Deadline-driven

Some people are self-motivated. They wake up at an hour they set, they plan their days and they stick to their plan. I used to think that I was one of them, in moments of especial self-delusion. When a small voice at the back of my head would raise some doubts about the veracity of such beliefs, I would pinpoint some specific instances when I would have made a plan and stuck to it, or invest some small incidence with special significance to prove this point.

Last week, the daycare/preschool place put into effect a strict rule (no more gentle guidelines, for tardy moms like me) that kids have to be dropped off by 9am or will no longer be allowed inside the place. If you who know me and have even a small idea of my kid-dropping-off schedule, you will understand the utter shock to the system this rule was. I have routinely been dropping off kids anywhere between 10am to noon at daycare, precisely because I could. On the infrequent days when I schedule a morning meeting, I make a special effort to drag myself and the kids out by 8:30am, but that's fairly rare. All my meetings, experiments, deadlines usually are kept during the latter half of the day.

Today has been day #4 of dropping the kids off to school before 9am, and I can clearly see that I am, to most extent, rule- and deadline- driven. Unless acted upon by an external, implacable force, I, alas, tend to stay at rest and simultaneously tend towards disorderliness, thereby combining both the first law of Newton as well as the second law of Thermodynamics.

What's utterly surprising to me is that how easy this transition was- I am not scrambling in the mornings, the way I used to when the deadline was not there; instead, I find that I have time to wash the dishes, and give the kids a bath, along with breakfast and packing lunch. How utterly strange!

Perhaps the rule makes me plan out my mornings the previous night, so I am no longer disoriented and trying to create a plan while getting everybody ready as soon as I wake up.

It's a bit sad that I apparently need an external somebody threatening to punish me before I can get my act together. But hey, at least the job gets done. And now I have a new insight into myself.

All this reflection, all this self-obsessed blogging all these years, and I find that the person I know the least is the one closest to me.

Today seems to be a day for profound insights.