I’m officially weird.

Being ADD, it means I spend much of my life totally bored off of my nut. It’s a bit of an issue when you’re being paid by the hour.

Then, when the pressure’s on, you can perform feats of productivity the likes of which even god has never seen (10 points for the first person to recognise where I got that quote).

Take today.

I spent the hours between 10 and 4 bored and doing odd bits of work, being just as productive as many… then I got a deadline… impossible actually. I had to document something I hadn’t even seen, on an application that didn’t work with the particular functionality. And I had to do it by 5.30 (when I wanted to leave for Bikram); they needed the material for training tomorrow.

“Leave it to me,” I said.

I zipped over to the appropriate people, asked nicely (but not too nicely) for help getting access to the functionality. A couple of mis-fires, and I had it on my desktop.

Then I clicked into high-gear, creating 5 Wiki pages in the space of an hour.

To put this into perspective, the generally accepted norm for documenting a piece of UI functionality is about an hour a window or function.

I actually missed my Bikram deadline, but only because I decided to document the last window while on the high. I can do a double tomorrow (I’ve got a stack of things I want to do tonight anyway).

And you know, I’ve been told in the past not to rush things. A former employer took me aside once and said “You know that job I gave you, it should have taken you the rest of the afternoon. You’ve got to slow down.”

I didn’t say anything to that, but felt oddly put-down. I can’t help the speed I can get things done, and when I go, I go properly. If I know how to do something, I can do it very, very efficiently.

Take my time at a former employer – the ex tech-writer took 18 months to create a manual. I wrote a manual on an application (albeit somewhat simpler, but nonetheless complex in what I laughingly call UI design) in 2 weeks; 3 with corrections and reviews.

They liked me, but not enough to pay me what I was worth. I left that job feeling totally unappreciated and — in some ways — betrayed.

And here I am again, getting-off (though not in a rude way) on the adrenaline of a deadline.

Potentially this is another reason why I felt so awful when I lost the job earlier in the month. I was gearing-up for the work, I’d worked-out how to do it, how long it would take and planned it out in my head (which I find interesting and engaging), then they started screwing around and eventually said they didn’t want to work with me.

I took it personally. Something I’ve really got to stop.

There was a point to this blog entry, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

Oh,  I’m a yellow apparently, and I rock and am amazing, or so say the two people who desparately needed the material. So that’s nice to know