Use your time well
Jan. 3rd, 2014 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeI promise not all my entries will be about procrastination and the iProcrastinate podcast. However, today is not the day I won't be talking about that. Double negatives for the win!
I've been thinking about time, and procrastination, and what I'm doing with my life. Time is the one resource all humans have that is truly finite. It was Bob Dylan who sang that "he not busy being born is busy dying," and that rings very true. It's why laziness and sloth seem to be universally considered a grave sin—it's the waste of our most precious commodity.
So the question I've been asking myself is what I want to do with the time I have. I never seem to have enough, and yet I procrastinate on a lot of things, most of them work-related, but some of them life things that I need to deal with (usually government stuff, or things like organising my paperwork—always tasks that I usually find aversive).
The guilt we feel when we procrastinate, according to Pychyl, stems from the fact that we are not being authentic to ourselves. We know we ought to be doing whatever it is we planned, but instead we're doing something else to avoid the task we currently find aversive. In order to mitigate the dissonance we're experiencing, we lie to ourselves about why we're procrastinating.
In my case, 90% of my procrastination stems from anxiety, usually because I'm convinced I won't do it properly. This ranges from my translation work all the way to filling out official forms. Yes, I know it's not rational. With forms I'm always convinced that after I send them in I'll end up with irritated government officials landing (metaphorically) on my doorstep to tell me I've done it all wrong and now they're going to take away all my things as punishment. I'll lose the house, or the car, or my job, or whatever. IDK, I did say it wasn't rational, right?
It's what my father always called la pensée magique. If I don't do it at all, then I can't do it wrong. What could possibly go wrong with that plan? ;)
So the order of the day is to make use of all the time I have. This is not a prescriptive thing, per se. There will be no melodramatic declarations of never spending time in front of the TV again when I could be outside climbing mountains or white water rafting, or whatever. I just want to make sure that I spend my time doing the stuff I actually planned to be doing. If I'm watching television, I want it to be because I want to watch television at that moment, and not because I'm putting off filing my taxes or avoiding my writing because it's stressful. If I'm surfing the internet, it's because that's what I want and planned to do, and not because I don't want to be shovelling the balcony.
In short, I want to try to use the few hours I have to myself every month to do things that I find useful and/or fulfilling. I don't want to be one of those people who finishes life with a boatload of regrets concerning things I never got around to doing.
The plan for Monday is to sort out stuff I've been putting off. Namely, getting a doctor, a dentist, and maybe a therapist. The last will depend on how much it costs and whether or not I think the therapist and I would be a good fit. My headspace has been all sorts of up and down in the past year, and it would be nice to achieve some balance. I'm already prone to that sort of thing, what with being bipolar and all, and I have a classic neurotic personality, which means my emotions tend to be extreme and I have difficulty regulating them, and that I also tend to be very anxious.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
forthright pointed out to me that he's never known me to not be stressed, which is fair enough, though I will confess the comment stung a bit at the time—no one likes to be thought of as a basket case, after all. But I guess I am, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, so long as I try hard not to drag anyone else down into the crazy with me. ;)
Stay tuned for more posts later. I want to do one on weight and body image and health and What It All Means to me. Right now, though, I have writing to do. I have a little under an hour and a half before it's nap time.
I've been thinking about time, and procrastination, and what I'm doing with my life. Time is the one resource all humans have that is truly finite. It was Bob Dylan who sang that "he not busy being born is busy dying," and that rings very true. It's why laziness and sloth seem to be universally considered a grave sin—it's the waste of our most precious commodity.
So the question I've been asking myself is what I want to do with the time I have. I never seem to have enough, and yet I procrastinate on a lot of things, most of them work-related, but some of them life things that I need to deal with (usually government stuff, or things like organising my paperwork—always tasks that I usually find aversive).
The guilt we feel when we procrastinate, according to Pychyl, stems from the fact that we are not being authentic to ourselves. We know we ought to be doing whatever it is we planned, but instead we're doing something else to avoid the task we currently find aversive. In order to mitigate the dissonance we're experiencing, we lie to ourselves about why we're procrastinating.
