Suck it up - an appeal to LJ-motivation

[ailiathena]

It's almost 3:00 pm. That means that I need to leave the house in an hour and a half to pick up Guille from work and go to the gym. I have been ready to work for the last six hours. I have accomplished nothing.

I have a lot to do. Here's a short list:

• contact TOPS to make sure they're down with me doing research there
• write a first draft of my IRB proposal (no pressure for quality, but it needs to be done, like, yesterday)
• finish reading When Sex Goes To School. It's nonsense that it's not done yet. Like, really. I like it. It's an easy read. And I should have finished it two weeks ago to be on track with my independent study.
• email The Unknowable Dr. S (henceforth, Tuds) and get her feedback on the research ideas. Also JRG.
• email Ms. Red again. Hey, maybe this time she will actually have some advice about what I need to be doing with myself.
• stop avoiding the SMA poster. (Ms. Red's question should motivate you to think of a timeline. Because really, if you put off your research, you'll just be here another year, but if you put off the poster, you will make an ass of yourself at your first professional conference.)
• stop avoiding creating the Anthgrad Wiki. Because, really, isn't that a better way to waste your time than online Backgammon?

Okay! Great! So obviously the reason I can't get started is that they are all tremendously vague but monstrously important things. (Except the wiki, which is just so relatively unimportant that I can't bear to begin there.) So the obvious thing to do is to create small but achievable goal/steps.

But the thing is ... there are plenty of small steps and I'm just not taking them because what I REALLY need to be doing - getting the IRB so that I can start collecting data - is overshadowing everything. Like a big spaceship threatening to destroy Earth. Really, do you care about getting to work on time when you see a spaceship? No! Okay, that analogy makes sense in my head. I'm not going to worry if it makes sense to anyone else.

I'll let you know if this posting actually helped in a few days.