Schedules and things I don’t want to do

In general, I’m pretty organized and disciplined. (Stop laughing, all of you…) I make schedules and to-do lists and put reminders into my phone. In spite of this, and perhaps, at least a little bit, because of it, I am also singularly good at putting off things I really don’t want to do.* Most of you, I’m sure, have to-do lists that look like mine and you know that there are always a million things to do. Usually 999,999 of them get completed within a reasonable time frame, but that last one can get dragged along for quite a long time before you realize that it is the one thing that you only really allotted 2 hours for each week, and then you somehow filled those up with other projects that really, truly, needed that extra 30 minutes each to stay on track.

I’ve realized that often this happens with projects that I’m not sure how best to get done, or where I need help but am hesitant to ask for it. Sometimes it happens when someone else has dropped the ball and I’m overwhelmed at the possibility of picking up all the slack. Sometimes it’s both of those things plus some other stuff. Whatever the situation is, it invariably leaves me feeling vaguely irritable. Sadly, there is no way to get rid of the irritable feeling without doing something. Generally that something is work… on the abandoned project… until it’s done…

Here it goes…

*I know that at least some of the commas in this sentence have to be wrong, but I don’t know which ones. To those of you who care, I am so sorry… And please, let this apology carry through the entirety of this post which is filled with a unique combination of appropriate and inappropriate commas.