Give a 'Rot a Job:

A fully decorated room!

A website filled with content that you’re proud of!

A finally finished fanfiction from the 8th grade!

What do these things all have in common? They are complete. They are a full checkmark in the box of your life and can finally move out of your already chaotic brain. Honestly, there’s just something about a fully done task that really gets me going. I make to-do lists all the time (I have a notebook dedicated solely to making lists) to get to this level of transcendent completion, but recently I’ve been struggling with actually following through with my tasks. I decided it was time to be a real journalist and to find a reason why I’m not completing things, even though I love it.

“It is all too easy to treat the to-do list like a menu where you’re constantly ordering the easiest-to-swallow tasks, while the more undesirable tasks fester and grow in number,” E. J. Masicampo says for Harvard Business Review. If we actually have a set action plan to complete the items on our list, we can reach completion much faster than if we just simply slap it on a list and call it a day.

Another reason why we love completion is because it “eases the uncertainty we may feel about whether we’ll be able to achieve the task, and the related anxiety and cognitive tension we may experience at the thought of not completing it.” It’s interesting because this could actually be a byproduct of our animalistic nature from way back in the day, except instead of having anxiety over where our next meal will be or whether we will survive to the next day, it’s over that unfinished fanfiction we wrote over five years ago. Psychology is so cool, guys!

In an effort to put my completion skills to the test, I set off to complete the activities that I had started, whether that be my almost finished junk journal, that one call I need to make that I am absolutely dreading, those video games I need to finish, or even this post. We’ll start with the easiest task and move to increasingly difficult ones to see if I can use any of my previously learned skills to my advantage.

Mission 1: Calling about my failed debit card application.

Background: For my job, I have to get a company debit card to use my discount. Unfortunately for me, my pdfs glitched out the first time and I didn’t submit the right materials. Now I have to call and ask about it. I have been putting this off for two weeks.

Mission 1 Action Plan:

-Type in phone number

-Talk to representative

Completing Mission 1:

I shakily typed in the same number that I had been trying to call for weeks. I sat on hold, hoping that they would be able to do something to help me. Soon, a very nice woman answered the phone. After I slowly repeated my address (I always get scared that I talk too fast for the phone to pick up), she told me halfway through to tell me that I had already been approved for it.

Now this might seem silly to you all. “Why did we need all of this build up just for you to call someone?” I’m going to be very honest with you all when I say that I have extreme anxiety calling someone on the phone. I get really nervous when I’m talking to someone and I can’t read any of the expressions on their face. Anyways, I don’t like how anticlimactic that mission was. I actually didn’t even have to call them because I had already been approved (would have enjoyed receiving an email about that). However, with our action plan, I actually completed a task that I had been dreading for a decent amount of time! Yay!

Mission 2: I have seven pages left in my junk journal/sketchbook.

Background: I’m sorry if this hurts anyone’s feelings, but I have no problem ripping out sketchbook pages in order to complete a sketchbook. I’ve finished three sketchbooks so far, and I rip out pages all the time. The reason I do that is because sometimes things feel really stale to me. I just want to be done with it. I have seven pages left in my junk journal and I’m going to try my hardest to actually fill them up.

Mission 2 Action Plan:

*This marks the point where I gave up with this concept for about four or five days.

Completing Mission 2:

I just ripped out the leftover pages and focused entirely on painting the cover of my new sketchbook.

I completed a total of two tasks in the week I allotted myself. It’s really hard when you set goals for yourself and you just don’t complete them. I feel like I’ve wasted the week away, doing things I didn’t have to do and avoiding writing this article. I can’t help but feel like I’m losing my spark.

The good thing is that I know that I’m not the only one who is dealing with this constant cycle of “I’m stressed and I need to feel better about myself” to “I’m a shitty person and I should be done with this by now.” So I decided to do a little research on how I can negate this cycle of evil once and for all.

I got stuck down this rabbit hole of short attention spans leading to lack of ability to actually complete a task. I thought that phones would be the answer, especially with the rise in popularity of the “phone detox” helping people take back their lives and their focus. However, I found another possible route that may have been the reason why I was having such a hard time with these tasks in particular. On Quora, a man named Russell Fong gave this straightforward response about attention spans: “The brain finds it difficult to process information when the person doesn’t care. It seems to be a waste of energy to the ever efficient brain. So the brain doesn’t waste time or energy processing stuff it’s not interested in.”

“It’s not personal.”

Now Russell from Fiji brings up a good point. Obviously I was not interested in making that phone call, otherwise it would have been done a lot earlier. I must not have been creatively charged at that moment because I just wanted to finish my journal and move on to the next one. But what about the tasks that I “completed” that I didn’t necessarily need to complete. The ones that my brain was actually interested in?

