Not Enough Hours

Like just about everybody else, I often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I want to do. Short of jettisoning my internal clock with something like the 28-hour day (and I can see my lab’s circadian expert shuddering from here), the best I can do is try to manage the time I do have.

I’ve been trying to employ strategies like Getting Things Done with a decent measure of success, but every so often I have days like today where I realize it’s already twenty past eight, and I have barely gotten to the grand personal enrichment tasks I imagined this morning I’d get to today.

There’s the things that are outside of my control, like the extra behavioral tests I had to run in the lab this afternoon, and the horrendous traffic I encountered as a result of leaving later that tripled my commute. But I’m realizing that there’s a controllable part of the problem as well. I think that a lot of the personal projects I keep trying to push myself to tackle are a little bit too open-ended. I haven’t broken them down into small enough steps that I can look at and say, “Oh, I’ll get this part done today.”

Instead, there’s a gulf between “start” and “finish” that remorselessly consumes hours and excretes inertia, such that I can work on something a whole afternoon and not feel like I’ve gotten anywhere—or lose the motivation to start again, and waste the time mindlessly scrolling through Google Reader. Of course, this goes back to GTD and intelligently defining steps. I suppose I’ve just been failing at appropriately applying this to my side projects lately.

Oh, and before you say “Why didn’t you work on some of those things instead of blogging about it?” writing a post was one of my goals for today, so nyah.