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pedantherI've been on long service leave for a month now. It's mostly consisted of doing not-very-much around the house; I've got a lot more reading done. I had ideas about starting new craft projects, or learning a musical instrument, or travelling to the city to catch up with people, or travelling somewhere farther afield, but none of them have really gone anywhere. Part of the problem is that I've always been bad at self-motivated scheduling; if I don't have a specific deadline or a specific event to co-ordinate with, if it doesn't particularly matter exactly when something gets done, then I can't decide when to do it, until either a deadline comes to the rescue or it's too late. (I'm the same with going to the cinema; if I'm really keen on a movie, I'll go in the first week, but if I'm not I'll keep going "maybe next week" until there's no next week, and I either go to one of the last showings or I realise that I can't make it to any of the last showings and I've missed my chance.)
There's a similar issue on the 'travelling farther afield' side, in that I don't know what to do with myself if I go to a new place on my own; I usually travel with people I know, or to visit people I know, or at least to attend a specific event, and every time I say to myself "I could go to (as it might be) New Zealand!", I don't have an answer to the follow-up question of "And do what?" When my long service leave was originally scheduled, the answer to "And do what?" was going to be Wellington Worldcon, but we all know what happened then.
I abandoned this post for a bit to write a different one on the subject of "I've got a lot more reading done", and after I posted it, it occurred to me that the self-motivated scheduling issue is also visible in my blog posting history: I've got a regular routine going with the monthly log posts, and the monthly reading challenges have enough structure that I want to keep providing progress updates, and from time to time there will be specific events like a theatre production, but whenever I think about writing something about more general life events, I always think "I can do that later" and then later never happens.
Oh, one other thing I have achieved with my first month of long service leave: I used the start of it as a push (specific event again, see) to start doing 750 Words again. Mostly I've just been writing down what I did during the preceding day; I'd hoped I'd get more blog posts out of it, but the journal is a lot of "then I did this and then I did this" that's barely interesting even to me, so I'd have to go back through it and pick out the interesting bits, and (all together now) I Can Do That Later. It does seem to be starting to have some effect on my ability to get things written, though; I wrote a quite a long (for me) review on StoryGraph recently, and I suspect this blog post would never have been written if I hadn't had this morning's 750 words to get me warmed up.
There's a similar issue on the 'travelling farther afield' side, in that I don't know what to do with myself if I go to a new place on my own; I usually travel with people I know, or to visit people I know, or at least to attend a specific event, and every time I say to myself "I could go to (as it might be) New Zealand!", I don't have an answer to the follow-up question of "And do what?" When my long service leave was originally scheduled, the answer to "And do what?" was going to be Wellington Worldcon, but we all know what happened then.
I abandoned this post for a bit to write a different one on the subject of "I've got a lot more reading done", and after I posted it, it occurred to me that the self-motivated scheduling issue is also visible in my blog posting history: I've got a regular routine going with the monthly log posts, and the monthly reading challenges have enough structure that I want to keep providing progress updates, and from time to time there will be specific events like a theatre production, but whenever I think about writing something about more general life events, I always think "I can do that later" and then later never happens.
Oh, one other thing I have achieved with my first month of long service leave: I used the start of it as a push (specific event again, see) to start doing 750 Words again. Mostly I've just been writing down what I did during the preceding day; I'd hoped I'd get more blog posts out of it, but the journal is a lot of "then I did this and then I did this" that's barely interesting even to me, so I'd have to go back through it and pick out the interesting bits, and (all together now) I Can Do That Later. It does seem to be starting to have some effect on my ability to get things written, though; I wrote a quite a long (for me) review on StoryGraph recently, and I suspect this blog post would never have been written if I hadn't had this morning's 750 words to get me warmed up.
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Date: 2024-09-17 06:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-27 03:32 pm (UTC)it also me.