In my case, 90% of my procrastination stems from anxiety, usually because I'm convinced I won't do it properly. This ranges from my translation work all the way to filling out official forms. Yes, I know it's not rational. With forms I'm always convinced that after I send them in I'll end up with irritated government officials landing (metaphorically) on my doorstep to tell me I've done it all wrong and now they're going to take away all my things as punishment. I'll lose the house, or the car, or my job, or whatever. IDK, I did say it wasn't rational, right?
It's what my father always called la pensée magique. If I don't do it at all, then I can't do it wrong. What could possibly go wrong with that plan? ;)
So the order of the day is to make use of all the time I have. This is not a prescriptive thing, per se. There will be no melodramatic declarations of never spending time in front of the TV again when I could be outside climbing mountains or white water rafting, or whatever. I just want to make sure that I spend my time doing the stuff I actually planned to be doing. If I'm watching television, I want it to be because I want to watch television at that moment, and not because I'm putting off filing my taxes or avoiding my writing because it's stressful. If I'm surfing the internet, it's because that's what I want and planned to do, and not because I don't want to be shovelling the balcony.
In short, I want to try to use the few hours I have to myself every month to do things that I find useful and/or fulfilling. I don't want to be one of those people who finishes life with a boatload of regrets concerning things I never got around to doing.
The plan for Monday is to sort out stuff I've been putting off. Namely, getting a doctor, a dentist, and maybe a therapist. The last will depend on how much it costs and whether or not I think the therapist and I would be a good fit. My headspace has been all sorts of up and down in the past year, and it would be nice to achieve some balance. I'm already prone to that sort of thing, what with being bipolar and all, and I have a classic neurotic personality, which means my emotions tend to be extreme and I have difficulty regulating them, and that I also tend to be very anxious.
forthright pointed out to me that he's never known me to not be stressed, which is fair enough, though I will confess the comment stung a bit at the time—no one likes to be thought of as a basket case, after all. But I guess I am, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, so long as I try hard not to drag anyone else down into the crazy with me. ;)Stay tuned for more posts later. I want to do one on weight and body image and health and What It All Means to me. Right now, though, I have writing to do. I have a little under an hour and a half before it's nap time.
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no subject
Date: 2014-01-03 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-03 07:52 pm (UTC)And yeah, I tend to overstretch myself, which is also something I'm trying to work on. Mostly unsuccessfully. Ahem.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-03 08:53 pm (UTC)I don't know about you, but I had a year in which I worked for an american company as a de facto employee, but a de jure contractor. This meant that I withheld my own taxes, and would have to pay them when I submit my return. For the exact opposite reason (figuring that I could make time to to all the exchange rate lookups and calculations on my own, instead of bothering to hire an accountant), I ended up filing nearly 3 years late, and had to pay a whack of legal fees (there was a process a lawyer could enter into for me to get the penalties waived, and the interest reduced by 2%; this reduction was more than the cost of the lawyer). All said and done, I was out about an extrs $3.5k in late filing costs (and it would have been even worse if the CRA had asked about my failure to file before I'd gotten on it). Also a problem was that my system for managing my paperwork didn't scale particularly well, and I'd somehow structured my life so that it cost me $6 and took at least 1.5h evry time I wanted to access my paperwork during tax time (and yet I have a friend who insists that of all the people he knows, I have my bureaucratic shit together the best).
Just thought you'd appreciate a sincere answer to your rhetorical and mostly sarcastic question (and maybe some counter-neuroses that can turn you into a complete wreck who breaks down in utter panic at the prospect of filling out a form, rather than merely hiding from the forms in question) ;)
no subject
Date: 2014-01-03 11:16 pm (UTC)For the record, your friend must have a really disorganised social circle!
It's also a point of pride with me that I've never once filed my taxes late. That's the one thing I've always been responsible about, when it comes to my personal finances. I have always used an accountant, because I don't trust my own math skills, and that helps tremendously. :)