[89/365] procrastination

It was time for the quarterly review with my DSA mentor yesterday. The only thing I said of any interest was that because of her encouragement to take enough breaks, to plan them into my schedule, I'm realizing just how terrible I am at relaxing or resting. To the point where I genuiniely wouldn't count on myself to recognize those things. I tend to keep myself as busy as possible for as long as I can, and then I crash and stay in my pajamas playing games on my phone while watching stuff I've already seen on Netflix. Because my brain has associated depression and procrastination with most leisure activities available to me -- reading, movies, music, casual games, some kinds of exercise -- I can find myself thinking of them as things to be dreaded rather than enjoyed and I go through big phases of not doing any of them because I've made them too stressful for myself. Bigger ones like holidays aren't available to me because of cost, Andrew's unwillingness to do them, and my finding that planning a holiday just sounds like another thing to manage so I don't do it.

My mentor has been encouraging me to take and even plan breaks in when she asks me about my upcoming week. This has been suggested since my second mentor (I remember he always used to advise taking an hour off a day, a day off a week, and a week off every three months. I can't even imagine a week off. The only weeks I get away from my normal life are to go see my family, which is the furthest thing from "off"! But this guy lived it; he would only meet me on one day of the week and he was always talking about holidays he was planning or had just been on. He was in his fifties and his life felt very distant from me.)

So this morning a friend shared an article about beating procrastination< by scheduling all the fun stuff and letting the work fit in around it. Like every procrastination-beating technique, it won't work for everyone and it might not work at all, but it certainly intrigued me after what I'd been thinking about yesterday. And I do find I do well with this kind of thing: "I want to go out to the pub with my friends tonight so I need to work on this essay now." "I might have a date tomorrow so I want to get this work finished today."

It works really well for me: I still remember once last year when I had some uni thing that I needed to do, and it felt huge and difficult and in the afternoon I was staring down the prospect of working on it the rest of the day. Em J texted me and asked if I wanted to come over and see her and Stuart, I said give me an hour or two, and did all the work then that I'd thought would take me all day, and got to spend a nice evening with some of my favorite people.

I hoped this would work for me today because it's Games Night tonight, and I have a lot of uni work to do. But I've wasted the morning. I'm so intimidated by this project -- a known reason for procrastination is just not wanting to do something or worrying you won't be good at it. When of course I won't be any bloody good at if I don't get some work done on it this weekend, before the busy-ness of lectures and oh yeah I've got a job interview on Thursday (day before this is due) sets in.

Another tactic for fighting procrastination seems to be self-compassion -- like this article says, the idea that procrastination is a mental health issue is becoming increasingly mainstream. So even if I don't think I'm worth compassion, I can tell myself that it's more efficient in overcoming the procrastination and actually bloody getting somewhere with my work, heh.

argharghARGHargh

A lot of you know I've had massive trouble with being given inaccessible reading to do for uni. This has been a problem since I started, and trying to ask my disability advisor about it last year got me nowhere (she treated it like a problem of individual lecturers rather than something utterly systemic, and she never really got back to me about it anyway).

This year I've got a new disability advisor, and I finally got around to asking her the same question the other day: what am I supposed to do when this happens? She replied "You were given $software which is supposed to handlethat, have you been using it?" and even copied a bit from my DSA assessment about this.

Which I guess I never read carefully enough. And the training I got on that software was entirely about other things, OCRing actual paper documents. No one told me it'd work with PDFs or other computer files, or showed me how to do that.

I just tried it and it works.

And I'm really upset about it. I can't even read; I can't concentrate because I'm so emotional about how long I have strugged, without enough support. Without anyone going through my DSA report with me. Without good training. (I had to find the CD and re-install the software myself since the training people just re-imaged my computer last summer.) Without this even being mentioned by my previous advisor when I asked her the same question last year!

All my suffering and frustration and struggle, and the means to fix it was on a CD in the desk drawer next to me all this time.

Later I will be relieved and happy that it works (well mostly; it's still buggering up the IPA in my phonology textbook! but that is to be expected). But for now, I'm teary and I can't bear to read anything just yet.