It's Only Tuesday!

PA and I have been keeping our lists going on Google docs for the past few days. Sunday and Monday I did fairly well. Today I kinda dropped the ball. Which makes me sad, but it's done, and, as PA said to me just a little bit ago, there's still time to make it up, as it's only Tuesday. It's not that I did nothing, but I didn't get much done academically. But tomorrow I'm going to come out with fists flying. I'm determined. I know I say that all the time, but I'm in earnest at this point. I did well a couple of days, and I'm not going to let one day not doing quite as well drag me down! It's only Tuesday, after all!

Accountability Partner Meeting!

So I got an accountability partner - yay! We had a meeting today to figure out the contours of our accountability practices. We're going to use an online Google doc (on which we've already put our master lists) to keep our goals in front of us and each other. We put together mini lists for today (I did MOST of mine, but not all of it), and we were supposed to make a plan for what we were going to get done in each of the next three days. AP (that's your acronym/name, accountability partner!) pointed out that making a list for the entire week was probably not the way to go, and I agreed; it's biting off more than we can chew at this point. So I made a rough outline of what I want to get done in the next few days. It's probably way too much, but I want to see what I do when I raise the expectation bar a little. I may have to lower it again, but this is also a good exercise for me and AP to get used to what our limits are.

We share one project in common, since we have one class together, but of course our preparation for the project (a research paper) looks very different, as he knows his secondary literature, and I don't. We do hope to meet once or twice a week, if we can swing it, because we found just talking about our respective projects helped us to get a better grasp on what exactly we're dealing with and what needs to get done. I think it was a very productive meeting! More in the near future on the adventures in taming the BEAST!

10 Days to Get My Shit Together

So I had an idea for trying to beat spring break procrastination. First of all (sadly), I'm not going home. I don't work at home. I visit and hang out, which is what going to the parents' house is about, in my opinion. So I'm staying here.

Secondly, and this is my idea, I have a piece of blank 8x10 notebook paper for each day until classes start back. On that paper I will list each thing I accomplished that day. If I don't accomplish anything, the paper will remain blank. They're all taped to my closet door, so I have to stare at them when I wake up and when I go to bed. I hope it will give me motivation to get things done, so I won't have to look at blank sheets of shame when I go to bed. (If it works, I may adopt this as a regular thing.)

And so, off to fill today's sheet of paper!!

Procrastination is the Matrix.

...and the Matrix has you.

Yes, This Is My 2nd Post Today.

Making up for lost time? Not really. I was just reading a book I bought recently on the advice of a friend. The book's called Eat That Frog, and it's based on the premise, put out there by Mark Twain, that if you ate a live frog first thing in the morning, everything else you did for the rest of the day would be easy. The author of the book tells you to make whatever your most important task - often the most difficult or longest or one you want to put off most - the frog, and do it first. The book sets out strategies to do this, and it's been giving me some good ideas. My frog for tomorrow? Besides getting out of bed at a decent hour? Reading for school. I have to decide which thing needs to come first, but definitely reading for school. Stay tuned....

If at first you don't succeed....

Well, you know how the saying goes. I'm so frustrated with myself though. I forgot to meet up with a friend this morning (ugh), which doesn't happen all that often, but I hated that it happened. Especially because we were meeting up to work, and so I didn't get that work done either. And of course now I've spent all do doing pretty much nothing. Honestly, I think I need to look into going to a counselor.

Anyway. I keep envisioning all the things I want to get done, envisioning my working on them and their being done, but I have such a problem actually doing them. I'm going to keep trying though. I'm going to keep trying.

What is WRONG with me?

Am I just lazy or what? I keep saying I'm going to do this, this, and this today, and then I don't. Is it because I'm not writing it down? Is it because I know I have to go back to work next week and I want to squeeze in all the lying around time I can? I don't know. I just don't know. But I don't like it. Not at all.

So what am I going to do about it? Not sure at the moment. "Just do it" comes to mind (although, I'd like to have a phrase that's not so associated with a commercial product, but what works works, I suppose). *Frustrated with self*.