Tag: Getting Organised

Journal

If I’d been doing it right, I would have come back with a tan…

Not that I tan, of course, despite spending my teenage years on the Gold Coast and undergoing the mandatory time at the beach. Tanning and me don’t mix – my primary pigmentation is basically red, so I keep having conversations with doctors about how easily I’ll burn and how prone I am to little things like Skin Cancer. I could go on, but my skin isn’t really the point of this post. *sigh* Let me start again… I am, at this point, about two weeks behind on e-mail, phone-calls, text messages, facebook updates, blog reading, and social engagements of all kinds. The first week of this was unintentional – just the usual slippage that comes from trying to get too much done at the same time – but around Tuesday of last week I declared a unilateral retreat from from the world in order to spend the second week reading, mainlining ibuprofen, and living on soup to avoid further irritating an inflamed

Journal

Not so much kicking the jams out as nudging them with a toe and asking politely if they’d mind leaving…

It’s been an inauspicious start to my April of getting things done – slept through the alarm this morning, managed to fritter away two hours without getting started on the (very low-key) to-do list of writing and cleaning-projects needed to make the house ready for the Dungeons and Dragons game on Sunday.  Not a surprise, really – both brain and body are used to an afternoon start at the moment, working late into the evening, but I’m trying to break that habit over the coming month. Still, there is a list of six things that need doing today, and I have managed but one (and that one was basically checking a website). I will be rectifying that…well, not shortly, but sometime after 2 PM when I get back from renewing the lease on my flat, paying bills, and feeding a friend’s cats.

Works in Progress

i guess that i could get crazy now baby

I’ve spent most of the afternoon rushing around the house, MC5’s Kick Out the Jams buzzing through my head. I imagine it’s going to be something of a theme song during April – it’s certainly what I plan on listening to every morning this week (although I’ll probably cheat and cycle through the innumerable cover versions out there for variety). I’ve been looking forward to April since the start of the year – one way or another, it’s been the month where I get to try and reclaim my groove as a writer of fiction rather than theory. The current plan for the coming month: Do a whole mess of rewrites that have been piling up, then get the stories submitted The problem with coordinating thesis writing and everything else isn’t finding the time to get drafts done – it’s finding the time to do the polishes and redrafting that transform those first drafts into something worthwhile. Over the last

Works in Progress

This Post in Bullet Points

Off to the Gold Coast again today, in order to learn how to be a PhD student. One might think that after so many years I’d have worked out how by now, but one would be mistaken (said without snark – there’s been a gear-shift in the process recently, and I’m the kind of driver who grinds gears until someone points out the various ways that’s a bad idea). Finally made it to the post-office during work hours yesterday, which meant I could pick up some of the packages of awesomeness waiting for me (a copy of Couch, courtesy of Ben Francisco, and copies of both Cory Doctrow’s Overclocked and a collection of Hugo award winners courtesy of Jason Fischer – thanks to both of you, for they were awesome things to discover). Reason my thesis leaves me a funk #29: I haven’t actually finished and submitted a *new* story (as opposed to resubmitting something that’s already been out) since

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Mental Reset – Day Three

I have but to rearrange the folder archive of my writing files (to better distinguish between “do now” projects and “percolating for ideas” projects) and tidy up some boxes, then the study is done. Not complete, for there are still projects that remain long-term on the organising front (filing cabinet, wardrobe full of crap), but done enough that I know what needs to happen on all front. I have, however, sorted through seventeen decks of playing cards and tossed those that are no longer complete. I also found a movie ticket for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film that I felt the need to archive once upon a time. No, not the recent one; I’m talking about the first one. Both the ongoing projects list and the very next thing that needs doing lists are getting out of control, but I should be able to burn through the majority of the entries over the weekend. Still,  I move onward to

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Continuing the mental Cntr-Alt-Del

It’s day two of the great purge-and-reset, and I’m yet to get out of the office. Twelve straight hours of sorting files and making mental notes on projects yesterday (which proved surprisingly exhausting) and I’m finally down to the last box of lost papers/books and a two-drawer desk-caddy that’s got loose papers in it. I figure I’ll have the study finished tonight, then it’s on to the bedroom. Oh, the things that have been tossed out over the last twenty-four hours. I’ve made seven trips to the bin thus far, each time loaded up with an arm-full of paperwork I no longer need, and what remains is still a pile large enough to animate and give sage advice to fraggles should it so desire. Among the many things tossed out: tax records from 1995; hard-copy of seven chapters from a fantasy novel draft I’m pretty sure I didn’t write – I think it’s Sean’s, from back before I spooked him

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Because ambivalence wasn’t working for me…

So last night I ran down the list: – Feeling like there’s too much to do, yet doing nothing of note? Check. – Spawning new projects I just have to do because “they’re so damn cool” instead of finishing old projects? Check – Not sleeping? Check. – Avoiding blog-posting? Check. – Resurgence of interest in both wrestling and gaming, with a hyper-focus on my favourite wrestling-sim that often supersedes sleep and food*? Yeah, that’s there too; check. Yep, all the signs are there and my customary ambivalence in the face of things that stress me out remains ineffective. It’s time to hit the big old mental reset button and start reworking my to-do list from the ground up. I’ve given myself permission to do nothing but get my life in order for the next four or five days, ransacking the house room-by-room and establishing a workable model for getting done all the stuff I want done. A physical and mental