Time Passages

The difficult thing about blogs, of course (aside from the fact that I don't want to be identified, chased and finally mown down, so I have to be careful about what I record), is the time it takes to put things together. My blogging life has been around for a good couple of weeks and this is the second of my posts. If my blog were a small baby, you'd assume there was something wrong with it, given the tiny amount of fuss it appears to be making.

My time has been spent constructively, of course. Why, only last night I drunkenly rang up my favourite pub at university and satisfied myself that their beer selection and jukebox was essentially unaltered. With achievements like that, it's no wonder there's little in the way of blogging.

This leads naturally onto the big questions about the most effective ways of spending ones time. I tend to be of the 'if it's got to be done, do it soon' approach, but also the 'if it doesn't need to be done, do nothing' approach. Hence all my work is completed (and well, if I do say so!) well in advance of deadlines, but I've also got a big pile of stuff on my desk that seems to just never go away. The alternative would be to leave important things to the last minute and then get the piddly things done first time, but that wouldn't really work - despite the fact that many in my department seem to operate this way. I was given a document to review at 1:45 the other day, and said I'd easily get it back to them for 3:00, only to be told it was needing to be returned in fifteen minutes. As it happens, I do have things to do at my work, so the document was passed on without me seeing it. Last-minute merchants. Grrr.

The main problem with my own approach, of course, is that one tends to settle for what one has. I often think of grandiose projects, only to do nothing about them on the grounds that I don't actually need to do them. Sometimes this is sensible - no-one constructs a life-boat unless they're on a ship, and even then only in certain rather dramatic circumstances. But it'd be nice to think I was able to organise myself enough to write that admiring letter to Dario Gradi, for instance.

I've not been particularly cynical, radical or liberal as yet, but I can't see that I absolutely have to do that right now...