Today I spent my free time at work engaging in what is quickly becoming my favorite procrastination activity: daydreaming about ways I can quit my job to write and making lists about the things I need to do in order to make that happen.
On one hand this makes for a nice change – this time last last year I was unemployed and dreaming of ways to pay rent – but after three months in the new day job things have evolved to the point where it’s a hindrance rather than a help.
You see, somewhere along the line I ceased being the office assistant and became the unofficial web-guy for the company. My day’s went from data-entry to content production and putting together a plan for the company to revise the website and engage with social media. I’m far from an expert on this kind of stuff – I got the job by virtue of being the sole person in the office who knows *exactly* how much I don’t know about SEO and webmarketing – so it takes up brainpower.
The net result is that I spend hours writing or thinking about writing or putting together plans for writing, then I come home and stare at the manuscripts I’m meant to be working on and my brain is full of fuzz. And since I’ve rarely had the kind of job where I show up and do this full-time, in an office, it’s getting harder and harder to stop kicking myself for being a slack-arse and not being further along on the writing career than I am.
It’s been particularly frustrating this week. Part of it is the regular January thing – it’s one of those months that’s forever filled with doom and tight finances in my world (too much spending at Christmas is followed by 5 birthdays for close family and friends in the space of a month) – and some is surely the aftermath of the floods.
But I figure that’s accounting for some of the frustration, not all of it. My own apathy makes me angry, which in turn makes me apathetic, and it’s difficult to break that cycle
I suspect it may be time to build myself another thirty point plan for the coming year.
