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| Princess Dejah, age 5 months, learns the joy of vacationing. |
At this time last year I made goals to reduce/eliminate my personal debt, increase the quantity (and sales) of my books and stories, exercise more and lose some weight, read more, and produce more of my own food through gardening and the like.
As with all assessment of goals, I have had mixed success, and any lack of progress can be attributed to the fact that I did not exactly follow good advice about how to set goals.
Procrastination and a lack of persistence seem to be my biggest personal foes. For the second year in a row, I set a goal of producing a monthly, 10,000-word adventure about the superheroic Myke Phoenix. The goal was met not at all in 2012 but accomplished for the first two months of 2013. I have reset that goal for the third time, which means the true test of success may be when I release the third new story in March. Ultimately, of course, that 12th tale in December will be the moment of complete success on that front.
The week away from the quotidian did serve its purpose; the mind is cleared and more or less ready to return to the grind, and some good thoughts have been thought. Sometimes all of the order in my mind is undone before noon on the first day back on routine duty; let’s hope this time around I can fend off the disorder a while longer.
One of my foremost goals is not to neglect this little corner of my universe as much as I have been wont to. Here, I hope to wax on life in these interesting times, my various personal projects, and pop culture in general – the stuff I expose my fragile mind to for recreational purposes (TV, music, movies …) – and I do value your thoughts, too, so please let me know in the comments when I’ve piqued your interest, made you think, and/or bored you to tears.
For now I see I have a few emails to answer, some meetings to plan, and some issues to address as the day job resumes – once more unto the breach, dear friends – and so it goes.
2 comments:
You want a comment, here you go.
You are not a procrastinator. You are something, I'm not sure what the word for it would be, but it is not procrastinator. Here, allow me to prove it. Next Tuesday is the release of the next installment of Firefly with Mal Reynolds & crew off on a new mission. Remember, it opens on Tuesday. What day will you go see it? Are you going to procrastinate and say to yourself I gotta go see that sometime while it is still in town?
Nope, not on your life. You will be there Tuesday.
Can I, as a reader of this blog, believe you when you say for the umpteenth time that you are going to pay more attention to this blog.
Maybe for a week, or a month then nothing. But, you'll be thinking, I gotta write something for my readers. But, it will be like a hair in your mouth that you just can't get out. It'll bug you that you haven't written anything. But, you aren't really procrastinating, it is just that something you want to do more interferes, like maybe a Spiderman movie, or a new Brian Wilson album, or something else that you really, really wanna do more than write something here.
The idea that you are procrastinating is a hair in your mouth. If you keep your mouth buttoned up and don't say you are going to do something that you fully intend to do but get side-tracked by something you want to do more, procrastination will disappear and you'll have no more hair in your mouth constantly keeping you uneasy.
There's my comment.
your old buddy,
kd
I can still be found hanging out at The Corner.
I think you're on to something. If I were a kid, someone might suggest I have attention deficit disorder and sign me up for a daily dose of Ritalin. Past experience shows that I will concentrate on this for a while, but inevitably something in the corner of my eye will attract my attention, and I'll reach for that and say, "Oh! Shiny!"
The word you are probably searching for is "undisciplined." As an old buddy you've accepted that this little spot will lie dormant from time to time, and you come back regularly anyway to see if there's anything new, and I treasure that.
I'd like to believe this time around I'm seeing clearly enough to maintain things for awhile. But just as the proof of the adventure stories plan won't come until the third new episode, or the 12th, any pledge I make to be a regular visitor to my own blog won't "out" until no one can remember when I last went weeks and months without a peep. So, the best course appears to be to pick the hair out of my mouth, zip my lip, and get down to business. See you tomorrow?
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