Wednesday, October 04, 2006
A stitch in time
Oh dear, my life as a blogger seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent weeks. First I spent a week in Lithuania for a travel feature, and then I have had to get to grips with starting my part-time MA on top of my usual work as a journalist. The MA is brilliant and I know I should give it my all. The bare minimum required involves writing 15 pages every three weeks, plus regular presentations, reading, essays and a dissertation.
Having so much to do is threatening to paralyse me. Every moment I should be (a)meeting journalism deadlines, (b)selling more journalism to keep money coming in, (c)writing my 15 pages for three weeks' time and doing associated reading, (d)sorting out all the endless household and car rubbish like taking the car for its MOT and buying toothpaste and orange juice, and (e)working out at the gym. But all I am doing is short spurts of work, heavily interspersed with surfing Journobiz, emailing and now, writing this. And typically, the still-grinding ear-shattering screech of the chainsaw on the building site outside my study is seeping under my skin. I just can't seem to focus.
It's not really that I have too much to do, because I tend to work quickly and never miss deadlines (too scared of failure). I just keep thinking there is too much to do, and the factI am not getting on with it, calmly ticking off task by task, but rather oversleeping and changing into pyjamas before sunset, is getting me more and more grumpy.
Having so much to do is threatening to paralyse me. Every moment I should be (a)meeting journalism deadlines, (b)selling more journalism to keep money coming in, (c)writing my 15 pages for three weeks' time and doing associated reading, (d)sorting out all the endless household and car rubbish like taking the car for its MOT and buying toothpaste and orange juice, and (e)working out at the gym. But all I am doing is short spurts of work, heavily interspersed with surfing Journobiz, emailing and now, writing this. And typically, the still-grinding ear-shattering screech of the chainsaw on the building site outside my study is seeping under my skin. I just can't seem to focus.
It's not really that I have too much to do, because I tend to work quickly and never miss deadlines (too scared of failure). I just keep thinking there is too much to do, and the factI am not getting on with it, calmly ticking off task by task, but rather oversleeping and changing into pyjamas before sunset, is getting me more and more grumpy.
# posted by Olivia @ 12:01 pm 
