on getting two and a half done on one day but I compete nothing, I feel utterly unsettled. No one but me monitors when or how much I work, but I still get sandy thinking about where else I’ll have to schedule in those missed hours.
In my ideal world nothing would come up, nor would I ever not feel like (or otherwise not be capable of) completing the work that I’ve scheduled. I would mark things down and then I would do them; they would get done and life would roll along smooth as ice cream.
In reality I know this won’t be possible. Shit happens, plans change, and I know enough to value the things that need valuing more than the pre-planned colour-coded blocks on my iCal need attention—and I can happily say that I do focus on the important friend-family-love-life stuff the most and without fail (though not without hesitation and fleeting [or sometimes more than fleeting] thoughts of my iCal system crumbling).
As a final thought, however, I don’t think that I need to change one way or the other. All of the above is a reality that, while slightly, occasionally lamentable, is just the way it is (for me). Realistically, my (slight) anxiety regarding postponing will never lessen nor disappear, nor does it have to. Nor will things never be postponed (because sometimes they will, obv.). How I plan (every)thing/s and how I value it/them works.
Ultimately, the way I feel and the way I schedule my time and the way I value the important stuff (which sometimes requires postponing the other stuff) occurs in a functional manner.
In other words, there is no silver lining here, there’s just a cloud, a.k.a. something to talk about.
Because it’s Sunday and I needed to check this off my list.
