Day three – time management

Trust me, this entry is probably going to be as boring as the title suggests, as mostly I will be trying to firm up some mental diarrhoea.

There aren’t enough hours in the day at the moment.

I say “at the moment” because I currently have a bit of contract work thanks to my friend Krys, so my days are not currently entirely empty. I need time to work on the contract, which is, of course, my top priority. (If I’m lucky, I will see my first paycheque in god knows how long before my birthday next Tuesday.)

In addition, I want time to write an entry of some sort every day, which seems to be taking an hour rather than the minimum fifteen minutes. I need half an hour to do my French homework and I also want an hour to go to the gym. Then I should also be spending time every day looking at my script for this year’s panto.

In theory there should be plenty of hours in the day for this, but there aren’t. By five o’clock – whether or not I have a rehearsal that night – I’m ready to call it a day. This will certainly be true next week when, thanks to the clocks changing, it will actually be dark then. (When I came back here nine years ago, I was surprised to discover that while I’d been back in London, Canada had changed its dates for changing the clocks. I thoroughly appreciated the earlier date in March for springing forward, not so much the decision to fall back a week later, so close to and occasionally on my birthday. Not a good present.)

And there would be enough hours in the day, if I got out of bed before 10:30 or 11am. Right now it is nearly noon and I’m only on job one of the day. I am not going to make it to the gym today, because at two o’clock I have my weekly pool game with my 95-year-old neighbour Pat. This will also cut into work time – and I’m actually getting paid for that.

So, where does it all go wrong? Every night I tell myself that, whether I go to bed at 11pm (when I want to) or  midnight (when I generally do), I will read until 1am, then go to sleep and get up at 9am. Inevitably I end up reading until at least 2am, usually longer and that’s the end of that.

It seems I now have three goals for the next six weeks: I will write something every day, I will not play stupid fucking spider solitaire and I will get to sleep and out of bed earlier.

Watch this space and wish me luck.

PS: Oh, great. Just when I’m trying to tackle time management, my friend Jane tags me with the black and white photo challenge on Facebook, so nearly an hour slips by while I try to find seven photos to convert to black and white and post for the next week. Thanks, Jane.

Here’s today’s photo.