I haven’t made the progress I wanted to with work month. I keep finding distractions for myself. Melissa won an ipad and I went to set it up for her and it wasn’t working. Turns out my operating system was out of date. This spawned an obsessive need to get my computer up to snuff. I upgraded my operating system from Mac OSX 10.4.11 to Mac OXS 10.6 which involved 3 trips to Future Shop. 1. To buy the disc to upgrade my system. 2. To go back and buy an external CD/DVD player because mine has apparently decided it doesn’t want to work anymore and I need one to load the disc to do the upgrade. 3. To return the external CD/DVD player because I ‘changed my mind’ about it.
I then upgraded my itunes, got the ipad in working form, updated any programs I could to newer versions. Discovered that I could get an Adobe Creative Suite upgrade from a friend of mine. Spent a day going from CS2 to CS5 and another cleaning out all of CS2. Had to restart some of my tutorials because they were for the CS2 versions and there are newer tutorials for CS5.
I planned to play catch up on tutorials this weekend because I have been receiving work to do sporadically throughout the day at my job lately and have been having trouble finding a stretch of time to do it. I did about 1 hour of tutorials on Saturday and found plenty of errands, reading and napping to distract me from doing any more. These are lame excuses because I know perfectly well that I could find the time. A couple options I’m debating are mornings (which probably won’t work) and staying at work after 5 and doing them there. I also thought about taking my laptop to work on a Saturday and doing it. That way I can’t take a break and go watch 4 hours of Keeping up with the Kardashians. I need to get myself into doing them regularly, get into a groove.
I want to do these tutorials, it’s just that sometimes they can be a little…boring. I find it hard to engage in some of them for hours on end. The tutorial for Illustrator CS5: The Fundamentals is 23 hours long. I figured if I did about 2 hours a day during the week and a couple on the weekend I could do it in 2 weeks. Fundamentals is only part one of learning Illustrator CS5. There are two more parts that are about 8+ hours each. I have a lot of programs like this on my list. I’m never going to get through them without a set time to work. Yes I can do some tutorials on a slow afternoon at work, but I can’t guarantee I’ll always have that time and the inconsistency is preventing me from making progress. Must get organized.
You’d think being organized with stuff would lend itself naturally to being organized with time. For me, not so much. Organizing my free time into things like, working out or doing these tutorials has never been easy for me. In school, I didn’t leave my work to the last minute, I’d always leave myself enough time to do it, but I rarely started things before I had to. I am someone who needs a deadline to get things like that done. There’s no real consequence for missing deadlines I set for myself. If it takes me two weeks or two months to do this set of tutorials, then whatever. The only person I’m letting down is myself.
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