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By this date last year, I had finished the Big Project and turned it over to the Boss and the accountant. This year, I’m so far from that it has me in a bit of a funk. I’m searching through the last two months, trying to figure out what caused me to fall so far behind. It’s not as if it’s any harder this year. In fact, if anything, it’s easier. When I do get around to working on it, things are falling into place the way they would if I had commercial accounting software, instead of a bunch of inefficiently interconnected Excel spreadsheets that I wrote myself.
It’s three things, I think. For one, my motivation has been lacking, because I get bored with the repetitiveness of the data entry part of the project, which is probably more than half the job. Second, the company has been busier than ever, and that means twice as much payroll and many more bills to pay. That’s not hard work, either, but it does take up time. And the Boss is trying to get us more work for the future. Without Julie as a buffer, a lot of the paperwork falls on me. He tells me he doesn’t want me to have to worry about it, and then he gives me another assignment.
Then there’s the third thing. I’m a year older, and a year tireder. It gets harder every year to sit at the computer long enough to get the kind of momentum I need to carry me to the end. If I could put in eight hours straight for a week and have nothing else to do, I’d probably be done about halfway through the week. As we all know, it doesn’t work that way. The artificial interruptions, from miscellaneous phone calls and faxes, combine with the real interruptions (meals, bathroom breaks, and a few minutes every couple of hours to rest my aching neck and back) to drag this out way longer than I thought it should take. |
