The question of what I’m going to do today can be met with a myriad of emotional responses ranging from anguish, to giddiness, to terror, to excitement. I don’t have a structured internship. Instead I have complete freedom over when I work, where I work, and whether or not I’m even bothering to put on “real clothes”. This freedom is awesome. I do not like putting on pants in the summer. I do like working in very awkward positions. Blasting Missy Elliot helps with my productivity. Sometimes I go a whole day without getting anything substantial done and that’s okay. But as Peter Parker’s uncle solemnly reminded him/us, “With great power comes great responsibility”. Time is not a renewable resource and once this second is over and done with, it’s gone forever. Sometimes I suspect my mom put the clock with the loudest ticking sound I’ve ever heard (seriously, the sound it produces is greatly disproportional with its size and demure exterior) in my room to remind me of this sobering fact.

Obviously I really care about the things I’m doing this summer including starting up a radio program on KSPC for incarcerated women, working with a shelter for battered women, and writing posts for this blog. It is super important to me that I do these commitments well.  But the pressure to deliver can feel a bit daunting sometimes because it’s not like doing a boring project that I don’t care about. In that case the pressure to deliver is external which, although it carries some weight, is not nearly as heavy as pressure that comes from within. These summer endeavors are not things that I want to do well because of such and such function it may fulfill in my life. I want to do a good job simply because I want to do a good job.

Doing a good job takes time and effort. In the face of long summer days, unrestricted internet allotment on my StayFocused extension, being “out of the hurricane radius but in the reasonably driving distance” (according to my mom) from the beach, time management is easier said than done. I would go to bed mentally listing the things I would like to get done the next day and roll out of bed the next day with a fraction of the motivation I had a sunrise earlier. Whoops. Because there’s always tomorrow, right? Days seem to last forever while weeks flash by. I often ask myself the deeply perturbing question of, “is it time to roll out the trashcans AGAIN?” because honestly it was like Thursday like yesterday.

The thing is though, things need to get done. It’s hard realizing that something is not done and should have been done the last time the garbage truck rolled around. I am sad to report that my willpower fueled by interest and desire to do a good job is simply not enough.

My strategy as of late is reminding myself of the fact that my time is limited and using the motivational momentum of the wake-up call to do the hardest step of any task: starting. It’s hard because the this step is laden with expectations, possibilities, fear, and doubt. But it’s so important it even has a name: The Zeigarnik Effect which basically just says that we feel compelled to finish whatever we started. Finishing a thing? Sounds good to me.

One of my favorite wake-up call (aka kicking myself in the butt reminders) is this video,The Time You Have In Jelly Beans. It is uber helpful in visualizing the time an average American has and I don’t use this uber lightly. Do you see that tiny portion of jelly beans left? That is the time we have to do things that mean something to us with people who mean something to us. Things that we do because we want to because we want to. People we love who love us back. I, for one, feel a sense of duty to make the most out of those jellybeans because those are the beans that will define my life.