WillWybrow.com

Let me tell you, writing about things these days is pretty much impossible. Thanks to the modern miracles of education and instant communication, hundreds of more intelligent, more well-read individuals than I have complete, unmoderated access to the content of my long-lived, infrequently-pruned blog. Given my awareness of how woefully I stack up against the intellect of close friends, it has become all but impossible for me to feel confident about almost any worthwhile topic. Things interesting me at the moment, for example, include the ongoing state of the negative influence of religion. But there are dozens of popular godless blogs dealing with commentary on that situation, all of them together having covered all the pertinent issues beforehand and leaving the only scope for new ideas as comment on news stories. So any relevant content is going to be second-hand at least, and nobody will want to read amateurish, immaturely-toned blog posts about what they could get on any news website.

Even if I were to come across my own first-hand news, there are those who are far better schooled in language than I who could do significantly more readable work presenting said news. There are plenty of people I know personally with more insight, more imagination and more skill in conveying persuasively exactly what they mean. This means I am ruled out of writing about other things that interest me as well, such as films I’ve seen. All the things I used to be the only one doing are now being done much better by all these new people I know.

It has left me feeling unqualified to write about anything but myself, and I am not such an interesting person that I could create successful content out of that. Nor do I feel like I could create something genuinely humorous for entertainment, even by writing about the topics I used to, but from behind a thick fog of feigned ignorance. Being exposed to real people who can write well has eliminated nearly everything I used to be able to do by showing it up to be so far from acceptable quality that it loses all value.

I still often have brief flashes of inspiration, where I’ll realise that most people are dreadfully wrong about something, but too often they can be summed up in one or maybe two 140-character posts, so never make it this far.

Up until this point, you might be thinking I am just having a little self-pitying whinge about personal inadequacies, but that’s not really what I am driving at. I’m just looking for a new angle to approach writing from, since it’s something I do really enjoy doing, and this is my little way of asking you to bear with me while I come up with something to do.

…but here it is anyway, because I don’t have anything new to write

All the important bits are here, with some context on either side of the year to help you figure them out, if you can.

I didn’t put labels on it because nobody really cares. But you can all look at the fading lines and maybe imagine what your own picture of the year looks like.

This past week, I’ve been (re)discovering the power of a well-structured to-do list.

I always get a surge of motivation just before bed time. I look back on my whole day, which has usually been wasted just trying to find little things to do on the internet to while away the obscene amount of free time I have, and wish I’d done something more productive. This leads to a regular occurrence, the ten minute long future-planning sequence where I’ll think fondly about how different things will be in the future, a habit that started off even before the whole deal with the altercation and the trial that between them have consumed my life this year.

Anyway, aside from a lot of far-off hopes and aspirations that take a form similar to New Year’s Resolutions (and have as much impact), I’ll also come up with some things to do in the immediate future. I might think of something I’ll need to go out and buy, something of mine that needs finding from my scattered and unsorted possessions or perhaps someone who needs to be emailed or phoned (usually before a specific time). More often than not, when I wake up in the morning, I’ll have forgotten, and failing that, I’ll be too apathetic to get it done. And occasionally I’ll oversleep and fail by running out of time in the day.

Enter the humble, hand-written to-do list! Harnessing my nightly dose of motivation when it strikes, I can put down a list of jobs to do the following day. So I tried it for a few days this week. I’ve had lots of little things to take care of as well as one big ongoing task that has earned me money for the two or three Christmas presents I am actually buying this year (it’s not real employment, more on jobs later). Building a list before I go to bed at night gives me a plan for the day, and it is easier to follow the plan than it is to remember all the things I’ve got to do and decide by ear which ones I should pay attention to. It’s also easier than mindlessly bumming around the house filling my face from the fridge while watching TV and refreshing Facebook. Just following the list requires the least mental effort, so that’s what I do. Having motivation strike just before going to bed is useless without being able to carry the motivation over to the next day with a hard plan.

Aside from letting me practise my film title parodies by naming each list as a sequel to its predecessor, having these lists means I have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings. Where, without a plan, I might optimistically aim for a 10am morning, this would consistently become noon or later as I’d stagger out of bed in that state of tiredness that comes from having too much sleep (which I think everyone gets?). If I ever had an ambitious attempt at getting even earlier (due to the reasoning that if a 10am alarm means I get up at 12pm, to get up at 10 I should set the alarm for 8), I ran the risk of not hearing my new phone’s pathetic attempt at an alarm sound or turning it off in my sleep and snoozing right on through.

Well, some of you may know that I’ve had a couple of job interviews this week. The first was at 4:30pm, so not particularly straining on my undisciplined lifestyle, but the second (same place, different day) was in the morning. Not wanting to run the risk of not hearing my alarm go off, I fished out my proper alarm clock, packed away in whichever box it came back from university in, way back in June. Not only is this alarm louder, it is less forgiving with the snooze button, only giving me four minutes of snoozing before piping up again with an even more annoying bleep each time. What’s more, it projects the time on the wall, which is pretty cool. So, thusly armed, I was able to make it to my interview on time. Good thing, too, because I did really well in this second interview, whereas I’d not done nearly as well in the first one.

One of the additional benefits to having this new alarm clock was that, in conjunction with my deferred motivation tactic of penning out some to-do lists, I could now reliably get up at a normal person’s time of morning. I was hitting the 7s and 8s in the morning that I’d almsot forgotten existed.

One other thing I should mention about the faithful handwritten list is the satisfying ability to cross things off it. What’s nice about the analogue system of pen and paper is that you can cross an item off really vigorously when you complete a tough task. It validates and amplifies any sense of accomplishment you get after doing a job to be able to scrawl a huge tick across the words.

So now I am back in practice with regard to motivation and hitting the early mornings, even when still not going to bed until 2 or 3am. What use is that especially to a man whose only time is free time? Not much, you might think. That is, until you find out that nailing the second interview for that job seemed to counterbalance the less successful first interview and has secured me the job title of ‘junior engineer’ at an electronics company. That’s right, your favourite layabout Facebook-jockey, Will Wybrow, is going to be a productive member of society again, and you can attribute it all to to-do lists.

The sequel to the original list, which I had titled Shit to Do.

The third in the series was a flop.

Set years in the future, Shit to Do 4.0 was created with a contemporary theme to appeal to the shifting demographic its predecessors couldn’t ever target.

Hello, friends! It is that time of year again where we all get together and celebrate CJ’s existence! It is something, I am sure, that we all do over and over in our daily lives, but it is nice to have one single day set out for it that we can all participate in.

Please attach the CJR Day Twibbon to your Twitter avatar to show your support for CJ. You don’t have to keep it on for long (unless you want to), but it’s just a wonderful gesture in support of our wonderful mutual friend.

It is customary on CJR Day for everyone to take a little time out of their days to think up one thing about CJ that they appreciate. If you can fit this in to 118 characters, that would be ideal, since you could then post it on Twitter in the format @twistedeuclid [thing we appreciate] #cjrday so everyone can see it.