Duck Wrangling

I took a week off to work on my thesis. Fat lot of good that seems to be doing me.

I've been spending days getting my ducks all in a row (I love that metaphor) based on the assumption that, once I had my ducks all neatly lined up, I'd be able to knock everything over with relative ease and efficiency.

Trouble is, it's taking an awfully long time to line up those ducks. Things I thought would take me half an hour are taking me close to three hours. And then I have to make my brain work well enough to re-write passages I couldn't write all that well in the first place.

Damn EndNote and it's promises of a better way of doing literature reviews. Damn it for being right, so I can't happily ignore it.

Damn my own tendency to put in too much detail on some days and not enough on others, so that I'm either wasting time putting in more than I need, or wasting time finding what I didn't put in.

Damn my lack of temporal awareness and poor concept of lineal time. I don't even notice how much time I'm wasting on lining up those stupid ducks until I realise I'm getting tired and finding it hard to focus - whoops, there goes another hour.

And yet, the ducks must be wrangled. If I don't waste time on it now, I'll be wasting time on it later. I know this because I was supposed to waste time on it over the course of the last six or so months, which would mean I wouldn't be wasting time on it now. But, you know, it was just so time consuming...

It's Friday, and I'm not even a quarter into what I wanted to do this week. Complete a draft? That's a laugh. I won't even clean up my first chapter by Monday.

Damn stupid ducks.

And, just for the heck of it: Damn.