There’s only so many excuses that you can give when your room has been messy for about four months.

Or reasons that you haven’t spent more time on your book, or reasons that you haven’t put together your presentation. Or reasons that you haven’t touched Celtx for about a month. Or reasons that your weekly blog hasn’t had a solid entry in a couple of weeks.

Drafts get left unpublished, emails left unanswered. Things accumulate in piles on your floor.

There’s only so many times that you can talk about “you” instead of admitting that it is, in fact, me.

The reason that I plan so many things, and in consequence, the reason that I fail to follow through, is that I want my life to be full. Not just busy, full, but brimming with abundance and joy and things that I find pride in. Seeing the countless possibilities before me, I grab at them all at once. I envision myself a locomotive that forges forward into the winter night, fueled by hope and guided by determination, chugging and blazing and wondering where it’ll end up. So many possibilities! So many things to do!

But in my excitement, I overextend. I take those good intentions and I spread them thin, stretching them further than their elasticity allows. I only have so many hours in my day; I only have so much focus to give. And when I overextend, I tend to snap back a little harder than I planned — therefore getting less done than I would have been capable of, therefore finding that I need more time to revitalize myself. I idolize multitasking, but in my attempt to achieve it, I become woefully under-productive.

I wish I could say there was an easy fix for this — Top Ten Ways to Organize Your Life And Become Successful! — but instead I find myself watching the good things that I’ve created pass me by. That connection that I made there, wasted. That idea that I had then, collecting dust in the back of my mind.

I am not able to multitask like I used to. So goddamn it, I need to focus on one thing at a time. The only reason the elastic breaks is because it is pulled in too many directions; but if you pull it one way first, and then the other, it dances. I’ve got to learn to accept that dancing is the only way I’ll get by.

Feature focus good intentions multitasking overextend Prose