Time is a Tickin'

Time is a Tickin’ (Photo credit: im elsewhere)

I began this post on Monday morning.

I attempted to finish it on Tuesday afternoon, while waiting for a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t get very far.

I spent yesterday working on my weekly podcast … and then trying to finish a freelance post that should have been done two weeks ago.

As you can see, time management is not my forte.

It wasn’t always this way. I was a productive, working member of society for a good twenty years — capable of managing projects on time and under budget. I expected that I would take motherhood in stride.

I was wrong.

Oh, there have been periods over the last 17 years when  I thought I had everything under control. The gymnastics era was especially productive for me: Although I was forced to be out of the house for big blocks of time while she trained, the hours of waiting around forced my imagination to work overtime. That was when I did my best writing, without feeling guilty about all the housework that wasn’t getting done while I was with my kid at the gym.

She quit gymnastics four years ago, and I have been flailing about ever since. And lately, it’s gotten worse.

For some reason, everything now just takes me longer. I cannot accurately estimate the time I should devote to a task. Writing a blog post used to be a pretty simple matter, but now I find myself worrying about SEO practices, finding good outbound links, creating descriptive tags, selecting appropriate images, editing video if I shot it, tweeting out links and writing Facebook updates…

…and I am responsible for more than one blog.

I am not doing any of it well. And it’s frustrating.

I have worked all day today on a MOMocrats post that is really just a bunch of quotes from others. It should have taken about an hour to write. It’s not done.

Instead, I’ve been distracted by breaking news, correspondence, site administration, and the realization that BlogHer is in two weeks (which means I need to get my butt in action).

I signed up for the annual 5K Run (which in my case, will be a walk). And found two partners to do it with.

But for months now, I’ve done very little of the kind of writing that prompted me to attend BlogHer in the first place. And it makes me sad.

The other day on Facebook, my friend Julie posted an article about ADHD in girls. And reading it, I wondered if I might actually have an adult case of it: I feel perpetually scattered, I constantly lose things… and I’ve felt mentally fuzzy for the two months I’ve been off caffeine; a disconcerting feeling I’ve been unable to shake. Maybe the structure of my previous occupations kept me in check? And now that my daughter doesn’t even need me to drive her to school, I’ve lost all semblance of structure and so I keep drifting off-task and topic…

Or it could just be that I spend too much time on Facebook (an occupational hazard for the type of social media type stuff I have been engaged in now for years).

But maybe it’s just the fact that I don’t have a lot of time to sit and think. When everything is boom boom boom, deadline, deadline, get here and then go there and then the family is home and it’s time to shift to making dinner… It’s all too fast. And I miss those long, long, afternoons sitting in a hot gymnasium, feeling bored while my daughter trained.

I wrote some of my best posts that way.

I keep thinking of ways to try to build in some time to do as little as possible (and hopefully, get my creative juices flowing again). But I have too many obligations, too many deadlines, too many things I should be doing that never get done.

Time management  #FAIL .

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