The shackles of religion

Well, well, who'd have thought it? I'd been grouching a bit to A about how I'm permanently slighty grumpy about never getting much done. Life is a long round of breastfeeding and laundry, now punctuated by bouts of banana-mashing. But I also spend a fair amount of time in front of the computer, so it's not as though the time isn't there.... Anyway, A wrote me a very sweet email, partly telling me I was doing a great job -- it's funny that however confident you are, this makes a HUGE difference -- but also suggesting that, as a time-management solution, I try to think of childcare as my primary task and other stuff as secondary, rather than the childcare being something that gets in the way of what I should be achieving. He also suggested only attempting one secondary thing per day.

Now, I thought I was doing this all before -- all the books and websites say not to be be too ambitious and not to be too hard on yourself, after all. Also, because I'm naturally very lazy, I've always thought that it's only guilt about being such a slob that motivates me. (It's a Catholic trait, they say.) But I was wrong. It turns out that it was guilt that incapacitated me. I'd get up late, then spend the rest of the day mentally berating myself for having made a bad start, and get too glum about it to feel energised to do anything. Now I'm still getting up late, because I'm tired, but free of the guilt, I'm achieving huge amounts -- windows cleaned, people phoned, emails sent. Gosh, it's terrific. What a genius my lovely man is.