Mission: Possible.

And there lies the most clichéd title for a post in the history of mankind. But whatever. I’m taking the standards off, remember?

Today I started a new experiment. I didn’t even realize before I started that I was playing with Havi’s Metaphor Mouse, but that’s totally what I’m doing. I don’t get along with to-do lists, so instead of to-do lists, I’m giving myself missions.

To give you an idea of how thrilling the missions are, Mission One was to get dressed, eat breakfast, and decide what Mission Two would be.

They’re not designed to be big, overwhelming missions. They’re designed to be little, doable missions. Mission: Possible, if you like. I’m on Mission Six now, and this part of the mission says “eat lunch and write a blog post”. I’m allowing myself an hour to write the blog post, and then I’m going to put it up, even if it’s crap (another part of taking the standards off the blog).

But the point is that even just calling it a mission instead of a to-do list kind of recasts it. And it recasts me a little bit, too.

Instead of a drudge, grinding through the boring shit I have to do (shop! Post a letter! Thrilling) I’m an adventurer. Everything comes with a tiny amount of pre-planning – not enough to scare me, just enough to know that I will have everything I need to do the task at hand. And because I’m on a mission (instead of just “doing boring thing number one thousand and eight-seven”) it’s all a bit more interesting.

It helps that I am trying to fight the fog by having some fairly concrete goals – on which, more in another post, perhaps – and that my missions are quite consciously focused on working towards accomplishing them. I’m spending a lot of time in planning mode, figuring out what’s next, what I want to achieve and how to get there. That feels good: a lot better than spending the morning on World of Warcraft.

Then again – it’s my history with World of Warcraft, and Dungeons and Dragons, and games of that nature, that make the mission thing so good for me. It wouldn’t be half as much fun metaphoring myself into an adventurer if I hadn’t spent so much of my life pretending to be one, if power fantasies and pretending to be the little girl with the huge axe wasn’t such a big part of my fun.

In real life, I’m not a little girl and I don’t have (or need!) a big axe. But it’s cool to cast myself as the hero of my own story. I’m not fighting to save the world against insurmountable odds, or anything. But I do have goals to get to and obstacles in the way, and I’m slowly working towards putting everything where it’s meant to be.

I think this “writing blog posts over lunch” might become a tradition. (I totally used to do that when I was working, actually.) It’s sort of cool.

And just so you know, here are the steps of Mission Seven, which is “Mission Get Blog Post Up”.

1. Find links to the places I have referenced in this post.
2. Copy and paste the post from Pages into Wordpress.
3. Check for spelling errors.
4. Hit Publish.
5. Tweet about my post.

After that, I think Mission Eight will revolve around taking a nap.

Oh, and this didn’t take even half an hour. So there, blogging-takes-too-much-time monsters.