Here’s a list of the same week I attempted this experiment:

-Got my wisdom teeth out

-Watched the entirety of Pop Star Academy on Netflix

-Completed several chapters’ worth of content in Deltarune

-Hung out with my friends

-Decorated my new sketchbook cover

-Planned a new time to film a segment for a web show

I think that my issue with completing tasks stems from the fact that it’s not enjoyable to complete the tasks that I genuinely don’t want to do. If I looked at all of the things I’ve completed over the course of the week, I wouldn’t think that I was such a terrible person. While at the beginning I thought that all I had “completed” was a phone call I didn’t have to make and a project that I ended up literally destroying, actually I completed a lot of things!

So here comes the real question: How do I force myself to do the things I don’t want to do? While I would love to live in a world where all of the tasks I complete are fun ones that I enjoy doing, the reality is that that isn’t necessarily all I’m going to have to do.

Cursives! Foiled Again!:

Supposedly it only takes (at a minimum) 18 days for a habit to form. Also supposedly, I think it’s funny to trick my brain into doing weird things. I was scrolling one day and I saw a video where a woman was trying to convince the viewer to write in cursive for a few reasons, but only one really stuck out to me: no one can read cursive anymore, so if you journal in cursive no one can read it. I, unlike most of the world, remember cursive and I write all of the time in my sketchbook. So I figured why not write in cursive for these 18 days and see how fast it takes root in my brain?

Spoilers: it really messed me up.

I started simple with writing just like I remembered from back in 2nd grade. Writing took me a million years and I kept itching to go back to writing like I normally do in print. My cursive was so utterly atrocious that I can barely read what I wrote the first day I started taking it seriously. I also wrote super big, something that we will see changes by the end of the experiment. If you are beginning to write in cursive again for funsies like I did, make sure you have big pages. My sketchbook is bigger than what I normally write on, so I had lots of room to remember the flourishes of cursive. Handwriting, in my mind, is like an accent. No matter what accent (cursive/”British”, print/”American”) you have, you still have the same voice. My handwriting style from print is starting to show up in my cursive a couple of days later. I still have to really think about how I’m going to write words and commonly have to go back and spell words correctly, but overall it’s not too shabby.

Well into week 2, I started writing much quicker than before, but don’t have any time to stop and think about how a word is spelled. When I normally write big words, I can stop mid-sentence and think about the letters that come next. With cursive, I feel rushed to finish the word because I cannot keep up with the speed of my mind or the speed of my hand. By the time a week and a half had passed, I completely stopped being able to write in print. I had started college back up again and was handed a sheet of paper to write on, to which I instinctively started writing cursive on. I tried to write in print several times, but I would have to exert the same effort it initially took me to write in cursive.

After my 18 days were up, I started to unnaturally flip back and forth between print and cursive. All of a sudden, I would write a cursive letter in the middle of a print word or I would have to actively decide which way I was going to write something. I started to freak out. Was I starting to think in cursive? Am I destined to forever write in cursive because I thought I could mess around with my brain? So, I started writing in print again. You know how people with non-American accents think that Americans talk super slowly? Yeah, that was me when I changed to print. All of a sudden, I was writing in slow motion, unable to keep up with how quickly I was thinking. I have a page of notes for a class written in print and I genuinely thought I was going to die while writing that page because it all felt so incredibly slow.

Even now after almost a month of recovering from this stupid experiment, I am still getting my sea legs back. I used to be able to write whole pages of notes with no problem, and now writing half of a page is exhausting.

Please never do this.

This Face Was Made For Radio:

I've done some stupid shit experiments in the past like not doing anything productive for a week and messing up my handwriting for the foreseeable future because I wanted to learn cursive again. Well now I've decided to tackle something less intrusive and awful to myself: I've decided to replace Spotify with my car radio.

For context, I've had music services for as long as they’ve been a thing. As soon as my iPod died, I had Amazon Music, and now I'm fortunate enough to piggyback off of a family Spotify Premium account. So why throw it all away? I wish I could tell you, dear reader, but my mind is a steel trap.One of the reasons might be because I get bored easily with my music. I have three playlists: the current season, work, and a compendium of any song ever added to a playlist. Every week I would listen to my Discover Weekly religiously to find new music, but I never feel satiated by the algorithm. Something is always… off. I can't find the vibe I want, or I don't want to be recommended “edgy, emocore, skinny jeans, mallgoth, black nail polish, post-hardcore.” Maybe I don't want a “dreamgaze dream pop Monday afternoon!” Another reason could be that I bought my car secondhand last year, which meant that she was actually born/grew up in a different state. All of this to say, I know she’s never listened to the radio for a while because all of the preset FM channels weren’t even ones offered in my state. So, in short, I felt bad that she had never been able to listen to the radio in a while and instead had to endure Dirt Poor Robins’s “Babylon” on repeat.

