Behind in every possible way…

Having fought a life-long battle against procrastination (and I blame educational mainstreaming for this – why start a report 8 weeks in advance if you can start writing it the evening beforehand, spend three hours on it, and still get an A?? This is why I really, really hated school…), I have been fairly well used to being behind most of the time. The only place where I’ve never really had to fight procrastination is work, and that may be because in most of the professional jobs I’ve had, there’s been so much work (worthwhile or otherwise) that there’s been no point in putting it off – or maybe I just don’t like being a slacker at work, I don’t know.

In any event, that’s beside the point. The first time it caught up to me was grad school, where I heard it described many times as feeling out like you started out a semester behind, and it only got worse from there.

But nothing, I repeat nothing, compares to the vortex of lateness that swallows you when you have a baby.

N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

The worst part is that you’re so tired at the end of the day that you tend to only do things that require little time and attention, and you put off the important things until later, when you can spend the time on them they require.

For me, this means that, for example, important e-mail/snail mail to people I love gets put aside for a later day if it’s something that’s going to take a while, and I’ve realized, now that Torsten is a whopping 7 months old, that “a later day” may well mean “never” if I don’t start doing something about it.

So I’ve decided to start with the e-mail queue. Three a day until I get through the backlog (or the apocalypse arrives, thus wiping out my inbox for me). JoAnna, Christie and Quisha, you’re first on the list. And if there’s not something in your inbox from me by, oh, say, tomorrow morning, you are allowed to beat me and/or tell embarrassing anecdotes about my youth as a guest blogger here.

If that doesn’t motivate me, I don’t know what will