drawing my attention

[psocoptera]

What I Should be doing is job-hunting. What I have been doing is drawing.[1]

Fan art for allecto's HP ficlet Rain in a River.

And here, captured on film paper for the first time, the majestic flight of the giant space hamster (now available in miniature). For ursule.

[1]Okay, and washing my kitchen floor, washing a bunch of dishes, actually doing some of my giant handlaundry backlog, sorting through a bunch of mail, booking flights for July, printing out an up-to-date resume for my resume-advising meeting tomorrow, etc. I would actually call this a big burst of productivity except for the stalling on starting the job stuff. Part of my problem is that I set up these false sequences, like, "ok, I shouldn't start looking for industry postings until I have my resume meeting so I can send them my improved resume, because maybe a bad resume is why I didn't get interviews last time, but I shouldn't look at academic postings until I've sent some sort of personal note to my exboss at Tufts, and I shouldn't just send him email, I should return that novel of his I borrowed with a nice thankyou note for my parting gift which means papermail, and argh." Clearly I could go ahead and start finding jobs to apply for without actually being at the point of being ready to mail off resumes, and really, the only delay on the book and note and stuff is inertia. It's just, any other task seems more attractive: going to the laundromat, sorting through papers trying to prune stuff before I move, it suddenly all seems so appealing. With household tasks like that I feel almost guaranteed a certain level of visible result for a certain amount of labor. (Drawing is of course even better since there's no particular thing to accomplish other than producing something interesting, and it's almost nothing but immediate visible results ::grin::.)

Comments

[glassonion]

When i was job hunting, i think i made some sort of deal with myself wherein, if i did some number of unpleasant tasks per day (where "unpleasant tasks" generally meant "writing personal messages to other human beings regarding employment" and "some number" was usually a pretty low number, like, in the 1-3 range, possibly even at the "1" end of that range), then i would be off the hook for unpleasant tasks for the rest of the day, and could do other things. Granted, i did not, in fact, wind up getting a job using this strategy. But it sometimes helps to set things up so that the reward for doing unpleasant things is to get to stop doing unpleasant things for awhile.

[ursula]

Yay, space hamsters who say "wheep!"

[allectofromlj]

It's *wonderful*! Thank you so much!

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! Was fun to do. My first fanart too - Petunia doesn't get drawn as much, so she's less scary to do ::grin::.

[sofer.livejournal.com]

Ah, the procrastination heirarchy. I know that well. When I start cleaning out the fridge, it's really bad. When I was job hunting, I would try to fool myself into looking at postings by telling myself I just had to look, not actually do anything about them. That sometimes helped.

The giant space hamster is very cute.