The first thing I did when I started this project was preset all of the important stations on my car. She has mostly pop/alt stations, with the occasional classical station and the jazz station that warps in and out of static every so often. I grew up listening to the radio, and most of the stations in my state have catchy jingles that I remembered to specifically mark as favorites. My first few days listening to the radio were boring. I kept wanting to hook up my Apple Carplay and was trying to prove that I still had an attention span by sitting through advertisements instead of changing the channel. I did this for about a week, mainly listening to shitty pop music. I itched for Magdalena Bay’s “Cry for Me” and Paramore’s “Caught in the Middle,” but I stuck to my guns.

About two weeks into my little experiment was Halloween night, which I was driving a lot during. As I was changing in my car after work, I turned on the radio and went to the classical music station where they were playing the instrumental scores of various horror movies. There is nothing like driving a curvy road in the middle of nowhere with the Cape Fear soundtrack playing in your car. Later that night, I picked up my friend and sheepishly apologized about the classical station playing. She just laughed and said that she’s actually been missing classical music. This moment was kind of a turning point for me, because I realized how personal radio seemed. I started to notice the little quips of the host for the hour in between songs, the personal stories interplaced between shitty pop music. I recognized that most of the advertisements were for local companies or events still held by the station, despite the rise of music streaming that undoubtedly obliterated their amount of listeners. I thought about my grandparents who used to always have the radio playing at their house on a low volume, and imagined the excitement of when the radio first came out. I got excited when my jazz station would finally come in, and got even more excited when a song I recognized came on the radio. (Lovejoy getting mentioned on the alternative station literally sent me into a frenzy.)

The radio is going obsolete, there is no doubt about it. More people are going to music streaming services than ever before, and less people are tuning in. The most important thing I learned from this experiment (other than that I might never need Spotify again) is that the radio brings me lots of joy. This is one experiment that I would do again, ten times over. So adjust your channels, tune in, and give it a try.

Stop Pretentious Writing:

Recently I downloaded Substack. It’s an all-consuming place where a lot of pretentious people put their thoughts. Anyways, in a perfectly structured article, I read about how this user organizes their thoughts and writes them down in their commonplace book. I have a very multifaceted opinion on organizing one’s thoughts before writing it down so I thought it would be something fun to share.

Do I organize my thoughts? Absolutely not. I don’t even think I look over these entries when I add them onto the website, I just trust my stream of consciousness and decide that’s good enough. This is mainly because this website is for me, not for you. It’s amazing that other people get to see my stupid opinions, but I am not trying to impress you. This is a place for me to write my thoughts and look back on it, like a digital commonplace book of its own.

Even when I was in AP Lang, I never organized my thoughts. If you’re not familiar, AP Lang requires students to write several essays within a time limit in pen. I would fuck off the planning stage and just get into it because writing is what I like, not planning. I’m lucky my teacher enjoyed my stream of consciousness (complete with jokes… I’m not kidding). This really helped me because I stopped putting so much pressure on myself to do well. When I plan, I write much more stiffly. I feel like I need to stick to the plan or else I’m a terrible person who’s stupid and can’t even stick to a simple outline. When I let it go, I feel free to write whatever and however I want. It’s a moment for me to fuck perfectionism and just talk to the page as myself. Writing without planning in AP Lang taught me that I can be more confident in both my writing and my thoughts.

Anyways, back to organizing your thoughts. Substack is inherently a platform used by people to share their writing, which is usually riddled with uselessly long and difficult words to make them sound interesting and are edited to hell and back to be grammatically perfect. STOP IT. I want to know who you are in your writing, not this image you’re trying to force yourself to fit. You don’t have to be a philosophical person to write well, you don’t even have to edit to write well. Personally, I would much rather read a piece of work that is purely in your voice than something that you have run through the ringer time and time again to sound like a perverted version of yourself. Don’t even get me started on organizing that shit in a fucking commonplace book. I feel like everything we do is subconsciously made with sharing it in mind. While I previously stated that I write this website for myself, I do think about the possibility of others viewing it.

