Making better choices about how I use my time

SNOW DAY! I got the call at 5 a.m. and happily snuggled under my five blankets thinking how nice it would be to have a whole day to catch up on things. Here it is almost noon and I still haven't done any of the things I need to catch up on. This is the story of my life. I am a horrible time-waster. Maybe such negativism expressed so negatively is not the happy clappy affirmation positive thinking recommended by self-help gurus, but it sure is the truth. I waste a lot of time doing nothing. It's not even stuff I like all that much. I mean, honestly, how many times do I need to check Facebook in a day?

I have a 45-minute window of time between when I drop the younger kids off at school and when I need to get in the shower to get ready for work. This is a usable chunk of time in which I could accomplish any of four extremely important things: a workout, my Bible/prayer/study time, housework, or schoolwork. Yesterday I decided to take "just a few minutes" to get on the computer, and before I knew it, I had to rush to even get my shower in. This brought home to me just how easily I can squander valuable resources of both time and energy. The mirror shows me this: I often make poor choices about how to use my time.

One reason for this is that in my perfectionism I build every task up into a major Big Deal that I think is going to need a whole day or hours upon hours of intense concentration to get the job done. That is how I like to work, giving total attention to one thing at a time and working at it till I'm done. I'm not a multi-tasker at heart. So I get caught up in all-of-nothing thinking and figure if I can't have all the time I want or think I need, that means I can't even start on the task. I feel at loose ends and free to putz around doing nothing. My motto needs to be: SOME IS BETTER THAN NONE. DO THE IMPORTANT THINGS.

Somewhere in there is the risk inherent in taking on "important things." If they are important, that means the cost of failure is high. If I fail at important things, what a loser I am. Not doing doesn't seem like failure. Somewhere in my head I seem to believe that if you don't ever get in the game, you can't be a loser. But this isn't about being a winner or loser, it's about gaining the benefit of the accomplished task. Staying out of the game panders to my fear of having someone see me fail spectacularly, but it doesn't get anything done that needs to be done. And neither does this navel-gazing! Time to get rolling. Bottom line is that I don't have to sit out on the sidelines twiddling my thumbs to keep from making a fool of myself by failing. I can make choices that lead to good things, and having those good things (health, tasks accomplished, freedom from kicking myself all the time for my procrastination, no panic at deadlines) is worth the little bit of pain it takes to fight inertia.

So here I go fighting inertia. I'm off!