doing it all .. or not.

I’m still thinking lots about the comment made to me yesterday wondering how I get everything done and “have time to do all that I do”.

I wish I did get it all done..

While many things get done there are several factors currently at play which make me believe that little to nothing is really being completed.

First: my to-do list is growing exponentially. Part of it is my often having a difficult time saying no. Part of it is that several large projects are going into high gear at the same time. Part of it is that I’m being more diligent about recording things that I need to do.

Second: I do many different and diverse things each day. My day starts with an alarm at 5:30 and ends somewhere between 11pm and when I actually fall asleep. I spend about 40 minutes on the subway each direction four days a week. I spend micro amounts of time on probably all my projects and to-do list items each day. It’s this little bit of constant work which assists me in eventually completing the projects. As they all have different start times and duration lengths I appear to constantly have completed projects. My clients may feel that is true, but I often don’t (see item “First” above).

It is fascinating how my brain moves constantly between all the projects (paid, unpaid, fun, and not) I have on my plate. If I ever gave a running commentary output of what I’m thinking about at one time I’d probably get locked into a padded room (hey wait.. that might not be so bad will they let me take my fibre?). It’s this constant thought and processing and reprocessing and … mandatory downtime (known as Shabbat) … which I believe help me get things done and have time for fun as well as work. I also often find that while working on something that is NOT the project I solve the problems. How often have you started to drift off to sleep and realize that it’s a missing semi-colon which is causing all the difficulty? That’s why I read a lot and also knit, crochet, (and now!) spin.

So, yes, everything gets done. Eventually. Some projects are completed more quickly than others. I have quite a few perplexing work issues at the moment, nothing overly insanely blocking but long term planning long term annoyances and things of that sort so I expect a case of start-itis in an attempt to solve them.

So what is the purpose of this post? Well, I’m not about to share the details of my to-do list but I currently feel that I’m not getting ANYTHING done. I guess I should stop expecting to mark January as a breather and think that I’ll have the ability to get a chance to catch up and instead realize that it is a time to go into even higher gear.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’d change my life for anything else at the moment [except for to get rid of this cold] but I definitely wish I could catch up a little more… I’m sort of doing better at turning down things but lots of things I want to do are coming up as well.

Lastly: I’m thinking of restructuring the schedule in anticipation of the semester starting again next week. I’m not quite sure how this will work or if I’ll keep things as they are. Time will tell.

• Category: life, tools
• Tag: project management