How do people do it, I really dont understand. How in the world do people manage to juggle so many things in their life. I have said
here before that I find that sometimes I really like being under a deadline and that it causes me to focus and perform well. Well, over the last several weeks since I had again been under lots of pressure (for reasons I am not allowed to comment on), I have realized that I needed to clarify my statement. That is that I like being under the pressure of a deadline when it is clear that it is possible to make that deadline AND the goals for the deadline are well defined and well understood. When goals are not clear and the ammount of work is seriously WAY too much for one person to finish, then I am not a happy camper and deadlines are not my friend in this case. I just thought that I should make that clear upfront since I have been thinking a lot about that
statement that I had made a while ago and wondering what could have changed so much since I wrote that since I was clearly under the pressure of a deadline again, but clearly not feeling the same way about it in fact this one was just SO overbearing that it was just depressing.
But that is not all, there is more. Back to my first statement in this entry. How to people juggle so much in their lives? I mean seriously, I have trouble just keeping up with Work, friends, home, and everything else that fills in the cracks (like bills, taxes, registration, things to send in the mail, any other various errand or item needed for some secondary purpose) that keeping up with everything else that I do (and WANT to do, just seems impossible). I remember that I
commented on
this before (although it was not this exactly, I am finding that the general problem is still the same), but I think that after just being in the same scenario for so long, my views have changed.
Usually my life worked like this: I would take on a lot of work. I mean I would really sign up to do a lot. Some things would enevitably suffer because of this, but I would usually still be able to deal with them, but just at a lower quality or longer time period than I had planned. Then I would eventually finish everything up and work my way back to the basics (being Work, sleep, nourishment, friends, and leisure.....things which most people can not live without), and it would not be long before I was tackling many other things, just because I can`t sit still for too long without wanting to do something else.
But lately, I have a larger problem. My world no longer works like this anymore. In fact work provides the majority of these problems, but I have found that the problem is exactly the same for me out of work as well. The problem is that now I have SO many things to do or to accomplish that simply trying to remember what all of those things are as well as giving status (or lack thereof) on all of those things tends to take up most of my time. And the rest of the time is taken up with what little time and energy which I have to actually accomplish things (note that this is true for work as well as home). In fact, I am sure that there are many things that I just dont remember simply because the rate of new things that I have to do is so high that its faster than what I can remember (this is a problem for me because I have never been able to really use an organizer or pocketpc or really anything other than my brain to keep track of things). So now that I spend all my time in this damage control / catch-up type mode, I try to spend a little time all of the time focusing on what I can do to get myself out of this mess. (...what I was thinking about when I started writing this.) And I really dont know the answer right now. I mean, I can barely try to remember all of the things I am in the middle of trying to get accomplished. Since I can`t use work examples, here are some home examples: I had a list of upgrades I wanted to write for this site, I need to fix the rss feeds from this site since they are written in true RSS form (which does not include a date/time so many aggregators have problems with this), I am not sure if I will ever be able to catch up with all of the topics that I wanted to write about (I am not even sure what they were or how many there were any more, they are all just written in random text files and post-it notes, and anything I could write on...), I am not sure how much time I can continue to spend working on the CarPC (since this sucked up quite a bit of this weekend for instance), I am not sure how much time I will be able to spend riding the motorcycle (this this too sucked up much time this weekend.....it was nice out (86 degrees) here this weekend), I am not sure when I will be able to put the seadoo in the water this year (remember that last weekend I re-discovered how much I like being out on the lake), I still need to finish some of the finishing touches on the living room and entertainment center, I am still involved in (but only in body, not really in spirit) a committee for my Home Owners Association, I would like to keep spending time with my friends somewhere in here as well, I need to get some more sleep (the 4-6 hours a night that I have been getting for a few weeks now is not cutting it. I was getting 8 hours a night for a week or two, and that felt good, but I did not get much accomplished then either, so I am not sure of the tradeoff), and these are only the things on my mind right NOW (and that I am willing to mention here). There are many many more things that I would like to accomplish, many of them at work (more than I have mentioned above for sure), and even some more at home that I did not mention.
So again, I re-iterate: How in the world to people manage everything that goes on in life. I thought that I was doing such a good job until things stopped becoming FIFO (first-in first-out, refrence to a queuing model in computers) and start becomming AINO (All-in No-out, something I just made up...). I think that I may need to perform some hard core triage (triage == deciding what should be cut) soon and start either putting things off indefinitely till I get free cycles or just flat out dropping certain plans. Already one of these items is Tivo. I have not been watching much tivo lately (maybe an average of one show a night now), and when I watch, I have it on in the background while doing something else as to not completely waste that time. Luckily there has not been as many new shows on lately in my season pass list (I think I have 30-40 shows or so in my season pass list), so I have not had to watch much (if I do not watch or delete at a certain rate (about 2-3 days), then new shows will start recording shows that I have not seen yet, and that is not good because tivo overwrites by time and not by how I have ranked the show).
Ok, well back to trying to bring down this list of things that I need to do more. Hopefully things will level off at some point and I can make it back to a state where I feel in control of everything which is going on.
J.P.