Prioritize.

Whenever I would get flustered about my homework, my mother would always advise me to “Plan [my] work, and work [my] plan.” At the time, that advice made about as much sense as anything the Sphinx said in Mystery Men. As I got older, I began to understand. No amount of tasks are insurmountable, but only one thing can be done at a time. If I allow myself to become disorganized or distracted, I may start fifteen projects and finish zero.

At work I find it useful when I have a lot of things to tackle to focus on those that are most urgent. I'll often e-mail a list to myself at the end of one day, denoting which goals I'd like to accomplish the following day. This was more effective when it was the only piece of unread mail bolded in my inbox, but most days I have 16-20 bolded messages reminding me of things I need to take care of. Taping actual notes to my monitor seems to be more effective, and the last few days it's been working well. Yesterday I actually completed everything on my list, and showed up prepared for a meeting today that I only had four days to prepare for, half the time I usually have. A deadline-sensitive field is not unlike outrunning the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark, however. I might reach a certain point in the cave but if I stop to rest, I'll be crushed. Even if I make it out of the cave, there may be a tribe of natives with poisonous darts waiting to chase me down. Yesterday I outran the boulder. Today I lay in the path of it.

I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to the initial creation of a catalog. It really shouldn't take more than three days, especially since catalog design is but one small facet of my responsibilities. With arguably the five hardest pages finished, the cover and first two spreads, I hoped to finish the remaining 19 pages today and move on to other things. I ran into a problem on the very first page I worked on this morning, when I realized I'd need to find a specific photograph, and that the search function was down on our image database. In hindsight I realize the EFFICIENT thing to do would have been to skip that page and come back to it when the search function was restored. Instead, stuck in harmful linear thinking, I couldn't move to page 7 until I designed page 6, and I spent the morning MANUALLY looking for the picture I wanted. By lunch I'd designed TWO out of the NINETEEN pages I wanted to get done today. And of course™, I came back from lunch to discover the problem with our database had been fixed.

After lunch and a few meetings, I noticed a sketch came through from one of my illustrators for a series of book jackets we were about to start working on. With the deadlines for the first book fast approaching, I decided to get the sketch approved by my editors before one went home for the day at 4:00. First I decided to work out a preliminary type treatment for the book, to show them with the sketches. A vortex, a cosmic anomaly, manifested itself in my cubicle and devoured time, and ten minutes later it was a quarter to six. I sent off the sketches and my type treatment, knowing I wouldn't have an answer until tomorrow, and decided to return to my catalog, to at least get that done before I left to vote. Already I knew I wasn't going to make it to gym tonight.

As I was about to work on page 8, I suddenly remembered something from the meeting after lunch, and realized I had to put together another book jacket for the issue I was currently working on. The design went relatively quickly, but driving home I decided to look back on the day and my productivity, or lack thereof. All I had to show for the entire day was a single spread from the catalog, one book jacket, and a type treatment for another jacket. I have my list of things to do tomorrow, but it includes all the things I DIDN'T do today. The boulder is bigger.

Hindsight is useful, provided one remembers prior experience. My job may seem boring to some, but I hope that writing about it will help me mentally organize, and face my list effectively tomorrow rather than foolishly. I must learn to prioritize, to recognize “I don't need to do that right now” and move on to other things. I really don't think there's a temporal anomaly that manifests itself in my vicinity.

On the other hand, it's almost midnight, and I haven't watched any of the movies I got today yet. I'm also wondering if I remembered to eat dinner...