I can’t for the life of me keep to a schedule. Oh, I can get to work on time and keep appointments and for the most part go to bed at a sensible hour, because Evening-Sofie has finally figured out that if she makes Morning-Sofie sleepy, that sleepiness is passed on though Afternoon-Sofie, and nobody has any fun. But as for internal schedules - schedules for stuff that nobody else cares about (except of course if it doesn’t get done at all) - I’ll happily make them, but they’re a guilt-edged (hah) invitation to Do Something Else. 

Write? I need to do some programming, now. Finish editing that draft? I haven’t finished putting the washing on. It came to my attention mostly when I realised it was well past time that I was cooking dinner, and yet I was emailing my mother (I call these queries ‘Moogling’) to ask her advice on how to better keep to a schedule.

 I thought I was good at scheduling. I managed my Honours degree while working part time and with almost a month spare for polishing the thesis. I completed two masters degrees at the same time while working three jobs. But those were all based on external deadlines. They had a logical order, and due dates carved in stone, and the left side of my brain has learned how to manage those effortlessly. 

The left side of my brain is a scheduling-nazi. It likes everything to be planned out so it knows what I’ll be doing and when, how much time I can expect to spend on a project, when a project will be finished or ready for the next stage, what else I can fit in. It gets very upset when other people ride roughshod over that with invitations to go be social somewhere. It gets stressed when things on today’s To Do list aren’t done. 

The right side of my brain hates those schedules. Especially if they have times attached to them - write from 6pm to 8pm - but I don’t feel like it right now. I’d rather work on this. Get this list of 5 things done - okay, we’ll do some of those, but surely some of them can wait until tomorrow, or next week even. 

It's usually my left brain that thinks about scheduling and organising. And it can't understand what the problem is - why is it so hard? Surely I'm just being lazy, just put the butt in the chair and do the work. It sees it as a discipline problem, but I'm not so sure of that.

I still get things done. And anything with an external deadline - go to work, go to sleep, get these critiques done - will be completed on time. But my right brain is resisting any attempts to plan or schedule when my creative projects will be worked on, and which one gets worked on when 

I’m still looking for a solution, here. Some way to convince my right brain to work with some kind of predictability. But as they say, the first step is always recognising there’s a problem, and my problem is the part of my brain that does all the creative stuff has no interest in doing so on demand. I’ll keep you posted if I find some solutions.