Those things that pull us away from our goals. I’ve written about procrastination and spinning plates when you add distractions you have a recipe for disaster.
John golfing at Norton on the day I wrote this.
My blog post is 2 days late this week because of distractions. If I had a more structured manner to write and post it that wouldn’t happen. Fortunately, I brought my laptop to this golf tournament. I followed John around for his first nine holes but it’s too cold and windy so I’m sitting in the clubhouse writing.
I’m feeling the pressures of John’s impending graduation. I hadn’t even thought about a reception until another senior’s parent was asked a detail about their son’s. Oh, I need to plan a reception.
I also must get invitations. To do that I have to finish John’s senior pictures – I still wanted to get at least one on the golf course. So, I took him out Sunday evening and we finished those.
Never mind the first set of senior pictures I took were also late because he wanted to get his hair cut between them having some with long hair and some with short.
John and his saxophone before he got his hair cut.
So, my distraction this week was that on Sunday night I got an email from the company I use to print pictures giving me 25% off but only for three days. I could really use that discount on the pictures I want to get for his graduation reception and his invitations.
So now this became urgent. Now I had to edit and create while I had Mikey on Monday, John had a golf tournament on Tuesday, and I had appointments on Wednesday. I didn’t have much time.
I’ve been a little tired for the last few weeks, so I wasn’t sure I’d have the endurance to get them done. Normally I would have taken a night and stayed up until I was finished. But I’m not able to do that now.
I decided that I would get the most urgent things finished and work on the nice to get a discount items done if I could.
My favorite of John’s senior pictures.
I got the invitations done; I hope there are no typos. Then I set to work on the 16×20” photo collage.
I set my computer to find all the pictures I had of John – wow, I think before I stopped the computer it had found over 4000. I decided I didn’t need to go through any pictures except the ones of him in high school. So, I set the computer to find pictures of John in each of those years. A much easier task for the computer and for me.
I still had a lot of pictures to go through. I narrowed it down to about 50. That was about twice as many as I needed. So, I went through and found the best of those to add to the collage. John participated in more activities than my other two boys. This was a daunting task.
I managed to get a collage put together. Then I edited and finished his senior wallet photos. It was about 11:00 pm and the discount only ran until 11:59 pm. I still didn’t have the collage with his senior photos in it, but it wasn’t going to happen in that short a time, so I ordered what I had. I have a little time for the others.
Our busyness can certainly become a problem when we allow it to distract us from what needs to be done. Then something becomes urgent and it throws our whole world out of whack.
I felt like I was living in crises mode for the last five-and-a-half years. It feels good to have only minor crises but had I thought ahead a little better it wouldn’t have been a crisis at all.
Does this ever happen to you? You put something on the back burner to simmer then it gets moved up front and center at a raging boil.
How do you handle being in crisis mode?
Do you feel like you’re Under Pressure when you let yourself get distracted?
Onward! Changes
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