I am really a very lazy person.
This may not always be apparent to the casual observer because they may see me at work, where I am very focused and willing to help out with anything. Of course, I am getting paid to do that, and doing things makes the day go fast, plus I have been raised with the deeply ingrained Midwestern work ethic that seems to perplex the rest of the country. However, once I leave work things are very different. It is absolutely astounding to me how many simple tasks I will put off forever just because I don’t particularly feel like doing them. I manage to get myself distracted and focused on something completely unrelated.
Usually this situation is cleaning related. Oh God do I hate the cleaning, although I have been much better about it of late. Lately, the issue has been some of the personal projects that I am doing just for fun. For example, I had planned to develop a regular schedule for writing to help train myself to write on demand and thus have plenty of new material to edit through and separate into the blog pile and the “Huh, that’s pretty good, so I should keep working on it and submit it to a magazine” pile. I also intended to be farther into my Diplomacy server programming as well. Now, in the latter case, I think the delay worked out for the best, but with the writing its really kind of ridiculous to be so lazy about something I enjoy so much.
I have got a list of topics and outlines for essays I am in the process of writing, and I am looking forward to working on them. However, since they were a planned activity I somehow managed to avoid them by frivolously surfing the Internet when I got home today, and managed to get myself obsessed with learning to write shell scripts in Linux. Which went well, actually, as I just finished putting together a shell script that functions as a plugin for amaroK, the music library/player application I use on my Linux boot. It was a totally ridiculous thing to spend a lot of time doing, and I attribute it to laziness. I’m sure the reason that I got involved in that tonight was because I was procrastinating on those other more important projects and that is a little frustrating.
I’m not exactly sure how to correct this problem in myself, but I would welcome any suggestions. I’ll follow up with them as soon as I’m done with this game of Jade Empire, you know the fourth time through is always the best.