Timing

Last week I wrote my first blog post for about 6 months, and as I was tapping away at the keyboard I told myself that I needed to get a blogging routine going, preferably to write something everyday.

The way to get any routine to feel natural is to to something every day for 21 days, so that when you do stop or miss a day you’re better inclines to start again, and the fact you missed out will feel unnatural to you.

So here we are, nearly a week later, and I have not bothered. I can put this partly down to awful timing on my part, this weekend just gone was a 14/48 weekend (you can read about that experience in an earlier blogpost of mine), and my hobbies seem to have suddenly got very emotional – A D&D campaign got far too deep and sad, I may go into that later, but at the moment the wound is too fresh – but mostly my lack of any writing issue to me having the planning abilities of a dead fish. A dead fish with a particularly busy week but who recently lost his diary.

I cannot honestly say that I haven’t tried to be more organised; I bought a planner, I have filled the planner up with things, and I keep it on me whenever I’m at work. But I suffer from one awful trait – I genuinely don’t care to remember what I write down. I wrote something down, followed everything up, repeatedly checked the diary and knew it was coming up…. and then didn’t bother doing it. And that doesn’t even go into the number of things I’ve done and not popped in the diary, or popped in the diary and missed, or just slept through.

The issue may not be that I plan poorly, more that I don’t prioritise my time and say ‘no’ to more people. I seem to allow my time and attention to be taken by almost any cause or event, to the point where I’ve devalued it. I feel that it may be best for me and my planning if I put things in order of importance, more than in calendar order – at least then I can feel bad for missing the big stuff and only not care about missing the useless things.

Of course, there is the third option that I just stop being useless and actually keep an active record of what I have planned and stick to it, but then I wouldn’t be able to moan about my natural inability to plan my own life.