The Mess

I have nothing to do. Well that's not true--I have tons to do. Well that's not true either. I have a lot of stuff that is my responsibility to complete, but I have nothing that neeeeeeds to be done this minute. This is a bad place to be and I am usually quite diligent about not getting to this place, because it is incredibly difficult to get anything done when nothing neeeeeds to be done. Then stuff waits and spider solitare is mastered once more and pretty soon there's a bunch of stuff that needed to be done yesterday and I'm all stressed out. The opposite of nothing needs to be done right now is no fun--no fun at all and to be avoided at great cost--even dare I say, at the cost of giving up my dream of being a master of spider solitare.

I have a strategy to get out of I have nothing to do. Make a list is the first stategy, but I have a list from last week that didn't get done yet and nothing on it neeeeds to get done. Another very effective strategy is to clean. When you clean and straigten and organize, you find those things that neeeed to be done, if only to make something cleaner and more organized. That would be a good thing right now, if only I didn't have spider solitare a few keystrokes away. Sometimes a good bribe comes in handy at this point--if you clean your office, I'll let you have a little bag of cheese its (that I usually allow myself every day about 10 a.m. anyway, but might not allow myself since it is now so close to lunch), but I already ate them while typing this blog, so that won't work.

Another strategy is to just do it. Just stand up and get it done. As I get older, that strategy works less and less. I tell myself--just do ittttttttttttttt. I make it echo in my head like an anouncer at a sports event. And then I silently mock myself by just sitting there. I'm so easily amused.

My final strategy and I hesitate to go to this length, is to enlist the assistance of someone else to light a fire under me. I recently told a co-worker not to let me leave the building until I completed a project we were working on. He completely failed at his mission. I used to have secretary who I would ask to come into my office and make a list for me and then as I was making the lists, we'd put time limits on things. That worked for a little while, but my current secretary is mean when I don't make a made up time limit and I have no patience for that. So that doesn't work. No I'm not ready to go to that extreme.

I think that I will play solitare until I win and then I will make a short list of things I would like to do today (including things I would not "like" to do, but perhaps should get done today) and then straighten just the main part of my desk and clear a walkway to it. That's a great plan--I should just do ittttttttttttt. (echo added).