Posts Tagged “work”

It is the beginning of March and it is as good a time as any to get things back on track. It may as well begin on a slightly personal note, bringing readers up to speed with the past 18 months – the period this web log has been idle.

Well first a bit of context. As of around the time I logged my final post I was getting set to tackle the final academic year of the course I was reading at the University of Malta. I was also wrapping up my summer role as welfare officer and getting set to take on further work by night.

My decision to take up the offer to continue working was probably a mistake on my part and that choice did come back to haunt me later on, compounded as it were by a couple of setbacks that ultimately served to sap my will. It was just a year ago today that I respectfully resigned from my work position.

By that point things were looking rather bleak. It didn’t help that I had been working on my confirmed dissertation topic for just a few months following the scrapping of the foundation work done on earlier prospective topics.

I’ll admit that I did lose composure at times but it would have ended badly were it not for the several persons who were very supportive. Good advice, encouragement and tolerance of my repetitive (and depressing) play list at 4 o’ clock in the morning all served to grant me doses of inspiration and motivation. If it weren’t for such individuals I likely would be in much poorer shape today.

Thankfully that phase is over and done with. I’d consider returning to expand upon it, but I think that an informal note would be more palatable for the foreseeable future.

There are not many things that I truly get hung up on. For the most part things just slide off of me like water off a duck’s back. However there do remain a few things that bother me and one of the worst would probably be personal inefficiency.

I like to be punctual. It doesn’t matter if it is meeting a deadline set by others or myself or whether its getting to a certain place by or at a certain time, I do not like to keep persons waiting. It is fortunate that I do not apply these standards quite as rigorously to other persons around me as I’d probably end up with an even smaller network of individuals that I’d call friends than I do at present.

However I also have several rather annoying habits that sometimes hinder my ability to meet my own standards. One is a tendency to underestimate tasks that I have to deal with, or to overestimate my ability to deal with them within a set period of time. Another is a tendency to take on or seek to take on more tasks than I can actually handle at any one time. This is why my personal to-do list dwarfs my done list. Either way these little quirks mean that I end up encroaching upon or even surpassing my deadlines more often than I would care to admit. It is similarly fortunate that this is far more likely where the tasks are being dealt by myself and ‘for’ myself but occasionally other persons do get a bitter taste of it in the form of way-overstepped expected deadlines.

I guess it comes down to having time-management issues really and, since I am reluctant to give up the new-found pace that I’ve set into motion within this web log, I thought it would be good to use this opportunity both to apologize to that individual who is waiting for work from myself as well as to provide a little insight to readers. I am working upon it of course, and will try to get results through as soon as possible, but I’ll be sparing the estimates this time as they were wildly optimistic the last time round and I’m nowhere near done with the segment concerned.

Besides, I can be a bit of a perfectionist and if there is one thing that troubles me more than handing in work late, it would have to be handing in what I personally consider to be shoddy work.