Failure

Oops! Well, things went a bit off the rails yesterday. A while ago I enrolled in an online statistics course that, like most online courses, I had completely forgotten about. When I went to check on it yesterday, I discovered that the first assignment was due that evening. I already had a bunch of work to do on top of that and, by the time I got through all of it, I had blown my writing deadline completely.

I feel like in this case my decisions were fairly good as soon as I realised there was a problem. More specifically, if I had to run out of time for something, I think my writing was the right sacrifice. That said, there are two other degrees of failure that I'd like to look into. Firstly, that I let that online course get out of hand to the point where it blew away the rest of my time. Secondly, that when it did I had no way to deal with it, no resilience built in.

To the first issue, the trivial solution in this case is just to pay attention to the course so that it doesn't surprise me again. However, I think the more general thing is that, if I want to be able to commit to a particular schedule, there needs to be enough surrounding stability for that to be feasible. What that means is there is a kind of implicit requirement to be on top of other things in order to be on top of this. Though that's not going to be possible all of the time, the more I can achieve it the easier everything gets.

The second thing is that it's probably not okay how easily even a relatively minor screwup can totally mess everything up. Even if I'm generally pretty organised, there are always going to be emergencies. I need to make sure that my writing system is resilient enough to stand up to them. If that sounds familiar, it's because I've said it before, which makes it not just a failure but a much more dangerous meta-failure.

The solution I've attempted multiple times is to write my posts well before the deadline, but it hasn't stuck. To address that, I'm going to make the following commitment: I will finish Monday's post before I go to bed on Sunday. Assuming that goes well, I'll make the same commitment for the week after. Having a harder commitment should make it easier to follow through, and if I focus on having enough buffer at the start of the week it should carry me through to the end even if something goes wrong.