mousme | Entries tagged with projects

I don't have a specific topic for this entry, just general catching up and making plans —most of which will never come to fruition, knowing me, but it's nice to dream. It's what my mother calls "building castles in Spain." I seem to recall that has a historical origin somewhere... hang on, I'm going to go look it up. Okay, I'm back (not that you can tell in textual form that I was gone), and the internet was mostly unhelpful, but it seems to stem from Charlemagne's abortive attempt at conquering Spain. So, there you go.

( Feel-good therapy )

( Projects and stuff )

Oh, and before I forget, I saw Ghostbusters last weekend with

toughlovemuse and

owldaughter, and it was amaaaaaaaaazeballs! I can't emphasize how much I enjoyed that movie. It did have some problems, but overall it was fun and engaging, and the women were all fantastic, and there was not one single fat joke in the whole movie! I was sort of bracing for impact on the latter, because of Melissa McCarthy. She's a fat woman in Hollywood, and the price of admission for that is to constantly have to make jokes at your own expense about your weight. I understand that that's how it works, but it doesn't mean I have to enjoy fat jokes. There were none, not even jokes about food apart from a running gag about wonton soup having a bad soup-to-wonton ratio. It was glorious. I have also joined the legions of fans who are super in love with Jillian Holtzmann. She has the most bad-ass fight sequence in the movie:

I mean, HOT DAMN.

She's weirdly not my favourite character, but she's definitely the character I'd want to hang out with/possibly take on a date. She's arguably the most brilliant/mad scientist of all the women, and she is entirely glorious.

If you haven't seen this movie, you should definitely go watch it (unless you are not into this sort of movie at all, in which case you probably won't like it).

Current Mood: good

I have been a terrible person to be around lately, both online and in person.

I'm going to try much, much harder to be better than I am. I kind of lost track of my goals in the last few weeks, especially once I started looking for another place to live, but even before then.

My resolution not to complain has been a total bust so far. I just can't seem to help myself. Resolution #1 is to try harder not to complain. I have it pretty good, especially when compared to most. No more complaining, self. This is the last post in which you get to do that.

I also have not been good at doing basic things to ensure good health. My eating habits are... well, they're okay but not great. I already decided to try the mason jar salad things, and in the interest of promoting better health, I'm going to try a few things in the coming weeks.

Walk 30 minutes a day. Preferably shortly after "breakfast," but otherwise whenever I can squeeze it in. Take the dog with me when I'm home so he gets some exercise too.

Stop drinking caffeinated beverages (coffee especially)

Cut back drastically on my sugar intake

Plan healthy meals for myself when I'm on my own

Take my vitamins/supplements every day

I am going to make a more concerted effort to clean and tidy both my living spaces. I've been doing maintenance rather than in-depth cleaning (like dishes, or surface cleaning in the kitchen and bathroom), and I need to do a lot more than that. I will have to find a way to keep myself accountable for this, but I haven't thought of a good way to do that yet. Related to this, I need to finish organising the books in the bedroom and do another sorting of my clothes to get rid of some of the things I don't wear or that's too old or that doesn't fit anymore. I have overall too much stuff that's taking up too much space in the house, so I'm going to try to cull unnecessary things in the coming months. I guess it could be considered spring cleaning/reorganisation. :)

I've been letting myself sleep in on the days I'm home, sometimes not getting up until 07:30 or nearly 08:00 when the rest of the family is up at 06:00 or 06:30. This needs to change. I'm going to set a (very quiet) alarm for 07:00, to make sure I'm not oversleeping, because these days there is no way I can drag myself out of bed before then without an alarm.

I am also going to work a lot harder to find additional sources of revenue.

No idea if any of this is going to work, but I'm damned well going to try. Self-improvement for the win.

Long week was long, and now I get to start my work week.

I am paying for going to sleep late multiple nights in a row. Monday was due to work, Tuesday was cooking day prep followed by Capricornucopia prep, Wednesday was cooking day, and yesterday I forced myself to post the promised entry about said cooking day after getting a very late start to Ottawa.

Now I am so tired I keep threatening to fall asleep over my keyboard, and it's just past 19:30. Four more days of work, then I get to go home and do some more running around. Capricornucopia prep is the big thing next week. Then Capricornucopia itself on Saturday, watching Bean solo on Sunday morning while

pdaughter goes to class, then driving back to Ottawa in the afternoon to start another work week. Somewhere in there I'll need to do some housecleaning and laundry, though no cooking, thank God. ;)

I don't know. The more productive I try to be, the more it seems like I'm not doing enough. At least when I was procrastinating I had an excuse for why shit wasn't getting done. Now that I'm trying, and trying hard, I'm still failing.

