Here is the odd thing about getting behind… no, this is not a dating column. Get out of here you pervert! Oh, but if you learn anything useful check back.
The odd thing about getting behind is how it feels trying to catch up. Last year, right before we completely crapped out on this blog for a couple of months, we only partially crapped out on it. Nathan was keeping up ok, but I was having issues getting things done. Then when I got everything caught up, Nathan hadn’t taken the time to get some stuff in reserve, and of course, I had spent all my time trying to catch up. We got behind again, and I decided to fill in the missing days with articles that I wrote that I never posted, and then take all the drafts we had in the draft section and turn them into full posts. I called it “Operation: CTFU.” C means “Catch.”
As I write this, it is the last day of January 2011. It is one of my many checkpoints throughout the year. While I was at work yesterday, it was actually the halfway point of the first ten-weeks, which is also a checkpoint. Needless to say, I evaluated my situation, and I’m very much behind. So I set myself some goals for today to get certain things caught up. These were also based on another set of checkpoints, which are our Thursday night meetings.
I decided to somewhat cut my losses for January for now. I figured it was more important to get on task now than to worry about what didn’t get done before. I thought, “I’ll just spend eight hours working on things today, and eight hours each day.. I’ll spend thirty minutes on each of the separate tasks I’m juggling, and I’ll gradually get caught up by being on task.” It didn’t really work that way though.
The funny thing is that all the tasks that I should have spent thirty and a half hours on each in January, just weren’t going to get caught up in a half an hour today. I couldn’t help but to think after thirty minutes of work on a task that didn’t accomplish a whole lot that if I would have just worked on it a little at a time over the last month, then a half hour would have been sufficient. I would have so much done already that I would only need a half hour to maintain forward momentum, not to try to get moving forward in the first place.
It’s something to really consider next time you feel like procrastinating. How useful is forward momentum as opposed to trying to get going? I read often about the importance of small goals, mini-goals. The big goals come into focus with the completion of the small goals. I need to write a song with that as a hook, and give it a really catchy hook, so I always remember it.