Expectations, Weakness, and Forgiveness

I didn’t torture and animals or anything, but this week I didn’t live up to my own expectations either. This is a complicated issue. On the one hand I know that it’s normal—and perfectly acceptable—to not be totally motivated 100% of the time. There will be times when I just don’t have it in me to make the most of my time and trying to be good just doesn’t interest me. Part of being good has to involve letting myself relax once in a while. If I beat myself up every time I waste a few hours playing a pointless computer game, I’m just going to burn myself out, feel worse, and not ultimately make myself any better for it. There are two issues involved here. The first is that there is a difference between not making perfect use of my time and completely wasting whole days. Relaxing, enjoying the day to day, and setting aside some down time are all necessary parts (at least as far as I can figure) of living well. What can be difficult is figuring out where the line is between how much time I need to recharge and how much time I should be using more effectively. The second issue is that there’s a difference between telling myself that it’s ok to take some time off and actually being ok with it.

This was finals week. Last Friday I collected final papers, on Monday I gave the final exam, and by Thursday afternoon I had to have final grades in. This means that much of my time this past week has been spent with red pen in hand. There are some things that I like about grading: in particular, seeing how much the students have learned and figuring out who has earned what grade can be a rewarding and interesting experience. The actual process that is involved with figuring that out, however, can be tiresome. Reading version after version of the same basic answer, trying to differentiate between them and assign grades evenhandedly, trying to decipher poor handwriting and trying to make sense of faulty sentence structures all get old pretty quickly. Part of me wants to just get it done as quickly as possible, but part of me constantly wants to take a break.

There were things that I wanted to do this week other than submitting final grades. I wasn’t going to save the world or anything, but I intended to make dentist and eye doctor appointments, get the apartment cleaned up and do a little rearranging, get some work done on my dissertation, and so on. Instead, I dragged my feet to the point that I accomplished almost nothing other than finalizing grades. I would go strong with the grading in the morning, working for three or so hours until I started losing focus and needed a break. The problem is that these breaks didn’t want to end. For two hours I'd distract myself on the internet, all the while thinking about how I should really be getting back to work. Then, when I finally started grading again, I’d be itching for a break in another half hour.

Do I think that this makes me a bad person? No. But I know that if I were to stick to a better schedule, I’d end up being happier overall. Ideally, I would work for a while, take a small break, work some more, and so on, until I’d put in a good day’s work. In the evening I’d then be able to use my time as I pleased without feeling the weight of work in the back of my mind. Instead, I stretched out working each day from 6:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and enjoyed almost none of that time. This would leave me tired an unhappy, both because my time had been so unenjoyable, and because I had wasted a day so inefficiently.

This raises a curious question, that’s really more about psychology than philosophy: why do we sometimes do things that we know will make us less happy? When I’m taking a lunch break and delaying getting back to work, I could easily realize—if I stopped to think about it—that ending my break right away and working again would make me happier at the end of the day. Sometimes when this occurs to me I do just that, but other times I banish the thought and continue forward on my path to a miserable day.

The reason that this particular struggle is stressful for me is that I have so much open time ahead of me. I have a lot of writing to do, and a lot of time to do it in, and I am the only one holding myself accountable for that time. My own experience has taught me that the best way to get over this type of hurdle is to think about why I get held up and make rules ahead of time to keep myself moving forward. For example, here are some rules that I will do my best to stick to in the weeks to come. I plan to update them as needed:
1. If your break has lasted more than 30 minutes, but you haven’t written 1,000 words yet, start working again.
2. If it’s 3:00 or later, and you haven’t left the apartment yet, go for a walk.
3. If it’s 5:00 and you haven’t done anything from the ‘to do’ list other than writing, do something (however small).
4. If you’ve finished 2,000 words by 2:00, stop writing, but do 2 things from the ‘to do’ list.

Not the most exciting, but hopefully I can keep these in mind. If I do, I know that I will both get more done and be happier at the end of the day.