Focus For Fun And Profit

If I wrote only about my successes I would have fun, but my other things are also important. I have a lot of interests and a lot of problem prioritizing it. I may justly be criticized for a lack of focus in general. When I focus on a particular subject or project, I am extraordinarily productive and usually successful, but I have never applied that as a general strategy to life - I have no idea how. Often this is just an amusing thing, and if it means my lifestyle is more humble than that of many of my peers, well, at least it's the natural outcome of decisions I have made. A lot of their toys of success are illusion anyway. However my lack of focus has on occasion cost me a lot of money unnecessarily. There was the plane ticket incident, and now there is the Appeal Billing incident. After the first Appeal that I won, it took about a year to get the check because The Other Side simply forgot to mail it - or something. So I got it into my head that I had quite a while to submit my billing. Wrong-o! The rules are clear about having 30 days to apply, and I clean missed it. Partly that was because I'm busy doing other stuff but mostly it's simply because I failed to focus on the task at hand. I submitted the bill anyway, with a clear admission of error and asking for consideration, but I won't count on getting paid. Sometimes you just face the consequences. The lesson is obvious. One distractor is computer games. I love turn-based strategy, and I have spent an appreciable fraction of my life on them. Now that they are available on phones, I can distract myself at any moment, which is o.k. during genuine waste time but deadly during potentially productive time. Why do I game more and garden less? That's easy - I tell myself I'll play just one more turn and then go garden - but these games are cleverly set up to encourage the "just one more turn" response to which I must frankly admit I am vulnerable. Therefore I have to set up a rule: gaming only on the bus - so that I can devote my actual time to other things, like actually living life. And billing!