Performance Quotas

Since retiring, there is very little exogenous pressure on me to do things.  I have to create those myself.  Some projects have gone well, some languished.  I get things in on deadline, but can procrastinate a lot, maybe an inner mechanism that serves me well for enough things that it has been ingrained.  The exceptions have been reading, where I stay ahead of schedule and housework where results can be seen.

Perhaps what brings success in these are performance quotas, structured in different ways but measurable.  For long works, I will set a timer and read until the timer runs down or to the page beyond that.  If parts of a book or article are sectioned in shorter ways, I will read to the end of predetermined section that day.  Same with New England Journal.  The personal rule is two articles a week, which I have recently maintained, aided perhaps by CME credit.  For Medscape, today I will read this or write this.   The tasks are defined and paced resulting in high completion results.

For housework, pacing the big projects is harder.  I will do milchig/fleishig dishes right now, perhaps.  But creating My Space, making the Living Room and Family Room functional, and creating walking paths in the basement needed more than quotas.  The timer did less well on these.  Setting regions went better, sorting papers for save or recycle sometimes offered better results.  Not very different from learning anatomy where you can look at a region or you can master a system.  What seems to emerge as the common theme is the specificity of what constitutes a successful effort.  When I know when I'm done, I am able to get done.  Those things where intermediate steps are less observable, my gardens, entertaining visitors, organization participation tend to be less effectively pursued.  I need to do better at making as much tangible as possible.