Somedays I think my life would be easier if I were an obsessive-compulsive.*

Let’s look at what I’m doing right now: Working a consultant engineering job, with its attendant time consumptions, busy putting in more personal exercise hours than I have since high-school, trying (and failing) to keep a bi-weekly podcast operation, trying (and not doing so well) to keep interesting content up on this blog, maintaining a house and yard, maintaining a spousely relationship, trying to catch up on my scrapbooking, trying to catch up on my reading, trying to keep up with my professional journals, trying to maintain friendship relations with people who don’t live near here, plus myriad other things. Ugh. There’s not enough time in the day. If I were OCD, I might have one or two of these that I MUST DO EVERY DAY, but as it is, I flit from one to the next as they catch my attention and must put in real effort to maintain a constant level of dedication to a project.

Jenn complains of the exact same thing as what I just wrote; she’s got too much to do. I need to take the advice that I give her: “Just don’t do all of that.” Of course, I won’t give up on my spousely committments, nor can I give up on my professional committments. I have a serious time investment right now in my fitness that I will not allow to slacken, thusly everything else sort of slides. Especially the yard (boy, do I need to edge the lawn, it looks like grassy octopi are attacking our road and driveway). I’ve also been reading a lot less than I used to, which is a shame because there is so much good stuff out there.

Probably the thing I could do that would most effectively give me time back would be to quit writing and reading blogs. That must take up at least an hour a day, and more on the weekends, plus my ~6 hours-per-two-weeks committement for the podcast. Or I could quit watching TV, but like the reading thing, there’s a lot of good stuff out there.

Alas, at the moment I don’t see a whole lot that would be easy to scrub. And truthfully, despite the slightly whiny tone to this post, I’m not feeling stressed by my committments at the moment. I hearken back to the days in college when I really didn’t have any committments (besides my wife and the band) and smile. Now, it’s time to go and upload some photos to flickr!

*CoverMyAss: I am in no way implying that behavioral disorders are good, or that I think people with OCD have it easy. This is a thought experiment and I’ll emphasize I don’t know anything about OCD that isn’t broadcast and sterotyped on national TV networks.