Okay, so, now that we're all here, can I whinge/vent? Marvellous.
I have become painfully aware that I keep letting people down at the moment, because I think I can do things then it turns out I can't do everything so end up doing nothing. And so I try to make up by promising more then of course it just all gets worse.
I say this for a number of reasons.
1) I've had a couple of beers and people are here now and it's great
2) Sorry if you've had to interact with me in the last week or so
3) Am I actually rubbish or is this just normal? And if it is just normal, why?
4) For better or worse, I seem to have got away with what I'm doing for a while now, so maybe it's useful for junior people to know I feel this way
5) Other things that I really can't say in a public forum
6) I'm totally going on strike in a couple of weeks https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/12609/Biggest-ever-university-strikes-set-to-hit-UK-campuses-over-pay-conditions--pensions
I will probably delete this shortly...
re: Academia. Whinging/venting.
@edwinb one more thing, that can easily make one uncomfortable (and cause positive change) is time-boxing. I'm doing time-boxing for most of the previous week because I feel like I'm too distratcted and I can actively see how minutes of underperforming (in my case, through distractions) turn into hours of underperforming. This allows me to immediately calibrate my perception and thus, promises to others.
There's also a "kanban-reset" trick or "sorry, I won't do it" trick. If you track issues somehow, look at the most stale ones and tell the person or the people "sorry, I won't do it after all". It feels rather bad, but normally people are understanding and you'll either find a way to delegate or it will turn out that the issue wasn't that important in the first place. Kanban reset is, of course, something I would put into the "last resort" bucket.
But also, and I can't emphasise that enough, having a CBT psychotherapist is a huge positive EV. For fifty quid a week, (or for two hundred, I don't know the prices here, my therapist is Croatian), you get a professional who can force reflection and provide you with a toolbox tailored to your particular set of unwanted behaviours (or lack of wanted behaviours).