You are given a moment. What do you do with it? Does what you do depend on how much time you know you will have available to you? Do you need an uninterrupted segment of time in order to actually accomplish things?
I am not usually an ADD-type personality, but I feel like parenting has reduced my attention span and drive to engage in things. I am the queen of multi-tasking, but it’s gotten to the point where I can only attend to something in sound-bite sized amounts of time. Even if I have more than a sound-bite of time available, I flick to something else anyway. For example, when Bea wakes up every hour or two, I get accustomed to that and tend to wake up just before she does. When she sleeps longer stretches again, I continue to have broken sleep because I expect to be interrupted.
I think it was Virginia Woolf who said that in order to be a writer one needed £500 a year and a room with a lock on the door.
I don’t want to complain about being a parent – I chose this role, am continuing to choose it and really do enjoy it most of the time. But I need to either refine my time-management skills, so that I can make the most of the fragmented time I have available to do things, or refine my expectations. Or both. But sitting on the couch gorging on crystallized ginger and watching TV shows is not exactly a useful way to spend my time.

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