grammar whore

i thought i’d say a bit more about the lost feeling i mentioned yesterday. like i said then, i’m a smart person with a lot of interests, a half-renovated house, and a very full toybox. each day is shorter than i want it to be and i never accomplish all the things i want to do.

and yet, i spend a lot of my time doing nothing. some of my activities are entirely passive: i watch tv. i watch jef play video games. i read other people’s blogs about productivity, for christ’s sake.

i also have the habit of thinking about doing things, rather than actually doing them. when i was younger, i got more satisfaction out of planning than doing. probably some perfectionism going on there. that’s getting better, and now i would much rather get on with the doing than just mentally masturbate over it.

still, despite my long list of things to do—things that i really enjoy, things that are right there, things that need to be done—i find myself slowing down after just a short burst of activity. my brain goes blank. i don’t feel any desire about anything. it’s sorta zen, i guess, and completely uncomfortable. it makes me feel like life is passing me by.

according to my counselor, this is because i grew up in an underachieving family and have already accomplished more than they ever taught me to expect from life. my parents didn’t model for me a productive life full of growth and learning. so while i can imagine what i want, i’m not quite sure how to get there, and i just … run down.

i’d like to change this. i’d like to be able to schedule a full day for myself and know that i’ll actually do it all. i’d like to be able to turn my brain off and just plow through a bunch of doing and not look up til it’s all done.

i had the idea to start small. so i might make a list of five or six 5-minute tasks, and then plan a time to do them all in order without stopping. (it seems like i really lose traction during transitions from one activity to the next.) eventually, i’d like to be able to go steady for several hours without needing to veg. thirty minutes seems like an appropriate place to start.

i’m a pretty smart person, so why is it so hard for me to get through the day without some serious mental-energy issues? who knows. but i recently made three changes in my life that save me a LOT of time each day… therefore giving me more empty time in which to get tired/bored/lost.

1. set all my email accounts to run through gmail
i have at least five email addys—the real personal one, the online spammy personal one, the one from my old employer, the freelancer one, the online spammy freelancer one, and probably a couple others. because i was using dreamhost’s “spam assassin” feature, i couldn’t run all of them through entourage. so i would leave a browser window open and check my junk mail folder every few minutes. total PITA. now, everything runs through gmail, and i can use its omnipotent search capabilities too.

2. check my feeds, gmail, the weather, and the news through iGoogle
this is the big one. i used to mouse through my bookmarks every hour or so as a mental break looking for new blog entries. then once i was reading a blog, i’d get caught up in the archives for an embarrassingly long time. (have i ever mentioned that i spend much more time passively thinking than actually doing anything? it’s a family trait i’m trying to outrun.)

now in one glance i can see what’s new and worth reading. if there are no updates, i have to actually think of a reason to visit a blog. and really, that’s a lot of work, so i normally just skip it.

3. simplified the auto-pay on my bills
i’m a freelancer who spends more than she should, has erratic income, and yet wants to pay down debts and save as much as possible. all my bills were set up to be paid automatically from my checking account, and it was annoying to never be quite sure when they’d be withdrawn or how much exactly i would need in my accounts.

i simplified everything (and got rid of my worrying) in three steps:

• any bill that can be charged to a credit card now goes to my amazon card, which i pay off every month.
• any bill that has to come from a bank account (the utilities and my student loan) now goes to my savings account.
• i decided how much i’m willing to spend on food, gas, and other basic expenses, and am sticking to them.

now i can leave just a little money in my checking account and know that there won’t be any unexpected charges that put me below zero. this means i can send bigger payments to the credit card i’m paying down and leave the rest of my money in my high-interest savings account.

(edit: i’ve also started using yodlee moneycenter to centralize all my bill accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, and other things. it’s a great tool for seeing everything at a glance and staying on top of due dates and account activity.)
that’s an awful lot of mental energy freed up. what on earth am i going to do with it?

all the cool kids are doing it, so i am too: i’m putting together a list of 101 goals for myself, to be completed in 1,001 days. so far i only have about 40 goals, but that’s okay. here they are, censored a bit for privacy… Read the rest of this entry »

of course, “post to my blog” wasn’t one of my new year’s resolutions. that would have been too easy to give up. neither was “get over my caffeine addiction.” but here i am doing both of those things.

i used to drink three cans of diet coke a day. then six. then i started drinking coffee in an effort to drink less diet coke. so now i drink lots of both. i’m a bit tired of it all, which is shocking since i really do enjoy the daily countdown-to-headache.

but this morning, it just had to be chai … chai and excedrin.
here’s a bit of fun: how much of your favorite drink would it take to kill you?

clicky clicky.