Friday, May 26, 2006

Priorities

I remember this one episode of Gilmore girls where Rory's spazzy room mate introduces her boyfriend who lost a bet and had to speak in cliches the whole day. That's quite difficult, although I did find a website that purportedly has 3300 cliches on it. Overused that they are, sometimes, they ring very true.

When they said "it doesn't rain, it pours", they weren't kidding.

It really does.

In the last weeks, I've had to deal with an amazing array of issues. Some were work related, some were health related, some were family related and some were future related. All required my attention at the same time. And sometimes there really was the feeling that I had horses tied to each one of my limbs and they were all threatening to run off in different directions.

Multi tasking works most of the time- for spurts, it's fine. Not for these long drawn issues that don't really have easy solutions. So, sometimes I deal by crying, sometimes I deal by being super-efficient, sometimes I deal by wanting to throw things against the wall, sometimes I deal by just shopping. Sometimes, I just don't deal at all.

The advice I've been getting range from being useful to utterly useless. Especially things like "don't worry", "things will sort themselves out", "don't think about it". Ok, you try that. I think the best piece of advice I got recently, as cliched as it sounds, is "one thing, one step at a time". And while my automatic hackles started to rise at the sheer platitude-ness of the statement, it occurred to me that it made sense.

I did have to deal with things one thing at a time. And I had to prioritise them. First thing that needs to be taken off the list has to be all the grading I have to do. And then, some of the most pressing issues, it's beyond my human ability to solve them so they get pushed onto the backburner as well and hopefully, things will sort themselves out.

For now,
1. Get grading done.
2. Take a break because I think I'm one step away from losing all my marbles.
3. Once one and two get done, then I'll figure out how the rest of the list should pan out. And the rest of the list indeed is extremely long.

Yes, indeed, one thing at a time.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:50

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