Jeremy C Kester

What am I doing? I am serious, what the hell am I doing?

A lot has been happening in my life these last few weeks and in a lot of ways, much of my life has been a blur. It’s especially apparent after missing a promised date to return feedback to a person I offered help to, I miss a target release date on a short story, I miss 4 days on my writing goal in the last 16 days (2 of them because I was sick), I haven’t edited much of anything in over a month, and I am now on nearing 2 months since posting anything of substance on my blog. Time is flying by me while I chug on without understanding that I am missing these things until it is too late.

It’s like my brain is continuing to be distracted despite my belief that I have been gaining focus.

The truth is, I’ve just gotten very good at taking that little bit of focus I had before all this and *cough* focusing it on a singular task.

In a way, that was what I needed. I needed to prove to myself that I could manage to write over 1000 words a day with little risk of failure. In fact, in the 172 days since getting my goal over 1000 words a day, I’ve only missed that goal 7 times. That’s a 96% success rate. Good, right?

Yet, in my last blog post of any substance, It’s Also What I Am Not Doing, I pointed out what truly has shown to be a lot of my problem: there’s a lot I am not doing!

But not the entertainment stuff, like I was trying to point out in that post. No, it’s the important stuff that I am missing and haven’t been talking about. Nor have I been doing anything about it.

That’s gotta change.

I have to be capable of managing my actions to a greater extent than what I have been. Particularly as I have been proving that I am not improving so much as diverting from disaster.

What I need is a plan. And patience. Patience with myself to slip and fall as I work through this. Indeed… patience.

Surprisingly (or not depending on your perspective), I end up almost blanking out for periods of time each day. Sometimes it’s mindlessly looking through social media while not making any interactions. Other times it’s as simple as staring mindlessly at something. Often for only a few minutes at a time, yet, those few minutes makes a major impact to my productivity. And to my life.

What ends up happening is that the thing I wanted to do on Monday doesn’t get done because – wait – it’s Friday already? No? Wait… Wednesday of the following week? Damn.

Days slip by almost without my even noticing, and while I have been writing a bunch (more than I ever had), it is amazing the sheer amount of things that have been getting past me.

I need a self-review. I need a deep look into what I’ve been doing each day and how that impacts my life and what I’ve been doing each day.

Maybe then I can make some real changes. Instead of being a continued victim to my own habits.