GTD Workflow

There is this theory stumbling around the universe that if you make a nice orderly list of Things That Must Be Done™ that your life will fall neatly into the habit of checking off said things.

HA.

I was tempted to put that ‘Ha’ in blinking neon red 72 point letters. Thankfully my sense of taste kicked in, but the intention was there (if not the execution).

I have made lists. And then made more lists. And then made lists of the lists, just for the hell of it. I am the reigning Queen of List-making and by all rights my house (and life) should be as perfect as perfect can be!

Most of these lists remain 99% undone and/or completely ignored.

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Notebooks Away!

To be fair, the stack is only 19 spiral notebooks/composition books/notepads high, but still.

Every year when the school supplies go on sale I invariably fall prey to the cheap massive piles of note-taking products that sing to me from the shelves. They are wonderful blank worlds just waiting for my ink to set them free. Continue reading →

It’s not a light at the end of the tunnel, more a light at the edge of the horizon– the same sort of hope, but not quite. Because tunnels are directional and horizons move, and I’m never quite as home on the sea as I mean to be. Continue reading →

It was worse than this...

I live under the delusion that I am a neat and organized person, even though my first instinct when faced with a clean desk is to pull out a project and start working. Which leads to getting sidetracked into another project which leads to finding that doodad I need for a forth project which leads to wandering into another room and returning with an armload of things… which leads to the photo on the right.

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I’ve been in a nice comfortable rut for a while now, but the fates (ie. the US Army) have contrived to kick me out by proxy. Thus the active duty half of this household will be in another country sometime next week and won’t be back for a year.

I could have gone with him this time, but I’ll be staying here (due to a combination of factors.) As things are packed and shipped and proper documentation scrounged up… the fact is slowly sinking in that I’m going to have to be the Responsible Adult while he’s gone. Continue reading →

The year is over, long live the year!

As unrealistic as it is to assume that we are issued a blank slate and a fresh start on the first day of a new year, I found myself unable to really put any long term goals on paper before today. I had some hazy ideas of what I wanted to do and some rather concrete ideas of what I didn’t want to do, but it isn’t until today that I’ve been able to start breaking them down.

I started with the basic idea that at the end of 2011 that I wanted concrete things that I could look back on as having accomplished. So I’m making a list of daily things that I can check off, and yes that means beyond the cut is 365 days worth of things (minus holidays, vacations, and NaNoWriMo) that I plan on doing.

As new events are planned, I will go back and move things around, so items may be moved off into a ‘bonus points’ list for the month. But I’m trying to keep all of the goals simple and easy to do in under an hour. That way if I have more time and energy, I can think up additional things to do based on the monthly theme, and if not I can just get the task done and over with.

2010 Monthly Themes : Finances, Eating Healthy, Getting Organized/Simplifying, Learn Something New, Active Powers Activate!, Indulge Creativity, Home Business, Simplify/Clarify, Family/Friends, Home Improvement, NaNoWriMo, Reflection

Read onwards at your own peril!

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2010 was a year of, well, wishing really really hard that success fairy would come and clonk me over the head with a better job, a more organized life, and a cleaner house.

You can guess how well that worked out.

But 2010 wasn’t a horrible year, just a very rudderless one. After 2009 and the end of college, I found myself lacking the weekly goals (and successes!) that classwork imposed on my life. For three years I’d been relying out an outside source to provide tasks and rewards, so in retrospect I can’t be too surprised that I fumbled the ball a bit when that ended.

(I did start out with the idea of making up monthly and weekly goals as I went, but fell into the procrastination that is ‘I’ll do it later.’ Planning to have a plan is not as useful an exercise as might be hoped.)

Thus my big successes for 2010 consisted of giving up Diet Coke for five months, losing enough weight that I had to buy new clothes, and finally winning NaNoWriMo without sneaking in college term papers.

Milestones were surviving a year of working at my current job, sill being sane a year post-graduation, and the celebrating an eight year wedding anniversary.

There are plenty of things that I meant to do, and was going to do, and should have done– but instead of dwelling on them, I’m going to use those failures to improve my goal-setting process for next year. As hysterical as my lunch fortune cookie was, it does have a point.

