I think of myself as not very conscientious. At
school, I struggled with completing homework,
sometimes not even turning in assigned essays. I
forgot about deadlines and accidentally left my
stuff behind. I did well on standardized tests
because I could read quickly and eliminate
probably incorrect answers, but other types of
tests were a drag. There were some subjects I
liked enough to do well in (well, mostly teachers
I found engaging). For the most part, though, I
didn't particularly care about grades. Even as an
adult, I occasionally forget to finish something
I'm working on, I lose things and time due to
disorganization and attentional hiccups, and I've
used my "Oops" fund a number of times. (W+ is more
conscientious than I am, and occasionally
patiently reminds me to take care of stuff.) I
tend to follow the butterflies of my interest.
Fortunately, I've figured out some things that
work well for me. Coding is great because even
though it needs me to be pretty exact, I can work
in small chunks, write tests to help me
double-check, and automate repetitive tasks that
my brain tends to hiccup on. When I worked at IBM,
I had a lot of fun working on projects I cared
about, like building systems to help professionals
transition into teaching or helping food banks
distribute food. I also did well skimming pages
and pages of internal discussions so that I could
summarize key themes for workshops. For my
consulting clients, I tend to focus on prototyping
their crazy ideas. If the idea proves worthwhile,
we can then turn it over to other people to get it
ready for production. Org Mode helps me keep track
of what I want to do and when. In the Emacs
community, I tend to focus on breadth rather than
depth: Emacs News instead of package maintenance
or core Emacs development. (And besides, it's
volunteering anyhow, so when people bump into bugs
in my code, it's either an opportunity for them to
help out or something they might just put up with
or work around.) I like experimenting, and I don't
feel stuck; I can move on from an experiment when
I've gotten enough data or when things change.
I've shifted my life so that most of the tasks on
my to-do list are things that I want to do that
aren't time-sensitive, so I can do them when I
want.