Now…What was I Doing?

I watched an old Ellen DeGeneres comedy clip about procrastination. About how she sat down to write on her computer and, before she even started, noticed how dusty her desk was.  So she went downstairs to get a cleaning rag, but stopped to pet the cat.  Which took forever, of course, because cats have a tendency to act all cute when you give them some attention. And then she noticed how disorganized her CD collection was, so…

…well, you know how the rest goes.

I laughed, of course, because I recognized certain behaviors I had in common.  Most of us do – right?

Except that I also thought, but I’m not that bad.

And then I went into the kitchen to make myself a salad for lunch.

But first I had to clean up the dishes from breakfast because, God knows, you can’t make a mess when there’s already a mess in there. 

After that, I had to make a pit stop because, well, running water does that to me.  And I noticed the sheets were off the bed, which reminded me they were in the washing machine.  So after I went to the bathroom, I walked over to the washer and dryer.  The clothes in the dryer were dry, so I hauled the load out and put them on the bed to fold and put away. 

But then I remembered I was making a salad for lunch, so I went back to the kitchen and washed the lettuce leaves and tore them up for my salad.

Realizing I had left the door to the dryer open – and the wet sheets were still sitting in the washing machine not getting any drier – I went back to the washing machine and moved the load to the dryer and started it.

Finally, I got back to the kitchen to work on my salad.  I cut up vegetables and threw in some dried cranberries and slivered almonds, but decided the salad needed a few garbanzo beans.  So I went to the pantry to get some.  While in there, I noticed how disorganized it was after our last shopping trip, so I started turning cans face front and grouping like items and…

…and then it hit me.  Egad – I AM that bad a procrastinator!

It took me an entire hour to make a salad that would normally take about 5-10 minutes, tops!

Vince says this is ADD behavior.  He says he’s just as bad.  He gets on the computer to do one thing and then, forty-five minutes later, he can’t remember why he sat down in front of the computer in the first place.  Because it couldn’t possibly have been to watch all those old Tim Conway clips from The Carol Burnett Show.

So now I’m wondering if I‘m a procrastinator or if I simply have a touch of ADD.

…aaaand I just spent 20 minutes online looking up the differences between the two.  Ack!  Plus, my research didn’t really answer the question as it was mostly amateurs giving their opinions on the subject.

I have a theory that with the proliferation of information at our fingertips, we all tend to get more distracted these days. Used to be if you wondered about something, you either had to look it up in the dictionary or encyclopedia (if your family was lucky enough to own a set), or you had to take a trip to the local library to find out.  So it had to be a subject you were really interested in learning about.

Now, we just hit up Google over any little musing and then, before we even type in our query, we’re distracted by something else.

Right now, I have about five projects partly completed and awaiting my attention. And those are just the projects staring me in the face.  I have lots of other ideas of projects I want to accomplish.  Some of them may just take months and/or years to come to fruition.

Fortunately for me, I will eventually focus and get them all done.

Like this blog, for instance.  Just because it has taken me four hours to write (well, maybe forty minutes to write and three hours and twenty minutes of procrastination as my attention was diverted by other things), but I will finish it.

But it isn’t without some level of stress as I wonder why I can’t just start one project, finish it and then move on to the next one.

I guess it all just makes me human. And I’m in decent company.  After all, Ellen DeGeneres has managed to do pretty well for herself. 

So I…oh look!  There’s Twinks.  She’s looking all cute curled up on the chair next to me, so I need to pet her furry little bell…

Oh, never mind.  Go ahead and call me a procrastinator. Tell me I have ADD. I can take it.

(But I DID finish this blog. So there!)