The extent to which I procrastinate over more or less everything is hilarious. Or at least it would be if anyone around me found it amusing, rather than frustrating. Take these words, the ones I’m writing right now. Had they been submitted any later, I’d have had to print them out myself and run breathlessly after the delivery van with a stapler.

 

I’ve always believed that disorganised people tend also to be timewasters. It’s very easy to tell if you’re the former - quickly answer the following question. No cheating.

 

“Do you have a pen on you?”

 

The world divides as neatly as it ever can, between the organised and disorganised: between those who would no sooner leave the house without at least one pen safely and consciously on their person, and those who seem to emit a phobic, repellent quality around this particular item of stationery. I’ve held on to a pen for, at best, eleven or twelve minutes. (I’d have noted my achievement at the time, but I lost the pen.) One of the many sentences at the time which I started with ”if I was running this radio station”, ended with “I’d make sure someone brought twenty pens a day down to the studio”. Nobody ever did, but I maintain that this remains an excellent idea. Should I ever end up in radio consultancy, selling this idea alone will make me rich beyond the very dreams of avarice.

 

I suspect that being a radio presenter fed the very hungriest part of the shambolic, disordered beast within me, as certainly for the greater part of the time I’ve worked in it, to do so has relied significantly on an almost wilful in-studio spontaneity and lack of planning. My producer and I used to marvel at the use made by other departments of things called “diaries” and “forward planners”, calling their contents Words From The Future. How, without at least some of both time travel and showing off, could anyone possibly know about the events of May 17th, on April 29th?

 

That’s all fine, as far as it goes, or at least, as far as it should have gone. What actually happened was that my muddled, inefficient approach leaked into and then flooded my real world. I’d head into the supermarket not for a “weekly shop”, with all the foresight that would imply, but because I needed some food on the grounds that I’d forgotten to eat. I’d emerge an hour and a half later with a Friends DVD, a copy of Private Eye and some chicken drumsticks.

 

All of this makes my second and most recent life in band management very much the stranger. In five years I worked with two different bands, booking tours, running gigs, persuading casino doorstaff that the drummer really was a member and just couldn’t find his card. I’m sure you get the idea. What’s truly weird, is that to do this without the whole thing falling apart within minutes, for the tours to actually happen, for the records to actually be released, required me to access reserves of organisational skill which were completely unknown to me, and certainly within me. If I’m standing in a room with four members of a band, and I’m the most organised person there, you know that’s a room full of some pretty disorganised people. Yet (and here’s a hostage to fate, right here in this sentence), about ninety-five percent of everything that should have happened, did happen. Ninety-five percent is good, right? That’s the sort of vote share Albanian dictators would claim in the 70s. I’m taking ninety-five percent. That’s a WIN.

 

Anyway, despite the fact that learning new skills: a foreign language, or to play the harp, say, can open up and start fizzing all kinds of new neural pathways, my unexpected diversion into an occupation which had the concepts of design and contrivance at its heart seems to have had little positive effect on my ability to consider and plan for events beyond this afternoon. Whether we can actually say with certainty that to be disorganised is to timewaste is unclear, but the number of times today already that I have dived to the other side of the screen to mainline chunks of Twitter and Facebook suggests that it might well be.

 

It’s not that I don’t know what needs to be done today, it’s that distraction and disorder combine and conspire against me. It can’t be this difficult. I’d make a “to do” list, but I can’t find a pen.