Cinta IT

Cinta IT

Don't we all feel miserable on a Sunday evening? The weekend has virtually ended and you brace yourself for the drudgery of another long week at work. Usually we dive into a burst of urgency Monday morning in the office--replying e-mails we have put off for ages, making phonecalls and setting up long-postponed meetings.

Since I don't work for anyone anymore these days, I don't experience that Sunday evening anxiety so much. Well, I don't know if that's good or bad. A bit of pressure is necessary sometimes to create a sense of urgency. Hopefully an empty rice-bowl is pressure enough for me to work harder.

I am constantly reevaluating my level of productivity. I need to eliminate time-wasters. Surfing can easily suck up too much of my time--it could be worse than watching TV. But that is not my major challenge; the real challenge comes from maintaining a steady interest in my "official" line of work, which is IT.

Too often I fall into spells of obsession with specific areas of interest that are totally unrelated to IT--such as the life of Sukarno, or the history of railways in Indonesia, or maybe even Sundanese poetry. These distractions yank me off from my main track and threaten the quality of my "real" work. Sometimes I feel a bit like the protaganist in Edgar Allan Poe's short story, Berenice (one of my favourites)--who suffers from fits of monomania.

To prevent any loss of concentration, especially when I'm in the middle of an important project, I often take the drastic measure of not reading anything that could veer me off-track. It is a tough thing to do--a bit like abstaining from sex. But it has to be done.

I have an important week coming up, starting with a meeting Monday morning. Think IT. Think IT. Think IT. Maybe I should start humming that "Cinta IT" propaganda song by Siti Nurhaliza which they used to play over and over again on RTM...