NOTE: This is a another draft from before my Mom quit dialysis.
Remember how I wrote about being overwhelmed by my various “To Read” book lists and shelves and piles? Well, I decided to sit down and try to consolidate all those lists to the one “Want To Read” shelf on Goodreads like I had mentioned in that post. As I was adding a book my kid wanted me to read, I noticed it was written by a white guy. I decided to look him up because I spent a decade unintentionally reading books only written by straight white guys (Dean Koontz, James Patterson, Dan Brown, etc) and so now I only read books by straight white guys if there’s a really good reason. (Like a recommendation from a kid in my family.)
As I was looking him up to at least make sure he was not unworthy of me breaking my Straight White Guy author fast, I found his instagram and decided to check that out to get a better feel for him. That’s when I discovered I had messages from some people regarding a skin problem I had posted about on my instastory. (Something I had forgotten I had posted about.) So, I opened messages to read some suggestions and ideas from people.
One of the stories really sounded like it matched the problem I was having, so I went to Google to learn more about the issue. I spent a bit of time clicking around pages about symptoms and treatments and causes. I started thinking about my moisturizer and went to the bathroom to go get it so I could read the label.
In the bathroom I noticed a mess left by the kids the night before and started cleaning that up. As I was cleaning that up I needed to put up some shoes in one of their bedrooms where I found dirty food dishes. So I grabbed the dirty food dishes to put in the sink where (CAN YOU GUESS?) I found a sink full of dishes to wash.
While I was washing the dishes it occurred to me that I was hungry, so I preheated the oven to make biscuits. Then I thought, I need to kill time while the oven heats up…what should I do? I looked at the table and saw my laptop was out and open so I sat down at it thinking well…looks like I was working on something, let’s try to remember what that was.
And when I woke up the laptop I saw the Goodreads “Want To Read” shelf.
I had sat down an hour or more earlier to cross “consolidate book lists” off my To Do list for the day and then proceeded to A) not finish the original task and B) start several other tasks along the way that I also didn’t finish.
BUT. It did give me this idea for a substack post so, I did…eventually…complete a task. It just wasn’t the original task, or the following 5 others that I accidentally started along the way.
I TOTALLY do that some times also. The worst is when I do it at work.