bad habits

lately, i seem to have lost the ability to accurately estimate the work i'm capable of doing in a certain amount of time.

that is, i make daily to-do lists that include the various items on my agenda. these things include attending specific classes, reading for specific classes, doing specific tasks that will add up to accomplished assignments in specific classes, lesson planning for specific stories, working specific hours for the IT part of my job... and much, much more. often, the task 'bed by x:xxpm' appears on the bottom of the list. i make sure to schedule meals, because when i first started this grad school thing, i ran into some trouble with nutrition and not remembering to eat sometimes. shopping, laundry, checking mail, gassing up the car, paying bills... they all make it onto the list from time to time.

naturally, when a list is huge, it won't all get done. but the less important items just migrate from list to list until they become important items. it's pretty simple. for a while now, for example, i've been meaning to get over to traffic and parking for a new sticker that will allow me to park close the building an hour early. there's nothing riding on it except convenience, so it's been pushed down the list. paying the electrice bill was floating on a list somewhere for a while, and when it became important (ie was due soonish) it got done. that's how it works.

now normally, the 'regular living as an adult' stuff takes a bit of a back seat to 'pull my hair out as a grad student' stuff. but the important stuff gets done on time. a given list will include the three or four really important things i need to get done and about an equal number of less important things i'd really like to get out of the way. (note: as long as there is a clean pair of underwear in the drawer, laundry can wait another day; however, in a perfect world, i'd do laundry about once every two weeks.)

this generally is a good system, and it's kept me more or less on top of things for a while. at least since midway through my undergrad degree. since this semester began, however, this list system has become a nightmare. the number of items and their relative importance hasn't changed. but for some reason, i find i get a lot fewer of the items on the list actually accomplished. and i'm running around a whole lot more doing much harder work. this seems a somewhat backwards situation to the logical one.

for instance: today's list included the unimportant items of getting that parking sticker; shopping for fruits, vegetables, bread, and eggs; printing out the articles for wednesday's night class. it also included the important items of compiling the workshop worksheet for tuesday morning's lesson; going to the swc to look a really old book, writing a report on the book, and reflecting on the whole ordeal experience before sending it out; paying the electric bill; reading the articles for wednesday online and making some notes on the one i have to present on; getting to bed by 10, since it is really hard to wake up in the mornings if i haven't slept enough and i can't afford to miss the class i teach.

that actually doesn't sound all that bad. a bit of running around, but how hard are any of those? not very. i did the shopping on the way home because it became very important when i remembered that i had no easily-brought-to-campus food for lunch tomorrow or easily-prepared food for dinner tonight. i visited the book, spent about three times longer than i'd planned examining every nook of its cranny, and very nearly got my exhaustive notes taken from me by the dictators librarians. i wrote up the workshop procedure and printed myself a copy. the students can just listen carefully this time around. i managed to slip the electric bill in outgoing mail on my way out this morning.

notice that i did not do any of the reading for wednesday's class. notice also that the write-up of my dear book is not in the list of things i completed today. and please do note the time of day when all this isn't completed.

for some reason, i've gotten into the bad habit of misjudging time. i could have sworn all this was doable in a day. but things just took much longer than they should have. and this has happened consistantly. why? i'm not daydreaming the time away. i remember those mental wanderings, and often write them down. i'm not sleeping too long, because i am getting up when the alarms tell me to, and getting to sleep after i should. i'm not obsessively checking mail or anything, and i haven't been blogging as often as i ought to be. so where is the time going?

alas, i've got about another two pages of cover memo, and something like 4 formulas to write. silly things that look like algebra but refer to the foliation of the book and various signed or unsigned signatures, and misprintings that i had to look for specifically on every page of a 400+ page book that practically fell apart between my fingers..... have i mentioned that this darling book is in ITALIAN?!? it's amazing how much harder it is to spot typos and transcribe messy handwriting in a foreign language. I might have had an easier time of it in old english, and that's saying something.

as with the last time, i'll give it another hour, and then to bed with me finished or not.

love and peace