Urgent things: reading papers, writing essays, booking a bed in a Bristol hostel for next week, writing posts here to assuage my guilty conscience.
Important things: working out what the hell I’m doing with my life (should I do graduate work, and if so, where? What’s next, after that? Where do I see myself in ten years? In twenty?), setting up a philosophy discussion group at university, planning the Next Big Thing (for me) internet and publishing-wise.
What urgent things should you be doing? What important things are hovering on the edge of your thoughts? Are the urgent things really as urgent as all that, or could you afford to take some time and think about the important things?
5 comments
October 15th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Cyrris
Well, I have to do a fair bit of homework for uni, as I have a maths test coming up soon and I didn’t do as well as I should have in the last one. Study isn’t so bad once you get started… it’s just starting that I find almost impossible to do. Although it’s somewhat urgent, I don’t find maths overly important. Or any of my uni subjects for that matter.
October 15th, 2005 at 12:25 pm
thefrogprincess
I have much to be doing, you know I like making lists about it. I need to renew my passport; it expired a year ago and needs to be back by the time I go away at Christmas. I need to find new furniture for my room; living in a big pile of STUFF is more annoying than I remember it, and it turns out I like having floor space. I need to get the documents for my job, set up my printer, get a young person’s railcard, change the internet package, get my train ticket, phone Orange to see about cancelling my direct debit and ring my friend who left me a message yesterday.
Less importantly, I need to wash my hair, decide what to wear to work next week, find something to eat tonight, pack for my adventures in Birmingham and Bath, find some new music to listen to and hoover my room so we don’t get mice.
October 15th, 2005 at 12:28 pm
ionfish
That passport thing is the top of the ‘Urgent’ list for me too; I’ve been really useless about it. Maybe I’m scared of getting my photo taken–I filled out the passport form online and and had it sent to me over six months ago.
Cyrris: I’ve found that university courses which before were merely things I supposed I had to do in order to get a degree are, now I need a really good mark, suddenly very important to me. But I agree about work; it’s getting going that’s the really hard thing to do. I am an expert at faffing about.
October 15th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
SquidDNA
Urgent: Absolutely have to get my workstudy paperwork processed, get this new gel technique to work like it’s supposed to, clean the apartment.
Important: Cancel my landline, digitcal cable, cable internet, get a DSL, get more numbers on my genetic study, clean the apartment, get an oil change, and read a paper or two now and then to keep in touch with the rest of the scientific community so I know what the hell people are talking about outisde of my specialized field.
I tend to never get any of the important things done; too often I wait until they become urgent. “Clean the apartment” has popped to urgent because I’m almost out of bread and I’ve slotted tomorrow to work on the gel technique, thus today I’m baking. Hopefully I can get the chance to talk to someone about DSL today. “So when you say 1.5 to 3MBit, how am I, as a consumer, going to measure that? That’s not a vauge and empty promise, right, it’s a guarantee I’ll actually get that on this end?”
October 16th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
nikky
urgent; find ben a doctor. bring ben home
important; get ben a cot