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Thursday, March 12, 2015

Working Diligently

After discovering how bad my work procrastination habits have gotten, I have been trying hard to not get sucked into the Internet and to work diligently down my work to-do list.

This is hard. What is hard about it is that I have to constantly suppress a panicky anxiety of running out of things to do. I can see what I have accomplished already this month and can project ahead to know that if all the audits shake out right, I will be completely finished with the month's work by next Wednesday. Wednesday! A full two weeks before my next set of files is set to arrive.

I am not even working as diligently as I could. I spend at least an hour every morning doing what I like before settling in to work. I have also typed up a few posts and had some longish FB chat conversations. I am not pedal to the metal, here, and yet I will be finished soon enough.

What is different is that I am forcing myself to put in several hours long chunks in every day. I find myself constantly wanting to stop and pace the work. I start to think about how to procrastinate and I have to interrupt my internal dialogue to say explicitly to myself, "Yes, I know I am going to run out of tasks long before I run out of the month. This is okay. Do it anyway. Keep working."

I am practicing resisting my preferences. Ouch. While it is of no significant consequence here at work, I want to be able to begin to break my flighty work habits in order to have better discipline in other areas. I have to remind myself that I am not losing any playtime by concentrating on duty first. I'll have as much time as I always did without the looming deadline to hurry up and get finished.

Really, I'm going to have a lot of free time at work by the end of the month.

1 comment:

Joy said...

Anxiety over running out of things to do? I had to read that twice. Come on, you know you'll never run out of things to do ;-)