Did you ever start a project (maybe one you’ve been putting off for a very long time) and then wish you hadn’t, because there wasn’t enough time to finish it? That’s the situation I found myself in yesterday, and then again today, on two completely different projects. I must have been out of my mind to get so deep into anything on the eve of my audit.

Let me start with a confession. I’m not much for filing. There has been a growing pile of paid invoices on the corner of my counter for more than two years, waiting for me to get the time (and, more importantly, the ambition) to put them in their proper files. I’m not kidding. At the bottom of the pile were invoices from 2004 (along with photos from the cruise, also from 2004).

I turned the pile upside down so I could start at the bottom, with the oldest. First I separated the invoices by supplier into broad alphabetical categories, A through E, F through J, etc. This might seem like an extra step, but I was working with limited space. If I wanted to sit while I was doing it, I had to use my dining table, and I had room for no more than half a dozen piles at a time.

That precaution didn’t keep me from getting my back bent out of shape. I was aching by the time I got to the end of the day, with the job about a third of the way done. I managed to get far enough that I could make one big crisscross pile out of all the little piles, so that I could get back to them on another day, when I had more time. Putting off work, now that comes more naturally to me than buckling down and doing it.

Today I was puttering around the house, straightening the clutter so that the auditor wouldn’t think my files must be in such an awful mess that he would have to look more closely. The other reason is that I have to be ready to host Christmas dinner in less than a month, and there are children coming here. The less attractive nuisances I have, the better.

For some reason it occurred to me that I need to reorganize my CD collection. Maybe it’s because I have mounds of CDs here and there in every room. I can usually find what I’m looking for, but that doesn’t mean the system makes any sense. I’ve had a rearrangement lurking in the back of my mind for a long time, with little time (or ambition) to get to it.

So I started. And within fifteen minutes I realized I’d never get it done in any reasonable amount of time. So I kept working for another couple of hours, for no other reason than momentum. It takes me a while to get started, but then it takes me a while to get stopped. In the end I swept all the CDs into piles again and shoved them in various corners and quit. And once again, my back was aching.

You can’t really tell I’ve done anything this weekend unless you studied it pretty carefully beforehand. And nobody does that but me, so to most visitors (including, most likely, the auditor), it’ll just look like the house of a single guy who doesn’t get around to cleaning things up all that often. I guess I can’t hide my true nature, no matter how much time (or ambition) I get on a rainy, lonely weekend.