The beginning.
I was a freshman in college. And I was incompetent.
Incompetence was old hat to me. I’d been incompetent all through high school. Middle school too. Before that I’d never pushed myself to do anything big, so I never had a chance to fail. Now the stakes were getting higher. I was at Bard College, my parents were paying a lot of money to put me there, and I couldn’t do my damn homework.
Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t? All I knew was that I didn’t. I would get an assignment on Tuesday: ten questions from chapter 5 of the textbook. I’d write down the assignment in my notebook. Then I’d expect to have it done by Thursday. And yet Thursday would roll around, and I wouldn’t have done it. So what went wrong? I really had no idea.
Are you getting how insanely unaware I was? I wasn’t doing my work, and I couldn’t figure out why my work “wasn’t happening”. I was so un-used to connecting assignments to finished projects that I didn’t know what went in the middle. How does the actual work happen? How did all these other people do it? I really had no idea. But when Thursday came around, they had their work to hand in, and I didn’t. Weird.
In high school, I’d seen therapists to deal with this problem. I told them I felt “overwhelmed” by all my work. They tried to help me deal with the feeling of being “overwhelmed” so I could work productively. Guess why I was overwhelmed? I had so much freaking work! And no one ever taught me how to do it. I mean, that part’s pretty straightforward, right?
They did teach me something: they called it “time management”. They meant well, I know. But they had me micromanaging my time, keeping track of how long I spent on different activities and scheduling time to work on my homework. Guess what that did? It made me feel worse for playing flash games in my designated “homework time”. A little more guilt worked wonders on my depression.
Did I mention the depression? It was pretty bad. I sucked, and I knew it. And not the getting-a-little-better-each-time kind of suck. I wasn’t doing thing I told myself I would do, and I had no hope of improving. So what good was I?
The manual.
Christmas break, 2005: my parent’s house. I’m surfing the web aimlessly, and I stumble on an article from Fraser Speirs about writing the perfect application for Getting Things Done. I could use some help getting things done, so I keep reading. Soon I notice that Getting Things done is always capitalized. A couple of Google searches later, I’ve got a new book to read.
David Allen’s book gave me hope. It gave me a manual. It explained how to get from assignment to accomplishment. I still sucked at it, but I had a process. I could get better. I did.
Today.
It feels like I still suck at it. But I suck a whole lot less than I did as a freshman in college. Every week is different: sometimes I’m in complete control, sometimes I’m flailing. Sometimes that’s okay, and sometimes it isn’t.
But I’m a competent human being. I’m proud to exist. I could live again like I did as a freshman.
Sharing.
So this is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to share my growth with other people. I’m hoping that someone out there who feels like crap about themselves feels that way because they just don’t know how to do what they need to do. And I hope that I can help them learn how to do it.
Is that you?
Are you frustrated with yourself for not doing things you told yourself you would? Are you confused by the fact that you don’t do things, even though you’ve committed to them? Would you like some help?
Shoot me an email. Leave me a comment. Let me try to help. I’ve been there, and it’s no fun alone.
