I figured out my November lifehack. Punctuality.

It's a sideways sneaky way of attacking the perfectionism, too. I get things done - usually as well as I can manage - but I get them done eventually. And sometimes time is of the essence more than I make it out to be.

This is actually a nice little about-face, because I had to actually learn how to slip things. Before my junior year of college, I had only ever been late with one assignment. Ever. In my whole life. By a couple hours. (And trust me, I felt awful and guilty over it for months, and it was a dumb little middle school worksheet that I knew was going to get recycled afterwards.) But by the time I hit 19, I was torturing myself to keep that record up - and at some point I stopped and said look, seriously, this Isn't Worth It most of the time. How can I train myself to gain the ability to slip? How can I open up the possibility of handling this in other ways?

And so I did, and now it's time to go back and re-hone my original tendencies and round it out more and learn how to aptly switch between these options that are now more or less opened up to me sans massive guilt feelings where they're not actually helpful. So for the remainder of the month, I'm going to revert to the time-neuroticness of my 19-year-old self and watch very, very closely as to where the strain hits - and where it's worth keeping that strain up once this little experiment is over.

If I'm not 5 minutes early, then I'm late. Building in buffer time will be good for me. (Hear that, brain? Good for me.) And my default activity during that buffer time will be sketching, because that's something I can cleanly task-switch into and out of as the clock requires (if I don't let myself get in too deep, but I can wrangle that).

Slowly - very slowly - I get more adept at moving through life. Hey, if I can learn how to talk to people and ask questions, then I can learn how to do anything.