In other news, I went to the dentist this morning after being a bad, bad dental patient and not going for two and a half years. I paid the price for it, though, as the dentist uttered the words "root canal" at me. It's not a done deal, we're going to try to repair the offending tooth with a plain old filling first, since I'm not in any actual pain (yet). Apparently, since I have a very good regime of personal oral hygiene, it means that the bacteria in my mouth are extra super-duper powerful, to cause this much damage in so little time. Um, yay? IDK, maybe when the apocalypse comes I can rule the earth with my pet ultra-powerful bacteria or something. :P

The verdict is that I need to step up the oral hygiene. Floss twice a day, use mouthwash twice a day, brush after every meal/snack when at all possible. Otherwise I'm looking at a mouthful of tooth decay. After 30 years of having dentists tell me what awesome teeth I had, this is a hell of a blow to the ego. Going to the dentist used to be a bit of a boost to my morale, but mutant bacteria have done away with that. Alas.

So the next few months are going to be filled with visits to the dentist's office. Huzzah. At least I got the snafu with my insurance sorted out. When I gave my card to the receptionist with my information, it didn't work when she tried to run it through the system. Turns out, when I got my permanent position at work, my insurance policy was cancelled and then replaced with another. Unbeknownst to me, I was actually uninsured for three months (even though my employment was never interrupted and I paid the damned insurance premiums the entire time!), but that ended mid-December. Anyway, I was able to get my new policy numbers fairly easily, which was a relief, but I am unimpressed at my job and their really annoying red tape and ridiculous guidelines that seem designed to screw over employees.

On the work front, I've been given a pretty big project at work which should take up a fair bit of my time and brain processing power (what little there is of it). I'm basically tasked, along with another operator, to entirely re-vamp the office's standard operating procedures. We'll be updating them and making them all accessible electronically. Right now they're a jumbled mess of paper, outdated and often badly written. It'll be a nice challenge for me, and it's always a good way to learn the ins and outs of the work itself, far more so than simply taking notes and trying to remember it all on my own. I've always learned better by applying my knowledge.

So that was my incredibly exciting day. Work and dental work. I have a couple of fandom-related emails to send out, and I'm going to try to stay awake long enough to finish the latest episode of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which I've been watching from the beginning (though I'm not enjoying it nearly as much as I want to).

Current Mood: exhausted

I 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.

( Unrelated planning stuff under the cut )

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.

Current Mood: busy

The more I listen to Tim Pychyl's podcast, the more I like it. I wish I had the intellectual focus to not only retain what's being said, but to synthesise it properly in order to explain why I like it so much.

I tried a trick he suggested today (not his own idea, but a good one nonetheless), that he calls the "un-schedule." He did give the attribution for the idea, but I can't remember it. My memory is crap these days, which is a post for another day.

This notion rests on a couple of premises. The first is that we ("we" being "procrastinators" for the sake of this post) are poor predictors of our own future affect. "I'll feel more like this tomorrow," or "I'll get up early in order to get this project done," are things we tell ourselves when we procrastinate, but we're deluding ourselves in the process. We're predicting that our mood will somehow magically change in the future to suit the aversive task at hand. This is, of course, patently untrue.

The second premise is that we are also poor predictors of the future in general. Procrastinators tend to view "tomorrow" or other days as a blank slate, as if we don't have any commitments at all and the day is just one giant, gaping void of free time. The truth is that our days are filled with smaller commitments (and sometimes larger ones!) that take up a lot more time than we like to think.

The "un-schedule" therefore suggests that we schedule ourselves backward. Think about tomorrow, list ALL the things you do every day and how much time they take, and then work out how much time is actually left over. So if I were to list a day off work, I'd have to factor in, say, showering and breakfast and lunch and dinner and washing dishes and helping to wrangle Bean and all that stuff that doesn't even register as a to-do list. It's just stuff that needs to get done no matter what.

I've done it for tomorrow as an exercise, since I want to get my Ontario driver's license and health card organised before I go to work for my night shift. I've devoted the entire morning to it, leaving myself some free time in the afternoon as a contingency plan, even with everything else I need to do as a matter of course on a work day. I think the health card needs an appointment, but I'll take one when I'm there if I have to. What's more important is the driver's license and changing my car registration. Then I'll deal with switching my insurance over, hopefully after the claim goes through for the last little fender-bender I was in (*sigh*).

The un-schedule was an interesting exercise, and one I'll probably repeat in the future, to see how well it works for me. I don't think I can adequately judge how efficacious it is after just one attempt.

I'll likely be posting more about procrastination and other personal/mental health stuff in the future, since that's what's on my mind these days. Don't be surprised if that's the majority of what you see here for a while. At least I'm posting, right? :P

Current Mood: productive

Two posts in a week! ;)

I'm logging on from work (I'm allowed to do that at my new job, within reason, which is a refreshing change), so I shall keep this relatively brief.

