Menagerie

How often do you hear something like this? 

  • I had a really bad week, I really need to work on my time management.
  • It all boils down to Poor Time Management™. 

Procrastination isn’t quite the same, rather, a variant. That one’s nearer deliberately choosing not to do something. Or is it really that different? 

I think all those invocations of ‘poor time management’ don’t really mean poor time management. I think describing it as having priorities that are not mainstream, frowned upon, or just simply different might be more accurate. I’ve found that most people who invoke PTM actually are well aware of what they’re doing, and their priorities, and just find it difficult to express (or even admit) the rationale behind their decisions. Like the person who gets home after 2am on Saturday or Sunday morning. Or the person who engages in retail therapy for hours and hours. It might well be them trying to stay sane! That’s a pretty important thing for most people, the inane ones included; maybe it’s some kind of self-preservation thing. 

Anyway, this ‘long’ weekend I decided to i) sleep, ii) work, iii) eat, and iv) do homework, in that order.

Why sleep first and foremost? I really woke up at 10am on Saturday, and had a ~3 hour nap in that afternoon. Because I know I’ll be losing sleep during the week anyway, and not paying down some sleep debt now will just mean more compounded interest to pay off later. And I was really tired then. van de Lagemaat’s TOK text is perfect for inducing catnaps, to reset sleep cycles, whatever. 
Sysadmin grunt work? Work pays. The thing called WOW fundraising group contribution means I don’t have lunch money for half a month. I really can’t tahan that kind of nutritionly hazardous thing anymore. This job not enough of a premium to make me sacrifice my sleep though.
Eat? See above. I actually snack quite a lot when I’m at home. 
Homework? There’s always a large collection of work that’s overdue, due, will soon be due, will be due in the mid-term, will be due in the long term.. IAs left right center. My homework diary boxes are always half-full with rolled over work before the school day even starts. I honestly didn’t get much done on this front this weekend, partly because it takes me 15-20 mins to get back into The Zone after an interruption.. what if there’s an interruption every 15 mins for 10 mins each? Quite a realistic scenario actually; bye, productivity. Even WriteRoom can’t help me here. 

And no, my dear teachers, much as I’m paying for the privilege to be a minion of the school, I am not your IT support monkey and SKW. I don’t particularly care if you’ve got a title or not. Why do you think it’s perfectly fine to sms me, call me, and call my house, when I don’t call harass you like that? Can’t you drop me an email like I very nicely asked, and don’t expect a response before next month? If you do that, you might even get an entry on my todo list! Wow! I’m really really ticked off now.

When you proverbially tell me to jump, I ask: how high would you like to fall from? 

PS Daiso is amazing, beats Muji and every last local ‘house brand’ hands down in variety. I wonder if there’s any stock control, since the checkouts don’t need to scan individual items.. can’t imagine their staff manually inventorying everything on a weekly or (gasp) daily basis. 

PPS I want to visit Muji sometime. 

PPPS IKEA’s house brand chocolate bar (is it cheaper than Cadbury’s?) which has a “Product of Sweden” sticker is actually Made in Germany, according to the wrapper.