Ave, Charles!

Charles gets it done. And he ends his piece (final sentence) with a funny mixed metaphor. I understand a bit how he feels; I've used the plate-spinning metaphor myself.

Let me elaborate on that: Striving for perfection itself is not a weakness, but being unable to perform mental triage—that is, deciding when and where you should spend your limited time and energy—is a weakness, I think. At least, it sure does make life a lot harder. I sometimes find myself wishing I could care just a little less about some things. I’ve got plenty of other projects that I had to put on the back burner, and I probably could have kept those going on the side if I had been capable of not devoting myself entirely to these classes. Now, though, I find myself in the position of having to shift gears and try to get back into a project that has had about two months to cool off.

Then again... maybe I wouldn’t have been able to keep all those plates spinning at once. I think a corollary of my inability to not give my current project everything I’ve got is the inability to shift back and forth between projects. I tend to pour all my time and energy into a project until it is done or something else more urgent comes up. I’ve tried dividing up my attention between projects, spending a couple hours on one project and then switching to another project for a couple of hours, and it hasn’t really worked out too great. I think I tried it because I had read somewhere that it was an efficient way to work or a good way to avoid getting into a rut or something like that, but I don’t think my brain works that way. It takes me a while to get warmed up and really get into an efficient flow, so if I am constantly switching projects, I feel a lot less efficient than I might otherwise be. I suppose that’s a long-winded way of saying that I’m kind of crap at multi-tasking.

Yup, I definitely know the feeling.