Eleven

Post-it notes rarely stick to anything for long. Okay, obviously they’re meant to be temporary but even so they do have a habit of falling off most flat surfaces with ease. And I’m talking the real deal here – genuine Post-its, not an imitation brand.

I have, however, managed to get one to stick for almost five years. It has clung protruding from under the border of my monitor since 2007 despite hundreds of it’s brethren having long lost their will to stick in the same area within days of their placement. I haven’t reapplied any pressure to it, provided it with adhesive-enhancing supplements, or tampered with it in any way after it’s original application. It’s just stayed there defiantly refusing to budge.

So why I have I not simply removed it? I certainly didn’t intend for it to be there this long. And, I’m not that lazy… well, not too lazy to remove a Post-it note that is in my eye-line perhaps 6 hours of every day.

I’ve let it be because the message scrawled on it’s light yellow paper is as applicable now as it was then. By having resisted dropping off this long it appears fated to mock me; the relevance despite so much time having passed only serving to underline it’s point.

But what the devil does it say?

The message on it reads ‘STOP WASTING TIME!’. Simple but straight to the point. When I put it up it wasn’t meant to be a long-term life target; it was a prompt to get me to knuckle down on a piece of work I was doing instead of finding distractions.

It’s fair to say that five years of being reminded hasn’t exactly worked wonders. I’m probably as aimless now as I’ve ever been. And if you know me, or of me, you’ll recognise that is no simple feat. But let’s not go there.

I could have posted a thousand things on here in that time. I’m not suggesting that they would have been in any way interesting or insightful, or read by anyone at all, but they’d have still been a far better use of my time.

Will 2012 be any different? No promises. Every year I like to pretend to myself that I will rediscover the joys of typing a load of complete nonsense for the world to potentially see but I’m usually too preoccupied with speaking it to anyone within earshot to try.

Instead I am to make that bloody Post-it note eat it’s words – or at least not have to look at it so often. It’s not a case of a embracing a purposeful, fulfilling, and enlightening existence. That would require a sea change so vast it would require the waves from Deep Impact. No, just to spend considerably less of my waking hours staring at screens would be an achievement.