Part of my newfound productivity is a new resolution on my part to stop procrastinating. This is going to be a long-term process, as bad habits are hard to break and new habits are even harder to form. I've been listening to the iProcrastinate podcast by Professor Tim Pychyl (I hope I spelled that right), whose website can be found at http://www.procrastination.ca. I happen to find the website itself kind of klunky in its design, but thus far I love the podcast itself. It's just the right mix of theory (academic and otherwise) and practical applications thereof for me, and has already offered some very good insights into the phenomenon of procrastination.

The one thing that has stuck with me since I started listening a few days ago is the idea that the feelings of guilt that stem from procrastination are actually the result of living in a way that's inauthentic to one's true self. This hit really close to home, and hard enough that it made me sit up a bit in the car (where I was listening to the podcast) and think that, yeah, that sounds exactly right. Putting things off, especially important things (and isn't it always the important stuff on which one ends up procrastinating?) always ends up with me either in a mad rush, or crippled by anxiety (which in turn results in more procrastination), and that's not who I want to be. I also have a huge problem with perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking (they go hand in glove) which in turn leads me to procrastinate ("If I can't do it perfectly/all at once, then I won't do it at all!")

I'm not waiting until the New Year to work on my procrastination. I figure I'll take Pychyl's advice and "just get started." I do have some projects that I will wait until January to start, if only because I know I won't have the time and attention for them right now. January is just around the corner, in any event, so it's not like I'm putting it off indefinitely.

One of the major components of ending procrastination, according to Pychyl, is to make what he calls an "implementation intention." It's essentially a concrete plan for oneself, framed either as an approach or avoidance goal (the former being preferable to the latter), the more specific the better. So if, say, I want to become more reliable about flossing my teeth, the process might look like this.

1- I want to floss my teeth regularly in order to have a sparkling white smile and because my mouth feels nice when I do it (Approach goal. An avoidance goal would be "I don't want to get gingivitis or have tooth decay." Avoidance goals are, apparently, psychologically harder to stick with).

2- Every night after I take my toothbrush out of the glass but before I brush my teeth, I will put down the toothbrush and floss my teeth first. (This gives me a concrete set of steps that will allow this to eventually become an unthinking habit, something to work into my nightly routine, and by not making it the last thing I do, it makes it easier for me to follow through on implementing my intention.)

So because there are lots of things about myself that I would like to change (most of them small, some of them big, all of them important in some way), I'm going to be spending the next couple of weeks before the New Year coming up with not only a comprehensive list, but also coming up with a series of implementation intentions and strategies for the coming months. Changes need to be small and gradual, but also consistent.

The short list of stuff I have right now is as follows, in no particular order of importance:

1- Health habits (walking, eventually running, getting a grip on my mental health, etc.)
2- Writing (writing regularly, honouring writing commitments--fanfic and original--, finishing my work, submitting work for publication)
3- Knitting (working on more projects and rediscovering my enjoyment therof)
4- Family (spending less/no time on the computer when we're all home together)
5- Mindfulness (this may well fall under health habits, but I also want to focus on not letting negative thinking influence me as much)
6- Cooking (cooking more, mastering the art better, cooking more from scratch)
7- Housekeeping (keeping the house tidier than I currently am)
8- Work (actively pursuing career options, being more assertive about my job)
9- Friends (making a point of keeping in touch, which I am notoriously bad at)
10- Blogging (posting once a day, getting my thoughts organised, etc.)

Part of my resolution to post every day in the New Year will be my commitment to all these changes. I want to be accountable for the changes I'm trying to make, and the only way to do that is to put myself out there and therefore honour my commitment. In fact, one of the first implementation intentions I'm going to make is one regarding blogging.

It's difficult for me to form habits because of my irregular schedule. I can't say "Every day at X time I shall do Y thing," because on some days I work from 5:30am to 5:30pm, on other days I work from 5:30pm to 5:30am, on other days I don't work at all, and some days are spent recovering from a night shift. So a daily routine is next to impossible. That being said, I think I can still find a way to form good habits and to get into a kind of routine, just one that isn't as conventional as it might be. I just have to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Current Mood: optimistic

It's 2012, year of the apocalypse! Or whatever. I don't know about you, but I'm excited.

I haven't checked the Mayan calendar to figure out the exact date that the world is supposed to end, but that's okay. I figure it ought to be a surprise, don't you?

Otherwise, I'm looking forward to a quiet year. 2011 was a year of lots of stuff happening, most of it good but all of it kind of stressful nonetheless. So I want 2012 to be a year of quiet time, of settling into the new house and getting into some routines. I'm going to try a bunch of new things, but all of them small, local new things.

