Site Navigation:
Craig's twitter feed:
Tweets by @gevmage
I unfortunately have an addictive personality. I tend to gravitate toward things that I like and are interesting vs. things that are important or that I need to do. Most of the time this isn't horrible, because I like my job, and to a certain extent I like doing things that accomplish tasks, but it means that things that I ought to do get put off for much longer than they should, until I make a major effort. (I say addictive because I believe that if I got into physically addictive substances, my tendencies would make it that much harder to quit; I basically have a built-in psychological addiction to things that make me feel happy. Thus far, the only binges brought on my these tendencies have been binges of buying things on ebay.)
When I lived in Champaign, Illinois, we had a neighbor across the street (named Richard) that removed his concrete driveway over a period of about a year, by hand, piece by piece, with a metal bar and a sledge hammer. Most every afternoon, he'd break off a piece of concrete, pry it up with the bar, break it into tiny chunks with the hammer and haul the chunks away. The second summer we lived there, the old driveway was gone, and he brought a bunch of people in and they poured a new driveway.
His stick-to-it-iveness has inspired me since then, and I told him so one day. He told me that the secret to finishing a project like that is to do something on it every day. Not necessarily anything big, nor to have a set schedule for what to do every day, but just to do something on it, each and every day.
Another issue I have with getting things done is option paralysis. I have lots of hobbies, and projects, and things going on that it's hard to pick one and concentrate on it. And I'm a great procrastinator.
So...as a way to move some projects in the house and in my life forward, I am going to pick four categories of things that I need to work on around the house and do something on each one of them every day, and blog about them. For the boring things, I will just put in one sentence. Some things will probably be more interesting, so I'll talk about them a little more. The net impact of forcing myself to do these things will definitely be positive for me and my life, and I think likely it will be good for the blog too; it will keep ideas (if not posts) flowing more freely.
The four categories are: upstairs/general house stuff [upstairs] basement stuff [basement] beetle/garage stuff [garage] computer/photo/IT stuff [cyberspace]
So for Friday January 4: upstairs: mostly unpacked form Christmas trip basement: got started in labelling boxes, designated box for USB cables (see, some of the things will be very small) cyberspace: got photos backed up from camera garage: nothing yesterday; I'll do two things today (Saturday)
And for the near future: I have some work stuff to finish up this weekend, but I really, truly will be working on the beetle within the next week, so there'll be stuff up about that.