Don't Know What to Call This--My Habits? Life?

I've never been too good at achieving a goal where there are one or more subgoals that have to be accomplished first. That is, before you can do a, you have to do b. And possibly before b, c; and maybe even d before c. To me it's just too hard to keep that original, ultimate goal in sight.

Also--and somehow I feel this is related, though maybe it is not at all--when I am in the middle of something, I may suddenly think of something else that needs to be done; maybe a completely unrelated task. My tendency is to want to drop whatever it is that I'm in the midst of and go do the other, newer idea. When you do that--insert one thing in the middle of another that you in theory intend to come back to--I call that "bracketing." My home in littered with magazines where in fact a magazine is literally inserted in the middle of another magazine, because I turned to read something before finishing something else that I was in the middle of.

Nowadays I sometimes--often?--try to exercise a little discipline and finish that which I am in the middle of before I turn to something else, but it really bothers me, sort of makes me nervous, when there is that other thing that I'm eager to move on to.  Right now, I've been mentally composing some other things that I want to write, and it was hard to defer working on one thing while I work on another, but things have to be prioritized.

Which brings me to another point: in life, the order in which one does things can matter, and can  matter a great deal. I often have to tell myself, "No, do it in the other order!" Here is an example: Pull your pants on before you pick up that glass of water! (Can you imagine doing it in the reverse order?)  And in cooking, as probably any cook knows, the order in which you do things often matters.

So--tying this back up to the earlier point--I might have four things I need to do, and I often have to decide that a needs to be done before b, for any of a number of reasons. Or more or less force myself to finish a first. Well, that is just life, and a life lesson that maybe others have learned much sooner than me.

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