Wanna know what my biggest personality flaw is? I mean, I know I have quite a few, but this is the one that screws me up more than anything else.

I'm a procrastinator.

Seriously, I'm a bad procrastinator. Sometimes I feel that I've got a handle on my penchant for avoiding doing those pesky little tasks that I don't really want to do, like, oh I don't know ... taxes, paying bills ... unfun things of that nature. And other times I can feel it all slip out of my grasp, as it turns into a mighty vortex that sucks me into the spiral of "Things I should have already taken care of and have just ignored instead". This is one of those times.

During the daylight hours, I'm a master at just truddling along, forgetting all the unfun, unpleasant things I should be doing. But at night, they all come back to haunt me. When I wake up at 4 in the morning and lie in bed thinking "Oh crap, I should have done this thing last week, and that thing the week before, and I'm so behind with this, and I'm never going to get that done in time now ... ".

My excuse is that I've had all this personal trauma going on in my life since the summer and I've been really busy with directing so many plays, etc. etc., but the real truth is that I've done a little too much screwing of the proverbial pooch in the past 9 months. I haven't been all that happy with my life and I've chosen to spend way too much time hanging with friends, drinking, knitting, watching movies and TV, playing Big Buck Hunter, and on and on, instead if taking care of a big pile of responsibilities, most of them work related.

And now it's catching up with me. Now I have a huge pile of things that I should have done earlier and I'm going to have to scramble to take care of, and none of them will be as well done as if I'd done them when I should have.

Damn it. I know how bad procrastination is. I know how shitty I feel when I've let this much stuff get away from me. I know it keeps me up and night and makes me all stressed out and fills me with self-loathing. So why do I do it?

This morning I decided it's time to take control again. I'm going to set three goals for myself each week, plus at least one task I have to have done before I can go home at the end of the day. If I can just knock off a few of this things at the top of the scary pile, I'll start feeling better. I'll enjoy watching Buffy and knitting a lot more when I'm not always thinking in the back of my head "I shouldn't be doing this because I haven't done whatever else I was supposed to do".

So, my goals for this week?

#1 - No alcohol until the weekend. It distracts me, plus it's not helping me get rid of this seemingly never ending series of colds.

#2 - Deal in some way with the Business Manager problem. Find some way to begin a conversation with her that doesn't end in WWIII.

#3 - Get my new play selections done and dealt with. This should have been done before Xmas, for god's sake!

For today?

Read as many of the new play submissions as possible before rehearsals start at 2:00pm

Which means I had better get my ass out of d-land pronto.