By Brandon Penny, Emerson College

Don’t you love it when you’re being really productive on a particular day, or in a particular week?  I do.  It’s such a great feeling.  That euphoric feeling causes me to make all of these specific goals for myself of what I’m going to do in a certain day, or over a certain period of time.  When I set goals, they’re realistic in my mind, and they make me excited because I realize how productive I can potentially be and how accomplished I’m going to feel.

Productivity rocks.  But failure stinks.  Sometimes I fail at my goals because of lack of motivation, but sometimes I fail because life gets in the way.  That’s something I’ve experienced a lot of lately.

Two weeks ago, I was in the middle of uploading video to my computer from an HD flip camera and all of a sudden I received the message, “Windows Explorer has stopped working,” immediately followed by, “Windows Explorer is restarting.”  The problem was, these two messages kept repeating, and I literally could not do a thing on my laptop.

This was a serious problem, considering I had transcribed several interviews on my computer that I needed to begin working with as soon as possible.  Not to mention my entire life from the past two years [in the form of documents, pictures, video, music, etc.] was on my computer and could possibly never be retrieved again.  I was forced to put a tremendously important project on hold to learn how to just breathe and wait it out.  It was beyond my control at that point, since I was waiting on discs from Dell and for their employees to successfully help me.

Five days [and a few hundred dollars] later, my computer was fixed and luckily for me, all of my files were successfully backed up and saved.  Of course I couldn’t actually open anything until my parents mailed Microsoft Office and some other software to me.  But that entire week really helped me to work on not stressing, and realizing that sometimes things happen and you just have to live with it.

About a week later, I met my next enemy: sleep.  I had set these great goals for myself of when I was going to write certain stories and how long it would take me to write each one.  A few days into my super-productive week, I realized my goals weren’t very realistic.  I must have assumed that I am invincible and can continue to work long hours and write stories day after day, night after night, without much sleep.  Well, after a few consecutive nights of only four hours of sleep, it all caught up to me.  One night, I was so determined to work on an article I needed to write, but it became impossible for me to write.  I continued to fall asleep from 6 p.m. until 1:30 a.m., and I did not get enough done in that time.  Everything I tried, from chewing gum to walking around seemed to fail and nothing woke me up for more than a few minutes.  I was reminded once again that we all need sleep eventually. Telling myself, ‘I’m going to sit down and write this article until it’s done,’ is not always realistic when you can’t stay awake – and, oh yeah, 5-hour Energy doesn’t always work.

This past Saturday, life happened once again, and killed my plans for productiveness.  I have a total of seven stories due this week, and I planned on writing as many as I could this weekend.  Saturday morning, I attended a weightlifting event, then did phone interviews with a swimming coach and diving coach, and met up with a skeleton-turned-weightlifting athlete to interview her.  After all that, I planned on writing, writing, writing for the rest of the day and night.

What I didn’t plan on doing was going to the emergency room.  Ever since Tuesday, there has been something seriously wrong with my foot.  I am in excruciating pain when I walk, and it also hurts sometimes when I’m just sitting.  The pain hadn’t stopped or gotten any better, so come Saturday afternoon, I was so fed up with it I figured I had to make the right decision and figure out what’s wrong with me.  Fortunately, there is a hospital right next to the Olympic Training Center so I walked myself over there [I know, doesn’t sound like the brightest idea].  Unfortunately, they weren’t able to help me.  The X-rays showed there is nothing wrong with my bones, and ER doctors can’t tell me much more than that.  My best guess is that I pulled/twisted/strained something, but I’m not a doctor.  I may wind up finding a podiatrist if it’s still bothering me in a week or so.

Point being, I wound up getting none of the writing that I planned to do on Saturday done.  I spent a few hours in the emergency room, and was very tired and wiped out from that experience to do much afterwards.  You would think that I’ve learned to stop setting goals, because life will continue to get in the way and I’ll continue to fail.  On the contrary, I’m still going to set ambitious goals for myself and learn to live with computer malfunctions, sleep, and ER visits when they get in the way, because on the rare occasion that I am successfully productive, it feels awesome.