As I’ve already complained about, I’ve been pretty busy lately.
By “pretty busy,” I mean, “I haven’t actually been this busy in a couple of years, in terms of workload.” That makes sense; this month is genuinely so loaded with deadlines all collapsing into each other thanks to unfortunate timing that I will, thankfully, be making the most money I’ve made in a one month period since the end of 2019. It’s a nice milestone to reach, but perhaps one I might have swapped for a little bit more downtime in the last week or so, had I known ahead of time.
Things are running into each other in such a way that I find myself living in two different understandings of time simultaneously. On the one hand, there’s what I’ve taken to thinking of as long-short term thinking. That’s the part of my brain that’s vaguely aware of what deadlines I have in the next couple of weeks, and maps out what order I need to take care of things so that they all get done. It’s also the part that tends to get me in trouble, whether it’s accidentally forgetting something I have due or simply assuming that I’ll magically learn how not to feel overwhelmed when a particularly hairy piece of scheduling hits future me a week or so away.
And then, there’s short-short term thinking. That’s the me I wake up to every morning, the one that goes, Okay, today you have to achieve exactly three things for work. Here’s how you’re going to do that. Of the two time senses, this is the one that feels the most understanding and forgiving; the one that takes a moment to recognize that certain things can’t be done on the schedule I’d originally planned, and tries to work out alternatives, and the one that knows just how much internal pushing can be achieved before I lose my mind. (Also, how much I can lose my mind before I really lose my mind; there is a difference, you know.)
Holding both of these senses of time in my head simultaneously is something that is, most of the time, not really much of a problem… apart from those days when I wake up convinced that it’s Saturday, and really it’s just Wednesday and so much more needs to be done than I’d previously assumed.
In related news, I’m tired.