Life was easier, more a matter of black and white, back when I divided the world in two. That whole duality thing has quite a bit to recommend it, but it doesn't help me much at all.
But maybe it would, if I used it.
Instead of that, though, I'm currently all about splitting my activities into three. An effect of this, of course, is that it makes me more miserable, but that may explain its attraction. In any case, here goes: how I divide my actions into three and with what results and the nature of each.
When it comes to actions, those things most normal people do instead of just thinking about things, the most obvious and first is the smallest of the three: What I'm doing at any particular moment.
At any one time, rest assured, I am performing precisely one thing. There may be other things moving to some sort of completion in the background, but those were probably set in motion by me earlier and are either waiting for me to get back to them or humming along nicely without my interference or helpful assistance.
So, there's the thing I'm doing now, and that actually is what causes most of my problems because the remaining two categories are things I *should* be doing and things I *want* to do.
So here's the entire list, in handy bullet format:
- What I'm doing
- What I should be doing
- What I want to be doing
The number of things I should be doing is, frankly, pretty large, and it depresses me to even think about them. Worse, since I can attempt them and suffer the pain of failure, things in this category don't get acted on as often as you might think. Yep, the chance of success is probably even greater than the likelihood of failure and would not only lead to an accomplishment and getting something off the list, but would make me feel better. You would think that would be enough motivation for me, but you'd be wrong.
Anyway, whenever I'm doing something, I can't stop thinking about what I should be doing instead of what I'm currently involved with. If I'm doing something I want to do, I can't take as much joy in that as I should, because I'm always thinking about what else I could be doing.
I have no idea what any of this means, but in the meantime there's something I should be doing instead of writing this entry...
2 comments:
Perhaps you should be limited to only one thing per item.
If your list of Shoulds is longer than one for any given moment, should is breaking some laws or physics or something. After all, if you were doing something you should be doing, there's probably something else you should be doing too.
And the shoulds probably change from moment to moment. So if item number one goes on long enough, the "I should write out those checks" might be replaced with "I should clean up that dog vomit."
Maybe you're looking at the shoulds as coulds ... and that's a very long list (but probably populated with lots of stuff your shouldn't be doing and won't be doing and couldn't be doing).
That's a good point about only having one "should." The fact of the matter, though, is that even though there's only one most important thing to be doing at any given moment, there's a lot of shit that piles up in that category for me.
The dog vomit can wait, and sometimes does, but it's on the list and in the group until I deal with it.
Then again, if I only have one thing I should be doing, then I'd need to create a new category (Misc?) and I've learned that Misc stuff NEVER gets done. It's my black hole for filing.
And then I'd need to write a new post, about the four categories!
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