Commonplace books are sometimes being used for the sole reason of sharing them on the internet to make someone seem cool and mysterious rather than a place for you to really capture yourself in a specific moment in time. If organizing your thoughts before writing them down in a book no one will see is for you to better take in information, more power to you. If organizing your thoughts is to make yourself sound cooler and more mysterious to other people who could possibly flip through your book, then I think you should try just copying your train of thought down onto the paper. Imagine the book will never be seen by anyone ever and just GO FOR IT.

I want your draft to have YOUR voice in it, not you mimicking someone else's. Self-expression is so important in our lives and I've really been able to help mine through my writing.

BRING BACK FUCKING UP IN YOUR NOTEBOOKS!!

Anyways, that was kind of ranty, but the idea is to eradicate perfectionism with your innermost thoughts. Just let go!! Don’t plan shit out, or make a table of contents. Let each page be a new idea that you’ve had that you can be surprised by the next time you open your book.

Let your thoughts spill out and not force them to be quantified (is that the right word) into a box so you can highlight the top of the page a pretty color. Let yourself go when you write!! Post your free thoughts on places like Substack, but don't get hooked up on needing to replicate Didion or anyone else on the app.

Disney College Program:

I figured that it's about that time where I talk about the Disney College Program. It's almost been a year since I returned from mine, and I have a lot of thoughts to share about whether or not you should do it, what I would recommend doing, etc. So strap in and pull the yellow tab, mfs! It's time to go back to Florida.

Some lingo I will use and their definitions:

DCP = Disney College Program

CP = College Programmer

MK = Magic Kingdom

termed = terminated/fired. You can either do this yourself or be termed by a leader.

You should do the DCP if:

-You're willing to go out of your comfort zone

-You are not in school anymore or at least not in classes for that semester

-You genuinely like Disney

-You're willing to not like Disney after going

-You're ready to live in very close quarters with strangers

-You are mentally stable and not absolutely psychotic

-You enjoy drama and gossiping

-You're ready to wake up early and go to bed late

-You are comfortable socializing

Random Tips:

-If you can bring a car, bring it. We drove across the US to bring our car and it was the best decision we ever made.

-Shoot to live at Flamingo Village West if you can. You don't really have a say, but West is actually best (and that's coming from someone who lived at East).

-If someone invites you to something and you feel safe going, DO IT! Some of the best times I had were because I said yes to something I normally wouldn't have.

-Apply as soon as applications drop. The earlier you get a phone interview, the more likely you are to get a desirable location.

-It doesn't matter what your role is. I got a role I didn't want at all (MK Park Greeting) and I hated it, but I made some of the closest friendships because of it.

-You will make friends. I was so worried about not making friends, but constantly working with the same group of people forces you to make friends with your coworkers (even if it's against your will).

-DO NOT DATE. I know successful relationships that have come out of the DCP, but dating has led a lot of my friends to not hanging out or being too worried about their relationship to have fun.

-Events and classes don't matter. Unless you're trying to make connections, going to events is usually just for free food and swag. I do recommend going to anything that interests you, but forcing yourself to go to the multi-week classes can suck! I have two Mouseters degrees in Storytelling and Leadership, but I personally wouldn't do it again.

Do I Recommend the DCP?:

Here's the million dollar question. I would say yes immediately. Know that you will be overworked and underpaid, you will have the shittiest of days, and you will be mistreated in every sense of the word. However, you will grow so much as a human being. In my time at the DCP, I wanted to term so badly all the time. I hated it in parts, I got yelled at by guests, and I couldn't even get drunk at night. It wasn't until I started leaning into the experience and really taking advantage of my time there that I started having fun. So I completely recommend it, but I advise you to apply once you're at least 21. I was the youngest person working in my area and, while I didn't let anyone know, I felt extremely alone at times.

It should be said however, that it is definitely not meant for everyone. But, I recommend that if you are thinking about doing it that you should totally go for it. If you get rejected, just try it again the next semester. That happened to both my sister and one of my best friends on the program, and there is literally no shame in it.

Wait, Am I Not Messy Anymore?:

I inherited half-hoarder from my dad and half-sentimental from my mom. When I was younger, it seemed like I could never keep my room clean. I was always the type of kid to have absolutely everything laying out all over the floor, living out of clothes that never left my stack of laundry baskets and drinking out of week-old water from the millions of stacked cups.

And I tried being clean. Years of my parents entering my room and audibly sighing had caused me to go down the organization rabbit hole. I watched Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix tons of times, tried and failed to get tips from my sister, and made various attempts to clean it. But again and again, I tried and failed. So, how did I end up doing it? I have a myriad of theories about how I started to become “clean,” and I wanted to share them with you all.

