Ok, I'm gonna have to stop listening to audio books

I keep losing my train of thought while listening to 'The Valley of Horses'.

I did pretty good today.

There was only a quarter of an hour in the ‘wasted time’ category.  I even recorded all of my Clarity time.  If I work on some courses at home, that would be a trifecta. 

 

I know what I'm doing, now how do I fix it?

I think that one of the reasons that I procrastinate on starting things is because a 'commitment' issue.  I try to get classes or assistance on things such a programming language because, besides having someone that I can bounce questions off of, it 'commits' me to that thing -- learning a new programming language, dance class -- in my brain.  'Tuesday at 7pm' is devoted to that item, most especially when I have to go to that class.  Having paid for that class solidifies it, in a sense.  I'll even sit through the difficult parts having paid for that class; leaving means that I have wasted the money, and have missed something that I could have learned.  Whenever I don't do that, my mind doesn't 'catalog' that time in my brain as that 'work' period.  When I actually go to another location for the class I lose my focus less.

When I don't have that setup, there are a handful on other things that get chosen instead.  I keep my work setup on a different PC so that I don't get distracted by something on my main PC: an email, some web page, etc.  Even looking for a music track can lead to something that I had not planned on doing, such as editing tracts and files, or checking out stuff in folders, etc.  Even then, I will be on both at once, doing anything but what I'm supposed to be doing for work, and doing 'interesting' stuff on my PC.

The thing is, I want to do all of the things at the same time, even studying, or practicing, or whatever.  I would guess the easier, already set up, thing gets picked first.  I also have the issue of spending more time than I planned and other such crap, which doesn't help.  As in: oh, this will only take a few minutes, and it winds up taking three times as long (reading instead of skimming, maybe obsessing over neatness or sequence; then 'oh yeah, I wanted to do this, left it off of the todo list, crap let me go and get it started; and the weekend continues on that way -- and then throw in watching recorded shows -- and I get to Sunday night and some of the todo items undone, like maybe some work that I forgot all about or not starting on a work goal, or the messy workroom, etc.

Of course, it's always easier to choose when there is less to choose from.  When I went to community college in the 80s, all I had was class, so it was easier to give more attention to it.  When I started DeVry, work and school was somewhat separate, and doable.  Throw in marriage, and difficult classes, other things to turn attention towards popped up.  A lot of overtime, however that's a whole another post.  End of the 90's, I made myself choose one of two projects, so that I could see results that much faster.  Tried classes on and off, always stopped when either difficult, or that time that I was seeing someone (another different story),

This is probably very convoluted.  I'll have to go back and clean it up later/