do 10 minutes a day of routine tasks at work

I don’t do boring.

But yesterday my computer had a major glitch in which it threw everything, I mean everything (mail, documents, bookmarks, etc.), into the “recycle bin” and it took a lot of doing to get it all back. My IT person at work did a bunch of salvage for me over the VPN, I fiddled a lot, and S helped me restore some stuff. Ugh, it’s hellish. Even now, not all the settings are quite the way I like them. And I am virtually wandering, hoping I won’t notice more things are missing.

So I want to get back to this goal because in my mind, part of “routine tasks” is getting my computer cleaned up and backed up and streamlined. This is complicated because by restoring files and things, everything got restored. Things that were “thrown away” deliberately before came back with the things I want.

So, first I want to figure out what to discard again. Then I want to put my bookmarks on del.icio.us (or whereever the periods go), which I once started to do, but got lazy about. Then I want to get back to whittling down my e-mail, saving important stuff into documents. Then I can save my documents to my directory on the office network, so they can’t be lost if something catastrophic happens to my laptop. Basically, I want most everything to be available to me online or on my office network, and very little tied to the actual, frail, unreliable computer.

Oh, fun times. Whine. I hate doing boring stuff like this. I am really really bad at coping with being bored.

I’ve probably done this about every other day. But that’s way better than before adding the goal!

And, as with anything else, once I get started I often do more than the minimum. It’s just deciding to start that is the problem.

But as with any job, there are clerical things that need to be done. Forms to submit, lists to update, documents to transfer. Yawn. I tend to procrastinate these, because I am very easily bored, and it’s much easier to ignore them in favor of things that aren’t so mind-numbing. But I need to do these things. I think I’m ready to lose the constant feeling of guilt about these things that really aren’t all that hard to do.

So instead of procrastinating these boring things, I am going to do them in 10-minute chunks. I will set a timer for 10 minutes each day. (Starting tomorrow, because I’ve done more than 10 minutes of this kind of thing already today.)

Once I catch up on some of the other things I have been procrastinating, deleting old e-mails can be done in this 10-minute chunk of time. That’ll help me with another goal!