The further I go...

Last Monday morning, I woke up with a hangover. This was bad for several reasons: firstly, its tenacity meant that my useful output for the day was almost guaranteed to be rather low; secondly, it being the first Monday of the month, I felt it should be started as I meant to carry on; and thirdly, being hungover on a Monday at all gave me recurring thoughts along the 'I need to sort my life out' lines.

I have always been ridiculously superstitious about things like New Year; I have a new year/month/week = a new start kind of mentality, and always think that anything useful should only be started on either the 1st of the month or a Monday. If the two happen to coincide, my mind boggles with the regenerative possibilities. Sadly, I struggle to extend this mentality to new day = new start, and so this week, for example, I have really achieved very little, having essentially written the whole week off because Monday was a bad beginning. Now, I'm not saying that I've done nothing; I have done lots of things, but nothing so speedily as I could have, and certainly without the urgency that I should by now be feeling. (I have had several conference papers accepted in the last couple of weeks, all to be presented in June - which is marvellous, except that I completely forgot about that minor thing - Progression.) Yet again, it's Thursday and when I come to evaluate what I've done this week I don't really know what I'll say.

I'm meant to have nearly finished the research for a paper examining the relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, through their works based around the biblical Cain. The title of this post is taken from one of Byron's letters to his mother whilst he was travelling in Greece in 1810; the sentence. 'The further I go, the more my laziness increases,' sums up my worry about my journey into academia so far. However much I love what I'm researching, thus far I've been truly terrible at keeping myself in a routine. I've given myself plenty of excuses: after teaching, after Christmas, after this paper's written, and, invariably weekly, after the weekend I will do better. But, again invariably, I don't. When I was working in a 'real job' (as in, regular hours, regular pay, and 'Sunday syndrome'), Sunday nights were my sleepless ones, where I dreaded going to work. That wasn't because I didn't enjoy my job - I did - but it wasn't what I really wanted to do, and so Sunday nights tended to be spent sleeplessly wondering about how to achieve my professional goals (getting onto a PhD, basically), and all the things I would do and learn when I got there. Nowadays, Mondays are the sleepless nights, when I think about all the things I was adamant I would do, and the routine I was sure I'd maintain, and try to self-evaluate to work out what's been going wrong. Imagine the plunge in my self-confidence when, every week, the only excuse I can make to myself is, like Byron, recurrent laziness.

Unfortunately, unlike Byron, it is highly unlikely that I will ever become a world-renowned poet, and in posterity there will be no-one to excuse my laziness as part of a higher creative purpose. It's unlikely, too, that in future job interviews the phrase 'I could have done more' will impress. So, does all this self-indulgent whining have a point? To be honest, not really, but I am interested to know how other people manage their time, and how others motivate themselves. How do you stop yourself from stagnating at your desk? All suggestions will be gladly taken up. On Tuesday (after Easter).