the more things change, the more they stay the same

Wow! I've been doing a heck of a lot of writing in the past few days. Do you see what happens when you're forced to produce? Okay, forced isn't really the right word because no one held a gun to my head to make me write. I made the choice. All by myself. By making the choice it brings back memories of procrastination and waiting until the last possible minute to get things done.

Stacie and I were swapping stories the other day about how we were - and still are - procrastinators. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? Seriously though, we both agreed that we are most productive when we've pushed ourselves to the end and simply must get whatever it is done right then. Take, for example, when we were in school. Book reports? Presentations? How long ahead of time did teachers tell us these projects were due? Maybe a month or so. Where were we the night before the due date? Working on our reports/presentations. Why? Because the one time (for both of us, ironically) that we actually planned ahead and started working on stuff we spent the entire time analyzing, worrying, changing, etc. to the point of not getting the A we knew we would have gotten had we waited to the last possible minute.

Well, some things never change it seems.

This past weekend I had no less than a dozen things I planned to accomplish. Let's take a look at some of what did, and did not, get done.

Laundry: All but one load washed, none put away.
House cleaning: Didn't even attempt it.
Paying bills: If I don't get off my ass and do them, the creditors are gonna start shutting me down.
Balancing the checkbook: (see paying bills)
Grocery shopping: Not until Sunday afternoon and only because we didn't have anything to make lunches with this week.
Paperwork: I really need to find some house documents. Maybe if the room I keep them in wasn't so disorganized I'd have found them by now.
PAT meeting prep: I'm on a policy committee for the school. Tonight is our second meeting, the one where we come with our suggestions on what we'd like to see in the new policies. I still haven't reviewed the documents from the last meeting - two weeks ago.
Appointments: I have so many appointments I have to make, but aside from having the time to actually keep the appointments I haven't taken the time to make them.
Taking down the Halloween decorations: Yeah, that'll probably happen when it's time to put up the Christmas stuff.

And I even had an extra hour to do it all in. Ugh!