The Danger of Overload

I've written here before about my seemingly permanent need to have 'a project' on the go.  It's as if I long for something to dominate my life.  Is it a case of wanting something to blame when essential but unattractive aspects of running a hone get neglected?  Or conversely does this craving stem from a need to be wanted, to have some purpose in life?  In trying to explain this phenomenon, I might have stumbled on something that is critical to my understanding of my own psyche. However, I'm going to park this for now, albeit under that general classification of 'unattractive essentials'.

After half a week of feeling under considerable stress, I've been thinking about the way that bits of what I consider 'normal activity' can suddenly grow into new 'projects' and try to take over my life.  Often when this happens, it's not because of external pressure, but due to either some force within me or, conversely, a lack of self discipline in organising my life.

Regular readers will know about my work for WEBBS.  This is voluntary work that I do because I enjoy it, because I'm in sympathy with the charity that runs it, and because I find satisfaction in what I achieve by doing it.  In recent weeks, there has been an increased incentive, because I've been working with a familiar language: the Welsh tongue that I've been grappling with on an almost daily basis since I retired.  These two interests have coincided but, while my WEBBS controllers appreciate that my knowledge of the language means that I can be more useful than usual to them, there is no means of offering this real-life exercise to the on-line course that I'm following as a means of reducing the daily demand for time spent with that.

Like many voluntary jobs, control of the flow of WEBBS work is in my own hands.  I can work at whatever speed suits me, and return stuff when it's finished.  Within a day or two of my doing so, another batch is sitting in my inbox, and the cycle begins again.  If I want a spell of time off, I just have to say, and then let them know when I'm ready to pick up again.  It's just not in my nature to work slower than I know I'm able to when the work is there.

The trouble of letting something take over like this, is that other stuff, just as enjoyable, but less motivated, gets squeezed out, unless I actually 'carve out time' to allocate to it,  I've achieved this with my work for FreeCEN, transcribing the 1861 census, so that fellow researchers can use it without the need to pay a subscription.  This now conveniently fits into Sunday afternoons.  I'm on the verge of making similar arrangements for my own family history researches, by promising myself that I'll not do anything on the current batch of WEBBS work at the weekend.  This has the effect that the only competitors for family history are Church, football and housekeeping.

So what, I hear you ask, has made this week so pressured?  For upwards of thirty years, I have been a great devotee of spreadsheets.  It started so long ago that I can't remember the name of the first program to have captivated me, but I passed through Supercalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and briefly Symphony, before the present leader, Excel took control.  During the autumn months I followed up an appeal for someone to take over as treasurer of the Quaker Meeting that I now attend regularly, and the time is now approaching to process the data for last year.  The obvious tool for this is - you've guessed it - Excel.

Over the last few weeks I've been getting familiar with the previous year's reports and preparing my own workbooks ready to enter data as soon as it's provided to me.  Yes, a new project has hit the ground running to compete with everything else.  Add to this the fact that a few normally low profile but regular interests have also bubbled up and, as minutes turn to hours and hours into days, you can see that time can easily get out of control. 

I think the extreme pressures are past now, but the experience has certainly provided encouragement for thought and a bit more personal discipline!