One thing I want to do this year is reconnect with my friends. What with my schedule and all the upheaval last year, I didn't see people as often as I wanted to. So here's to spending more time with friends and keeping in touch. I'm going to be posting here more regularly, and making a conscious effort to read my friends' page every day instead of once every few weeks when I remember that this LJ actually exists. LJ has always been my main source of news and what have you for my friends, and it's past time I started using it again.

So Happy New Year again, everyone! I look forward to spending a lot more time with you again this year. :)

Current Mood: awake

I like this new idea of composing my LJ posts at work and then sending them to myself. Mind you, I may not be able to do this in two weeks' time, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. In the meantime, all you lucky folk in LJ land get Phnee!Spam. Don't you feel special now?

Anyhow, this post is nothing terribly special. I'm simply trying to put down some of my priorities for the near future, because, well, I'm tired of my life always being in the toilet due to one thing or another. So this is just some noodling on my part in order to get my life straightened out.

This got long, be warned.

( Sealed to protect my faithful readers from complete and abject boredom )

Okay, well, that's it for that. Obviously there are lots of activities and things that are going to get affected by any and all decisions I make regarding work and finances and whatever, but I'll cross those bridges when I get to them.

At this point, something's gotta give, and since it can't be me, well, then I have to make sure something else gives.

Current Mood: determined

So I've been doing some thinking about my writing lately, and rather than posting the results of said thinking, I'm making a poll instead. Just because I can.

I'd like a challenge. I work well with challenges. So I'm asking my faithful readers to throw ideas and concepts at me, and if I see one I like, I'll run with it. Current writing projects are NOT going to be put on hold, but variety is the spice of life, so starting other things is good too. :)

[Poll #623399]

Current Mood: optimistic

I am going to Mac 911 on my lunch hour today.

fearsclave's friend EKH took a look at Cleo yesterday and waved dead chickens and sacrificed the appropriate number of black goats in order to bring her back to life, and for a while it seemed to work. However, the gods were not entirely appeased, and Cleo was no longer functional when I got home. Perhaps he didn't sacrifice the goats in the right order or something.

Anyway, we're going to see the nice Mac doctor today, and with any luck things will be back to normal by this time next week. *crosses fingers*

I spent the day in Alexandria yesterday, doing crafty-type stuff with

looking4wings and

wultabat, who has recently acquired an LJ (probably for the sole purpose of making icons for it, since he hasn't updated it yet).

fearsclave went stalking the Fearsome Zucchini later on with his rifle along with his uncle and

wultabat. His uncle delivered the fatal shot, and it rained zucchini guts for a while.

fearsclave has photographic evidence that the zucchini will never terrorise the local people of Alexandria ever again. I think you had to be there.

This weekend was basically an exercise in Not Getting Things Done, except for one project which is still in Top Secret Stealth Mode, so I won't discuss it any further. You will get details of it after Christmas. However, I still managed to emerge from the weekend Really Damned Tired, so I'm going to try to get as many early nights in as possible this week.

Other than that, this week I have a few things to get done:

1- Work on my novel. I haven't touched it since Thursday at noon. I only have 13,300 words left to write to make my goal, so in theory it's doable.

2- Get the computer fixed. This is going to start today.

3- Call my agency about that stupid check they still owe me. Much is the hatred on my end.

4- Organise all my projects in order of priority, so that I'll be able to work on them more efficiently in December.

There are other things, but they're small and domestic and really don't need to be aired in a public forum. ;)

Current Mood: tired

I learned at university that procrastination is an art form.

Now that I'm trying to write 50,000 words in one month, my mind is coming up with tons of funky project ideas for me to try out. I have to then tell all these shiny new ideas that they'll have to wait until December. The shiny new ideas then pout and sulk and wheedle and whine and try to get me to abandon NaNo in order to pay attention to them instead.

Bah.

I need a whiteboard in this apartment. One where I can list ongoing projects, project ideas, and progress. It seems to help when I can chart my progress somewhere, as evidenced by the NaNo wordcount meter I have in my

secret_history LJ. I guess I'll hit the dollar store next and see if they have something close to what I'm looking for.

...

:::ETA:::

Got sidetracked and never posted this. Off to band meeting.

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Barenaked Ladies —Just Like Brian Wilson

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Varia
I need to get my act together
It's the beginning of the week for me...
Use your time well
More on Procrastination: the Un-Schedule
Thoughts on procrastination and other things
"... and I feel fine!"
More spam —the dangers of writing LJ posts at work
Hey, look! A poll!
So much to update about, so little time...
Procrastination techniques

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Corner of Bourbon & Division

Her Words of Wisdom Scratched Into The Door

Entries tagged with projects

Varia

I need to get my act together

It's the beginning of the week for me...

Use your time well

More on Procrastination: the Un-Schedule

Thoughts on procrastination and other things

"... and I feel fine!"

More spam —the dangers of writing LJ posts at work

Hey, look! A poll!

So much to update about, so little time...

Procrastination techniques