I'm having brunch with a friend this morning. When she suggested a meeting time, I required that we meet at 11 AM so that I could go to church first and then go straight to the restaurant from there. I had decided that if I went to the middle church service at my church which has three services on Sunday mornings, I would be able to get to the restaurant at our designated time. So, before going to bed earlier than normal last night, I set my alarm for 7 AM to give myself time to get up, drink my coffee while typing this and then get to church.
So, now it is 8:53 and I have just started typing this. What is wrong with my sense of discipline I ask you? At 3 AM when that thunderstorm came through north Dallas and woke me up, I thought to myself, I hope I can go back to sleep so that I won't have trouble getting up in the morning. But I think that single thought is what has me sitting here now. I gave myself an out when I had that thought. I cannot figure out why I sabotage my own wishes. But I continually do.
My alarm still went off at 7 AM and I still woke up. But then I hit snooze and went back to sleep and continued to do that every 9 minutes until after 8 AM. Finally at 8:35 I was downstairs making coffee and feeding the cats and beating myself up over the fact that I would not make it to church. But that is just the beginning of things that I intended to do today that I probably won't do.
I have told you this before, but I am a world class procrastinator. I really believe that it is an art and I wish they gave awards for it. Better yet, I wish they gave paychecks for it. I'd be rich! In college I would put off studying for a final until 10 PM the night before the exam. Then I would stay up all night long studying and make a B. Imagine what I could have done if I had studied even 24 hour prior to the exam. But I had this theory that if I studied for that test and then took another test between that one and the studying that I had done for it, it would just muck things up in my mind. I mean after all, you wouldn't want me to answer a question about shutterspeed with a long drawn out discourse on what John Wilkes Boothe was doing in the theater on that fateful night Lincoln was assassinated, right?
So, in my head, I could justify this procrastination. But as I aged, I always new about my propensity to procrastinate, so at work at least, I may have over compensated. If I had a project due on Friday and I had the time to complete it by Thursday, I did. It wasn't due to a desire on my part to suck up to the boss or to upstage anyone else, it was because I knew that if I didn't get started right away, I'd end up having to come into the office at 4 AM on Friday to get started so that I could complete it before it was due at 2 PM on Friday.
This lead to another problem. I found over the years that anytime you completed a project early at my former employer it got changed just as soon as you completed it. Meanwhile, you had some other work that you had planned to complete once your Friday project was due that now was being put off until Monday so that you could re-do the Friday project on Friday. It was the price that you paid for trying to complete anything early in that building. It was sort of the Murphy's Law of merchandise planning.
So over time, I found that the defense I had created to protect myself from my own procrastination no longer worked there and I gave up and just waited until all of the other merch planners were working on the same project to keep from doing it twice.
None of this has anything to do with missing church today. I just thought I would tell you about it while I am explaining that I hit my alarm clocks snooze button for more than an hour this morning. The exciting news is that unless it involves getting up before 8 AM, I practically never put off anything that I really look forward to doing. So, I will be blocking a group of cabins this week on Navigator of the Seas for the February 9th 2014 sailing out of Galveston. This will be my first time to block a group of cabins on any ship, so I'm very excited to get them and begin selling.
In the meantime, I have big plans to get up early one other day in the next week to go out and get some early morning photos at daybreak.... let's just see how that goes.....
Happy Sunday!
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