I can’t decide whether or not to stop dithering

You need to take productivity seriously if you want to get anywhere. Inspiration is 47% perspiration and 50% reading lifehacking blogs and 62% planning and 89% planning and that adds up to 100% awesome. Trust me, my mom was a math teacher. Follow those simple tips and you will make friends, succeed professionally, lose weight, feel confident, and stop crying yourself to sleep at night under the weight of a despair that sits squarely in the center of your chest like a cat-shaped stone gargoyle sucking your breath away.

I’ve taken to writing on notecards. I have one stack where every card lists one of my Big Things - things I’ve committed to writing or reading or doing for myself or someone else. They’re all in a stack so I can forget them. I have another stack made up of my to-do lists for the day. I made one for each day of the week. I write down what I should do for the day. At the end of the day I review the note card for today and for tomorrow. I cross off everything I got done today. I transfer unfinished tasks to the next day’s card. If I finish everything on my card during the day, I move on to the next day’s card.

So I’m pretty great, clearly. My work life’s admirably organized; nothing can go wrong and success is sure to follow. But the deviled egg’s in the details. Actually I like deviled eggs so that doesn’t really work. Note to self: spend 45 minutes trying to revise this paragraph.

Note cards can only take me so far. (I initially mis-typed that as “can only take me far” which is a pretty good typo. It sounds like I don’t want to go far, I want to go incredibly fucking distant like the stars or something so that the light bouncing off of me takes 10 minutes to reach you Earthbound mortals. To be clear, I don’t really want to go far, I want to stay home.) Note cards are only as good as the person writing and reading them: me. The tasks on the cards are at best moderately important, even within the narrow circumscribed sense of importance that defines almost all of my life. Because obviously ultimately almost none of this really matters, and short of ultimately as well - in five years time the minutia of my day to day will be lost in a fog of “what have I done with my life?!” Actually it’ll probably be more like five weeks time. But it would be only five DAYS time if not for the wonder of my note cards. That’s right, you heard it here first, organization defers a feeling of existential pointlessness! You can stick that in your ennui and smoke it.

Where was I? I forget. In the middle of something pointless, I’m sure. Oh yeah. Note cards. These note cards are keeping me slightly more on task than usual (moron task than usual? hmm) but the task they are not very pressing which leads to my problem. Well, one of my many problems, really, but happily (ish) it’s a small problem for once, though as I think of it now it’s probably the result of a big problem. Oh god. Don’t panic, just focus on the minutia.

See the thing is the stuff on these notecards all matters about the same, so it’s hard to prioritize. The result: dithering. I dither over whether I’d better something something, word that rhymes with slither. I read an article about this recently. The smaller the difference between two options, the harder the choice because the difference to be weighed requires great precision to measure. That can take more time and time spent is easily mistaken for a sign of importance, which makes the choice harder to make.

I think I may also have a bit of directed attention fatigue, which is when the brain gets tired and has trouble concentrating or making decisions or thinking. So yeah. The dithers, they infest me. I get out of it by rolling dice. Or I would, if I had any dice. Really I have the internet roll dice for me. There are 13 items on my list today. Hmm. That’s unlucky. (Actually there are twelve because “personal writing” is on the list and I am about to cross that off because this counts. By the way I initially typoed that as “this cunts.” I sincerely apologize that my typos are so shitfuckpissingly vulgar. With twelve steps remaining I now feel like I should begin by denying something, isn’t that required for success in all 12 step processes? I think I read that somewhere but I’m not sure because brain is tired, think is hard.) So I just googled “random number generator” and put in the lower number as 1 and the upper number as 12 and I clicked the generate number button and … can you feel the tension building as I delay the reveal with that ellipse? I am working on being a better writer - well, I am telling myself that I want to be a better writer and occasionally using that aspiration to kick myself for falling short and occasionally using the phrase “I am working on being a better writer” to congratulate myself as a comfort against the darker thoughts that crop up unwelcome so often - and it seems to me that building tension is part of writing better. I’m pretty sure that’s right, I read it in a book and the book was by a writer, and who better than a writer when it comes to knowing better how to be a better writer? I may start being rude to strangers in public too because it always makes me tense when someone else does that, and anything for the sake of the writer’s craft, right? I don’t really understand how it is supposed to work, but I am credulous. Especially with my tired brain.

The number randomly generated was 1. Tension: released. Literary enjoyment: produced. (Just checking, I’m right that it’s bad form to ask “was it good for you” regardless of context, right? But is it worse or better form to just assert “it was good for you”? Is this the kind of thing covered in etiquette guides? I’ve never read one. I figure that on the one hand my inclination to avoid conflict approximates close enough to manners that I’m probably fine and that on the other hand my inclination to think I’m terrible means I would just use the etiquette book to find small infractions I’ve been committing for years and so to conclude that I’m terrible and also petty for even worrying about it and on the other other hand - your hand, I guess, you don’t mind holding this for a moment do you? - I’m also petty enough that I would find small infractions others have committed that I previously didn’t know were infractions and then I’d be all offended, and then I’d feel terrible again (or, still) as I realized once more how petty I can be. So in short etiquette guides are yet another trap.)

I just crossed “personal writing” off my list and am now starting on task #1, which is to work on a piece of work related writing so dull it does not merit mention.

1. That’s a bit anticlimactic, I could have just started at the top of my list. Oh well. I wonder if there’s a lesson in that if I think more about it. Should I think more about it? I can’t decide. Maybe I’ll go get myself a cup of coffee. Maybe not.