Grmbflgxd
Three hours of sleep, and a four-hour transfer at Copenhagen. Hooray for Wifi and the Powerbook battery that just keeps going...
I'm too tired to do anything useful (other than read blogs and chat) and I have this sense of impeding doom over me - I have another conference coming up real fast, and I haven't prepared.
One of the best things about role playing games is that you learn to improvise. That skill has saved my butt on several occasions, but it's a constant struggle: when you realize you can wing things with reasonable ease, there's a huge temptation to just keep winging things and not prepare properly. I sort of hate myself for doing that too often, but I keep dividing my attention to so many places, that I almost invariably end up doing improvisation in some degree. On the other hand, it's useful to divide your attention, because it allows you to make connections between things you normally wouldn't do. On the other hand... it also means that you rarely get anything proper done.
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Yeah, I recognize myself from the description as well.Almost two decades of roleplaying, and especially gamemastering have left their mark. By providing an ability to wing a way pretty much through everyday stuff, and a decent chance of doing that in odder occasions as well.
And it sure can be problematic - as usually just winging it ain't enough for a perfect solution.
Of course, looking in from the outside it seems to be good enough - but being convincing is just half the victory (if even that), the result should also be correct and in time.
And those latter qualities tend to suffer from inadequate preparation. And a nagging feeling inide points out that a few more hours would've really added shine to the resulting product. I've never found out whether that is latent perfectionism or just a tinge of bad conscience - the symptoms seem to be equal...
Hence I've consciously taken steps to lessen the need for constant multitasking at work. Just to be able to concentrate on a subset of the ongoing tasks at a given time as opposed to flitting between them and losing time and energy to context switches along the way.
--lavonardo, 04-Aug-2005
Yup, me too. I check my email every 30 minutes only, keep IRC and IM hidden, try to eat regularly (low blood sugar makes the hyperactivity worse)... What other tricks are people using?
And good point about perfectionism and bad conscience having similar symptoms.
I think the IT industry works well for people like you and me: there's always something to tinker with, nothing is ever really ready, and all that matters is that it works, so you can do sloppy work and nobody probably ever notices.
(Though of course this is not valid for Open Source projects: there you can't hide anything. Which is probably good.)
--JanneJalkanen, 04-Aug-2005