Why does it take so long?

Could someone tell me, please, why it takes me ten times as long to do things as it should? Is it that I'm getting older? Is it that my attention is perpetually fractured and I can't focus? Is it that I'm caught in some kind of freakin' fissure in the fabric of spacetime? Or is it just lack of sleep?

I planned last night, and got up this morning intending to spend one hour clearing off my desk. (Yeah, it was a mess. I dumped a couple of days' worth of mail at the beginning of the weekend and didn't look at it again.) That was six hours ago, and I'm still not done.

It could be age. Seriously, I'm no stranger to the Midlife Mambo:

I'm so resigned to it that normally I tell myself it's okay as long as I'm doing something. Say I leave my office and go to the kitchen, then once I get there can no longer remember why I went (yes, I see all of you nodding). I can manage to be satisfied as long as, while I'm there, I move the laundry from the washer to the dryer, or put a few dishes in the dishwasher, or something. Anything. As long as there's a little forward progress. But it's apparently getting worse. Otherwise I don't see how I could have started out the day with the intention of making two — TWO — phone calls and six hours later still have one left to make! Is that how it's going to go? Is it just going to keep getting worse every year? How can it? I mean, there's only so much room to fall, you know?

It could be that my focus is eroding. Seriously. You can read more about it on my business blog, but there's a lot of information around that indicates multitasking 1) is kind of a myth (we can actually only work on two tasks at a time, and we do neither of them as well as we would if we did them separately), and 2) doesn't do anything good for our brains. The more you multitask, the worse you get at ignoring irrelevant information and focusing on a single task. Like walking to the kitchen to do something, I guess. That could be it. Am I doing it more now than I used to, so the effects are more pronounced? Am I in some sort of multitasking downward spiral?

As far as the fabric of spacetime being to blame, I'm willing to consider it. I may be living on a cosmic slub, the border of some big metaphysical Uh-Oh, and time just speeds up when I start doing certain things. Or the time some tasks take expands as I approach them. Yeah, okay. We'll say that could be it.

Or it could just be that my dreadful occasional knee pain has started again, and I'm worried about health insurance, and I've had a terrible time sleeping the last two nights. But, really, how likely is that?