Tomorrow, my busiest day of the year

    Most days I wake up and think about the things I want to do: go for a run, clean, and write. Those usually top my daily to do list. But at some point, usually pretty early in the day I get distracted. A few hours pass and I think, well I'll do it all tomorrow. But tomorrow never really comes. 

    I had planned on writing more posts between the last ones and now. But tomorrow never came. So this morning I decided I didn't want to go on my run, I started cleaning up a bit, but as soon as I sat down I opened the blog. It seems I need to kind of brute force my way to productivity, or negotiate (ok Nadia you can skip exercise but you have to write one thing at least). I've been coming up with different plans and schedules. But things just so easily fall to the wayside. This is especially true when big-ish things throw a wrench in my quiet and boring life. 

    I like routines and predictability (I know 🥱so boring). But for Christmas I drove down to my parents' house. Two days of driving down and two days back. Family drama aside, without my familiar surroundings I was a bit unmoored. Especially when I feel unsettled, everything becomes an excuse to not do things I want to be doing. And with writing, I really need to have a near perfect environment to not encourage my brain to take any off-ramp it sees as it slogs through the stop and go production of words onto paper. Writing is where my dyslexia and ADHD really conspire against me. Writing is tougher because of the dyslexia and since it's tough and not particularly enjoyable at the time my ADHD brain searches for dopamine hits in any little thing that pops up.

    One of my more successful tricks to force productivity, is to procrastinate on one thing by working on another. Hence today's blog post. I probably should be finishing up my applications (three left) or working on my manuscript (still not done). But why not write a blog post instead and post an excerpt? I still have nearly a week until the next deadline anyways, so I can definitely work on that tomorrow. 

    I will say hard deadlines, set by external forces are definitely one of the best ways to force some last minute productivity, which the applications have in spades. Definitely no wiggle room on those deadlines. Well except, apparently (and luckily) letters of recommendation can come in late without disqualifying an application. I have one recommender who procrastinates even better than me, in that she never remembers a deadline. So maybe that's worse, at least I get the thing done on time, which I and my GPA is grateful for. Maybe this spurt of writing will trigger me to write more today.....or maybe tomorrow.