I failed to meet my three week deadline for completing the laundry list. Why did I fail?
Quite simply, I had other priorities. Its hard to recall all the activities that I deemed
more important over the last three weeks, but I can assure you that there were a lot of movies
and games in there. Now the important question is what I am to do about it. I said that I
would hold myself accountable, but simply setting a deadline doesn’t qualify. There have to
be consequences for failure.
I feel a shallow shame for missing my deadline. I let myself down, but it doesn’t feel that
serious. I’ve lost touch with the motivation behind the endeavor. This should feel like
a betrayal of that motivation, but losing the connection to it destroyed the causal relationship.
The great tragedy in this is that I am now missing the power of that causal relationship.
Success promotes further success. This failure is a setback.
I’m going to make the consequences of this failure as simple and effective as possible. I
have a number of projects in flight at all times. Currently I have the laundry list, GRE studies,
various programming projects, Left 4 Dead level design and testing, three movies en route from Netflix,
and this blog to tend to, amongst other things. That is quite a lot to fill my time. Apparently
I value the movies and games/level design most, because that’s all that I’ve accomplished over the last week.
Next to spending ample time with my greatest distraction of course!
So, in order to promote getting shit done I’m going to revert back to basic disciplinary methods.
I’m grounding myself from the above activities until the laundry list is complete. After that
I’m going to schedule a dedicated time each week for attending to these less valued demands on my time.
This is time management 101 and, frankly, I’m embarrassed to be here.