Ev'rybody wants to work

No, no, not me...

It's one of the few occasions where my life co-incides with that of Brian Mannix.

I'm a professional, moderately successful, leader of men. Yet I don't like working.

The results are fine. It's just the doing of it is a joyless exercise.

I've talked about procrastination before, and I think this is an echo from when it first arose. The first few years of my career were spent hating it. Actually, it goes back to uni when I worked out fairly early on that accounting was not something I enjoyed all that much. It was the fear of letting my parents down, I think, that kept me going at it.

The wash up is that I take very little pleasure in the day to day of my work. I've managed to ditch most of the technical, boring accounting stuff now but dealing with the mundane of my current job still brings out the bad stuff.

One of the ways I combat this is to reward myself e.g. get the report done and I'll buy myself lunch today. Problem is, I find that I over reward myself. Just last week, I worked at home till 12.30, got in before 7.00, worked 2 hours and spent the next two in a meeting. My reward was to go and get my lunch and spend a half hour on Google reader catching up on my feeds. Unfortunately, I sat there until 3 and wasted the benefits of my hard work.

A tool I'm working on from my last session is the 3 D's as used in addiction therapy - Delay, Dilute, Divert. And it's kind of worked until today. I'm away on work and had allocated the afternoon for doing some grind work for the budgets. The sheer effort of working on this crap and not giving myself a reward that would end up with me not dong anything has now left me with a headache and insomnia, which is why I'm blogging and not sleeping. Sigh.

The work wasn't hard, btw, just of the kind that seems to jerk my chain, procrastination wise.

Here's some Uncanny X-men to cheer me up:

So what's the worst sound to hear at the dentists?

Is it:

a. 'That will be $213 for today and we'll make the next booking for two week's time';
b. The dentist's favourite drill - 'the rattler'; or
c. 'I'm just puncturing the abscess now and then let the pus drain out'.