I guess I hate the feeling that I am unable to stop the relentless march of time. I work harder than the amount of work I produce warrants. I am easily distracted, which is a weird form of procrastination. When I was a student, I would purposely waste time doing things that I wouldn’t normally choose to do to avoid doing the things that I really didn’t want to do. Why not do things I really wanted to do instead? Because I knew I wouldn’t be able to fully enjoy them if I had some horrid task hanging over my head. These days, though, it’s different. I naturally want to prioritize my tasks by the amount of time it will take me to do them; shorter tasks naturally move to the top of the list. That is the tyrrany of the to-do list: It’s not what you get done, it’s how many items you check off.

Mostly this relates to things at work—which I’m not getting paid at this moment to think about—but overall it relates to my life as a whole. Without making this sound like some cheap self-help book, this is what I want to do:

• Focus on what is most important to me
• Spend less time maintaining things in my life
• Express myself creatively