I feel like I was more organized when I was younger (high school, definitely not college!) but I think that may just be a case of selective memory. After all I do remember spending more than one lunch period in the library doing homework or an essay that was due that afternoon. Maybe back then I just didn’t know how poorly organized I was so it didn’t bother me as much as it does now.

Anyways, the source of my scheduling issues seem to stem from a strange artist-like quirk of my personality – I really need to feel inspired in order to sit down and code. If my muse is there it can be scary how much code I can write in just a few hours. On the flip side, forcing inspiration can be hard – very hard. I seem to want to mentally sabotage the effort – there’s always something more interesting or more important I should be doing.

I think taking the next step to better self-scheduling/not procrastinating is difficult because I’ve been very successful at slaying the first dragon in this quest – hitting deadlines. I’ve been really good over the past year with the vast majority of my deadlines. There have been a few nasty outliers, that’s for sure, but for the most part I’m getting quite unaccustomed to the lovely sound a deadline makes as it whizzes past.

Now that I’ve dealt with my issues well enough to not hurt other people, the only person I’m still negatively affecting is myself. I still have to put in a good deal more stressed-out crunch time and heroic efforts than I would like. It’s one thing to beat my muse into submission so that I don’t negatively affect someone else and a whole other thing to try to smack my muse down to the point that I don’t have to work late to make that happen.

The technique I’m currently trying is a combination of better/earlier delegation combined with daily or near daily minimum levels of effort for ALL projects I’m currently working on. I sure do hope this works because I’m getting really tired of working late but at the same time I actually love the pace of my schedule!