It's hard to define.
What's a lot for you is easy for someone else.
And you can tell someone else what you did today, and she might say "I feel tired just hearing about it."
But it can be hard to get stuff done.
The right stuff.
The stuff that makes you feel a sense of...well, accomplishment.
I often have trouble sleeping. And I think part of it is: I never know when I'm done, when I've accomplished enough.
Sure, you can do enough so there's no catastrophe the next day--you're not late with anything.
But there are many obligations that we make to ourselves, and these are often, shall we say, moving targets?
So I was going to get something done this long weekend!
I was going to go away for the weekend--for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, actually, since I don't have any appointments Tuesday.
Or I didn't, and then things got re-arranged, and I had to be back in the city on Tuesday.
So now 'vacation' for me.
I was going to take a train to Sacramento, lock myself in a motel room and write.
Or drive.
Or to Merced, which is lovely to me but probably a bit dull to most people. (Those farm towns get me somewhere inside.)
Driving would let me take more books.
But with checkout time before noon, that kills most of one day. Being "locked" in a coffeeshop is not like being "locked" in a motel room.
But as someone who once moved for three months and took along three boxes of photography equipment--and I'm not a professional photographer, just an avid amateur--so I know my eyes are often, as the saying goes, too big for my head.
That is: I plan on doing a lot, a lot more than I could ever--there's that word again--accomplish.
So one day this weekend I made myself work on a project for just an hour. That was the only goal. Well an hour later, it was done.
Somehow I had mis-projected, misunderestimated, as our beloved President says, how much time it would take.
I had told myself, 'this will take hours,' and that had discouraged me from starting.
And saying 'just start' doesn't work when in your head a little voice says (and then it will still take 80 more hours after that).
And today I told myself: you have to start by 1 pm. You must work for an hour. You can work on one of three things. (One thing I have to find. That is never a good way to start, because finding the right pieces of paper may take a while.)
Well by 2 pm, I was nearly done! I said "just a little more." But wisely I stopped instead and gave myself a nice reward--a cup of tea and a snack.
And then the "little bit more" really took another hour. But if I had sat there for the "little bit more," I would have become discouraged!
Then I rewarded myself again by taking a long walk, eating some vegetarian Indian food impromptu (unplanned) and taking pictures with a camera I thought was dying but really just needed a new battery. (A Contax G1. Lovely autofocus rangefinder with a brilliantly sharp Zeiss Planar lens. Yes, I obsess over details. That's the whole point.)
And then tonight I set a time to work for an hour on another project. I got something done, but I still felt "oh this needs so much more work." That voice! It's not the encouraging voice.
My wonderful therapist in Santa Cruz once asked me what the voice in my head that encouraged me to get things done sounded like. I said, "you should really do that, you lazy S.O.B., why haven't you finished it yet?" She said, dryly, "That is not the encouraging voice." "That is as encouraging as it gets," I said. Her: "Does this help you see the problem more clearly." Yes indeed.
So I got two things accomplished--that word again.
There's still something I need to draft (about taste, media and The New Yorker magazine). I told my friend Michelle that if I didn't have a draft by May, she'd have to bug me.
Or was it April.
Well, it's almost June, and I still need to write that draft.
But I was acting in a play. And then caught a cold. Life intervenes. The best laid plans....
Do you see how it goes? The glass is always half empty. There's always something not accomplished. But just because my list is long.
Yet I do feel a sense of accomplishment. I set out to work for a certain period of time, and I did. I got more accomplished than I thought I would. I'm sharpening my realistic sense of what I can and can't do. Funny that one could still do that at my age.
But now it's not even midnight, and I could sleep easily. Because I know I got something done, something that needed doing.
Do I need to work on something else? Yes, eventually. But my mind's a bit spent. And I can spend an hour or two on that project another day.
Something about "miles to go before I sleep"?
Ah yes, sleep.
My bed calls to me.
It knows--at last--my name.
--E. R. O'Neill