Goodbye 2010, Hello 2011!

I think on some level everything we do is motivated by how it changes the way other people perceive us. I want to be a Grown Up(tm) not necessarily because being a Grown Up(tm) is something I really aspire to, but because other people’s theoretical first reaction to me would be ‘Wow, she’s got this Grown Up thing down!’ and not ‘Ah look, she’s forgotten it’s garbage day again.’

But regardless of whether my motive is rational or not, I’m giving it a go.
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Brains Done Broke

I have apparently give poor Google Adwords a bit of a headache when it comes to matching adds to my content. If you take a gander at the pic to the right and you’ll find that the View From the Molehill category seems to have broken the poor thing’s brains. I don’t claim to have the most coherent posting tangents, but I’m a bit alarmed by what Google thinks I’m shopping for.

Fibromyalgia, Insomnia, Dumpsters, and Snoring are apparently good matches for posts on forgetting to take out the trash, trying to wake up earlier, and searching for something meaningful to do with my life.

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In order to feel more like an Accomplished Adult, I have decided to start getting up earlier in the mornings. This would have been a better resolution if I hadn’t made it right after a holiday weekend in which I stayed up until the early ams (reverting to my natural sleep patterns). So I’m counting 7am as a success, since I spent most of the night trying to convince my brain that no really, I was going to work tomorrow. *yawn*

One of my favorite posts from Zen Habits is How I Became an Early Riser and the one point I took to heart was that you have to have a good reason to get up. I can (and have) slept through alarms in different rooms, I don’t do well with going to bed before I’m sleepy, and if I don’t make drastic changes… then my normal wake-up time is only a snooze button away.

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I have been doing some pondering lately, mostly about five-years plans and ‘perfect’ days, and I think I may be chasing the wrong rabbit.

Society has convinced us that we’re meant to run in circles chasing a prize agreed upon as ‘sufficiently rabbit-like’ and we spend our formative years in anticipation of running that race. Once we’re let loose on the track we do our best to run the way we’ve been taught. If we succeed or fail… we just line up and do it all over again.

So why don’t more of us start chasing the real rabbits when given the chance? (Only one of the dogs in the photo swapped targets).

Because no one else does.

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seilF emiT

At my workplace we are allowed two 10 minute breaks in addition to lunch, workload permitting. I’ve very rarely ever taken these breaks since a) I had too much work, b) I don’t smoke and c) my friends take theirs at times that don’t match up with my own work habits.

But as things have slowed down a bit, I’m now at the point where taking the two breaks would not impact my job performance. Since I’m not going to take up smoking and my friends won’t be there, I’m rather stumped about what to do with them. I have the feeling I should be doing Something, since the point of them is to give us a bit of downtime in which to recoup.

Sadly, the only thing I can think of doing as a break from a workday in which I stare at the computer all day… is to stare at the computer some more.

I’m not sure if we are allowed to access blogs from work on our breaks… but I wonder if it could hurt to ask. *ponders* 10 minutes isn’t much, but having polished my Word Sprinting skills last NaNoWriMo, I can get out a decent volume in uber-rough draft.

If I roughed out one post per break, that would give me two posts to polish once I got home. It’s much easier to sit down and edit after a workday of Left-brain heavy work than to start something new. Plus I have plenty of things that need drafting! (I’ve been making a list of things I’d like to write about for each of the blogs, but I’ve never gotten around to doing much more that the titles.)

If they say no, I’ll have to think of something else… which may involve sketchbooks and art supplies.

Or interpretive dance.

There’s nothing quite like realizing you have forgotten it is garbage day (again) to make one feel like an accomplished adult.

After all, it’s not as if the garbage truck is some sort of stealth vehicle that nips in and out on random mornings and steals your trash like an anti-Santa. They are not chaotic beings pulled along by strange attractors, that may or may not pass by my house on any given morning. They are not quantum units that only sometimes exist in Euclidean space (ah Wikipedia, I should know better than to start playing in thee) or ghosts of garbage trucks past that collect only memories…

Nope, they come every Tuesday morning at roughly 8:30, baring holidays or hurricanes.