Comparison is the Thief of Messiness:

I wanted more than anything to go to a college away from home. It wasn’t because I didn’t like my parents or I was running away from our divorce-broken house, but because I would feel smarter knowing I wasn’t going to the same state school everyone I knew was going to. I had this weird obsession with intelligence growing up, mainly because it was considered my most prominent trait. I was the smart and funny one, not beautiful or kind, but smart and funny. I put everything I had into this idea that I was different from everyone else. When I decided my true calling was animation, I thought I got over this idea. All of a sudden, my love of story was more important than being smart. Then I got rejected from my dream schools and I ended up at the same old state school I didn’t want to go to.

Long story short, I decided to get my “away from home” through living in the dorms. You can probably guess that I did not live the dorm dream where I lived with someone I became best friends with. I had a roommate who would not clean up after herself. Out of all my messiness, I considered the worst sin to be food left out. My clothes could be scattered on the floor, but as long as I know which ones are clean I don’t care. Posters could be falling off of my falls, but at least I had some decoration. Water cups could be out, but soda cups could not. As you could again probably infer, my roommate was not of the same mind. She would bring plates from our dining hall and set them out on her counter, have fast food sitting on her floor where she slept (I cannot make this up). I expected myself to be messy as well, but I wasn’t.

I like to think that my first theory is either because I liked comparing my clean space to her messiness, or I was so scared of being judged that I was forced into cleanliness (a version of the theory that appeared after I shared a room where my space was clear view of anyone walking in the door when I lived in Florida).

Frontal Lobe Development:

There’s this widely known fact that even though you might be legally considered an adult by the government, your frontal lobe is in constant development. Now as of writing this, I am 19 years old, but that can’t be said that some form of development hasn’t happened since I was born. Maybe I just finally grew up?

However, this theory has been disproven. Exhibit A, my older sister. We were always foils of one another. I was smart and funny, she was nice and beautiful. I was the messy one, she was the clean one. It wasn’t until she moved back home after she extended her program in Florida that we both noticed a new difference: our roles had flipped. She suddenly was unable to keep her room clean and I was unable to let anything sit astray in mine.

But what if there was another reason why I became clean?

Keep, Donate, Trash:

When I was back at home, I had this sudden urge to go through everything I owned. See, I usually had a very unsavory duo of sentimental hoarding guiding all of my decisions. If something was cute and I liked it for as long as I was in a store, I would buy it. I had been doing that ever since I had any money to spend at all, which was probably since I was 10 going to the mall with my friends.

At the dorm, I naturally had less things to worry about because I couldn’t move everything I owned. At home, I had hoarded things from ever since I was young. I realized that I was messy because I didn’t have a place to put everything. I started watching all kinds of unhauling and cleanout videos, trying to mimic it for myself. What really made a difference in my life? What did I enjoy?

Obviously, this is the most prominent theory in my self-reflection. Ever since I seriously went through my own things, I have cleared both my mind and my space. I have been able to do things that I never thought possible (I have a COUCH in my room), and I have discovered so many more hobbies through making space for the things that I love.

Conclusion:

It does, in fact, get better. You just have to learn how you work. For instance, I need to be able to see what I own to enjoy it. There's no point for me to put everything in a box, I need to be able to see it with my eyes. Also I need to repeatedly go through the things I own, that way I don't have to find places to put things that I cannot store.

I feel like everyone can become clean over time. All it takes is a few times watching Marie Kondo and constant comparison to other people! Here are some things I'm planning to organize:

-Unfortunately, I was an art major, so I own a bunch of supplies that I'm never going to use. I plan to go through and give some of my supplies I don't use to my friends or donate it to this special area we have in the art building. I think it's fun to be a crafty girl, but I need to actually use the scraps I have to junk journal before collecting anymore.

-Sentimental items are really hard for me to let go of. I've recently come up with several ideas on how to scrapbook items to make it into one cohesive place. I really want to use the scanner that is built into my mom's printer so I can also have scans of bigger items, that way I don't have to actually keep them. Scrapbooking is a great way to combine all of them together in one easy-to-view location.

-Technology and cords has proven to be a difficult thing for me to sort through. I've been given more alexas than I can count, more phone cords and other things I definitely have enough of. Because I own a Wii, batteries have also proven to be a pain for me to deal with, mainly because it's a guessing game about what is charged and what isn't.

So have fun! I think it’s so much fun to go through what I own, mainly because it makes me grateful about how many things I own. Being able to recall memories with certain items or, if I want to donate them, think about how much good they’re going to give the next person is such an amazing privilege that I get to have. So get organized! Have fun!

PS: I’m a Butterfly on the clutterbug scale if you care at all.