On Attention Management
There are certain things I'm obsessed with at different times. Right now these two things are (1) television and (2) time/attention management.
I try to tell people (ie, my parents) that I am having difficulty managing my attention but they see this as contradictory to the fact that I make time to watch Pushing Daisies, 30 Rock, and Terminator. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The things that should have my attention are the things that I value. If I value television then watching television is not a poor use of my time and attention. And I do value television, and one of my many career aspirations is to be a television writer (another is to be a television journalist, and another is to be a football-playing king in space, with a moustache). Pouring my energy into a Shakespeare paper that I will not get a particularly good grade on and that will only cause more stress is a poor use of my time and attention. However, what must be done must be done.
In any case, I'm not claiming to be an attention-management guru of any sort. There are certain problems with my attention management. I have a tendency to fall into the following pattern:
(1) know that a thing is bad
(2) do that thing anyway, and feel no remorse as I do it
(3) immediately after I have done it, realize what a poor choice it has been, and feel tremendously ashamed of myself
(4) resolve not to do it again, repeat from step one
This applies to two main areas in my life. One is nutrition. There's right now an empty Dr. Pepper bottle on my desk. Right now I have 250 calories, 64 grams of sugar, 68 mg of caffeine, and -1 dollar and a much lower level of self esteem. What the hell drove me to want that Dr. Pepper? I don't even like Dr. Pepper that much.
The other area, of course, is time/attention management. I made some really stupid decisions today. Last night I gave up on the paper and decided to work on it in the morning, setting the alarm for 7:30. The alarm went off and then I decided to give myself another half hour in bed, despite the fact that I knew I would not get any useful sleep in that period. 8:00 rolled around and I still did not want to get up. I gave myself another 45 minutes in bed! And then I woke up at 8:45 and realized that if I was going to finish the paper, I would need to skip work that afternoon. I cost myself the opportunity to earn money! What on earth is wrong with me? At this stage, what I should have done was resolved to work through lunch (I wasn't hungry, I had a big breakfast) but instead I hung out at lunch and made more poor nutritional choices. Eventually I got the paper done, but at the cost of the other work I needed to do today, but still haven't done because I've been dicking around on Twitter and watching Fringe (which deserves my attention and is finally starting to reach the potential I saw in the pilot, but isn't urgent) and now I'm blogging about my poor attention management today.
I want to get back into the blogging habit. Seriously. Over the past day I have had a craving to blog about things and it's resulted in an increase in the number of posts on my livejournal. And so what I'm going to be doing, hopefully every day or every couple of days until I decide I don't need to anymore, is making time to blog about the poor choices I've made in terms of time and attention management. I am hoping that will help me to more easily identify what I'm consistently doing wrong. I'm also probably going to blog about particularly horrendous nutritional choices that I make but that's not going to be the primary focus.
Bottom line is here. What were the poor choices I made today? I chose to lay around in bed when I knew that my early morning time was too precious to spend lying around in bed when I wasn't going to sleep. I chose the ability to goof around in Ray over the money I could have earned by going to work. I chose to watch two episodes of Fringe rather than read Measure for Measure. What will I do better in the next couple of days? I'm going to set my alarm clock and get my ass out of bed. I'm going to take it easy tomorrow afternoon so that I'm ready to get things done on Saturday. And I am going to report back with my progress.
If I don't write a follow-up post about this tomorrow night, then poke me. Because I'm either misdirecting my attention or lying dead somewhere. And frankly, I'm beginning to think that the one isn't so different from the other.
(By the by, I want to apologize for how raw this post is. I promise not to make it a habit. I could have polished it, but... well, I really felt like my attention would be better used elsewhere.)