They have done this for the entire seven years we have lived in this house.

I’m going to go curl up in a corner, sip my coffee, and pretend that I was well aware of this fact prior to opening my front door and seeing that my neighbors are all actual adults and not just pretending.

Sip.

If Knowledge is Power…
And Power Corrupts…
Doesn’t that prove that Good is Dumb?

I am thinking about spring cleaning my life. Sitting down and looking at everything I do and everything I want to do and figuring out what’s worth keeping. And all I can think about is that stupid quote from Dragon Heart about holding your dreams in your hands long after they’ve turned to dust. But dust and water make mud, and mud and breath make life. If I’ve got water (time) and breath (will) then I’m not ready to give up quite yet.

Still. At what point do you just let things stay dust? Bury the ashes along the wayside and stop looking back? I wanted to build spaceships once, robot dragons and computer programs that learned languages on their own. I still have those ashes in a pencil box with glow-in-the-dark moon stickers and the remote control for the robot dog I built in high school. But they’re only dust now, those chances came and went and nothing I can do will turn back time. I still keep the box, just like I keep all the rest, hidden away against the chance that someday those doors will open again.

And some days it seems like I’ve buried myself in dreams that have come and gone, ashes and dust, none of them still walking down the trail beside me, eyes bright and tails wagging. I’m down to the junkyard mutt, my scruffy codedog who herds globals and locals with exuberant zeal, and a tortoiseshell cat who mutters to herself about fictives and muses and plots that won’t come untwisted. And maybe they’re enough.

And maybe they aren’t, I don’t know anymore.

Life happens once.

There are some days when the world just seems too heavy, too smothering with all the things that must be done/need to be done/really ought to be done. And instead of feeling emboldened with a feeling of going and doing all I want to do is curl up in bed and say No. No I don’t want to deal with this right now/anymore/at all.

But the world doesn’t care, and I can’t afford to not care, and all I have left is that I’m too stubborn to lie down and die. Because it will get better, eventually, and I just have to dig in my hooves and lean into the traces and keep pulling.

If it’s a fight life wants, it’s a fight life’s gonna get, and it can pile as much crap as it wants on the sled, I’m still gonna pull that sucker. Because if I’m a horse, I’m a Morgan-Arabian cross, bitchy and stubborn and bred to the bone to never give up, never ever give up.

And dammed if I’m going fail.

*pulls*

Dear Brain,

It is not necessary for you to try and think of sixteen things simultaneously. Even less so when twelve of the sixteen things have nothing in common. You are not Google. You do not need to provide me with random search strings about the number of petals on a tulip or why one type of elephant has smaller ears than the other.

Seriously. No love.

kthxbye.

P.S. Although finally remembering the thing that I was too tired to write down last night was a nice bonus.

May every year be better than the one before.
May your lows be only valleys soon crossed.
May your highs show you the way to another mountain.
May you find strength in old friends, and joy in new.
And in all things to come, may you enjoy the journey.

~*~*~*~*~

Most likely I am meant to post something deep and insightful here, but right now I’m just focused on getting this year over and the first half of next year over with as quickly as possible. I have a feeling a good portion of my life will be played at fast forward for the next half-decade or so. *sighs*

So tomorrow, I will be wise and deep and full of new life and purpose… and today I shall bid farewell to a year passed. *raises a glass* To the things I did, and the things I didn’t do. To the friends I made and lost. To life, and all its goods and evils. To a year I will not have to live again, and I am glad for it. Hear, hear!

How you pack your bags makes all the difference in the trip.

It’s never as far to the top as you think it is.

Sometimes the top of the mountain just leads to another mountain. Break out the champagne anyways.

Rockslides and avalanches are just a part of life, the mountain is not out to get you.

Sometimes it takes more than one try to reach the summit. Remember: Yoda was just a muppet.

Mountaintops are not mystical reservoirs of happiness; if you don’t bring it with you, you won’t find it waiting there.

And when all else fails… keep climbing.

One of my new ink pens has been chewed quite to bits.
The two possible suspects as quickly identified.
They are asked to hold out their paws.
Ha-ha!
Puppies do not come in blue.
J’accuse!