Writer, Coder, Avid Reader
Just home from the softball game (we won 35-7!) and I was so busy today that I did not have any time to blog.
Not much going on today outside of work and softball. I got the cable bill in the mail, and my landlord is sending someone over to clean out the gutters. It’s very late and I’m off to bed. More on the softball game tomorrow.
Why it is always I get busiest just before I am about to take some time off. I am taking half of this week off to head down to Orlando for Norm and Vicky’s wedding and I am being swamped by requests to get things done before I go. I’m in the office all day today, all day tomorrow, and for a few hours on Wednesday. There is not time to get everything done:
It might not sound like a lot but each of those tasks are non-trivial. Oh, and did I mention that I am scheduled for 4 hours of meetings today and an hour tomorrow, which whittles my supply of working time from 20 hours down to 15.
At this point, my plan of attack it to attempt to take care of items 2, 3, and 4 today, and then deal with item 1 tomorrow. I’m still not sure I can get it all done, but it’s the best I can do.
I really can’t wait until Wednesday!
I knew I was going to be busy today before I even entered the building. I have a meeting tomorrow at which a prototype application needs to be demonstrated and the functionality that was promised in the demonstration wasn’t developed yet. My goal for today was to knock most of that off. I set my out-going voice mail message to indicate that I was unavailable today. I also created an Outlook filter to reply to any email that I received indicating I would not be reading email until tomorrow. And obviously, I didn’t do any blog updates until now.
But I got quite a bit done, considering. I implemented lots of new stuff, including a tabbed interface in .NET, thanks to the help of one of our recent hires, who had done that sort of thing before. Got a lot of backend stored procedures and database updates to support the changes done as well. I’ve got about 5 hours worth of work to go, and there are abotu 5 work hours before my meeting, so I think I’ll be okay. But since it’s after 6 PM now, it’s time to be getting home.
I’m finally back in the office today and I have a lot of catching up to do. I didn’t go to the gym this morning, in order to get a little extra rest last night, but I plan on going at noon today.
I’ve got a list of things that I’d like to have done by the end of the day and I’ve already gotten one of them done. It remains to be seen if I can get the others done.
Last night, I had a craving to listen to No Doubt, so that’s what I’ll be listening to while I work this morning.
Two more signs that I am just too damn busy these days. First, I was up at 4:30 AM this morning, as usual, and into the office by 5:40 AM. However, once I got up here, I hesitated to go to the gym for my cardio workout because I thought I might be able to make use of the extra hour and a half to try and get caught up. So I did not go to the gym this morning, and instead opted to try and get caught up. I barely put a dent in things, and I did not feel good about it. I decided then and there that I would not sacrifice my morning workout for work again.
Second is email. I am very efficient with my email. At work, I use my inbox as my “to-do” list and refile everything else that I have read and/or taken action on immediately. This means that, unlike most people I work with who have thousands of messages in their inbox. I typically have 10-20 messages at any given time–namely those things that remind me of tasks I have to do. But I have been so busy that my normally efficient email practices have gone out the window. As of this moment, I have 171 items in my inbox and I am so hopelessly behind, that I am going to wholesale refile them later on today. If I forget to do something because of it, oh well. Someone will remind me.
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