Life update

It's been a while since I've written anything about the progress of my new year. The news is a bit mixed.

On the plus side, I've kept up with the new exercise regimen quite well. I'm walking every single night, including the weekends, and have only missed three days since the start of the year (one day that was just horrificially stressful, one sick day, and one day when games ran past midnight). I still need to figure out what to do on games nights going forward if they're routinely going to run past 10pm, since it becomes exponentially harder to go exercise past 11pm or so. I may try to double up the next day.

Also on the plus side, I've been slowly but steadily taking weight off (although I've been letting myself eat more lately and therefore this has slowed). Once I get through the current patch of stress, I'll try to go back to weight loss mode rather than maintenance mode. My blood pressure is also back down to something comfortable from borderline high.

The cost of this progress has been a lot of stress from shifting my life around, and there's been a lot of other random life work that I've had to do in the past two months. That, combined with two projects that are behind schedule and extremely critical at work, has meant a lot of stress, which I've been struggling with. I've now finished most of the major work for our Kerberos upgrade and the work remaining on guest accounts feels tractable, so I'm hoping this will partly let up in the near future. I've also taken care of a physical, a dental appointment, car repairs, a bunch of furniture purchasing and installation (with help), and similar work that doesn't have to be repeated.

My mood is very much on edge. This is mostly a stress reaction. Forcing myself to be creative and work 45-50 hours a week on tight deadlines takes a lot out of me and makes me uncreative, irritable, and prone to overreaction. Not much to be done for this except get through the current stressful times.

One thing that I'd dearly like to improve is my efficiency of work. I waste a lot of time poking at things, doing nothing while trying to do what I'm supposed to do next, or feeling guilty about what I'm not doing. I think the hardest part of time management is to either work on something or not, but not do the unproductive inbetween poking. I've been doing a lot of that poking lately, which often makes me feel like I'm only doing 4-6 hours of "real" work in a day. I'm then tempted to work later, particularly if I finally get on a roll, which means I end up working or trying to work hours that are far too long. Still no good solution for that one.

Thankfully, I have a couple of days of vacation between projects and I'm going to use tomorrow and Tuesday to further sort out my mail, work on whatever feels the most interesting, and try to generally get back on top of things. Usually this helps a lot with my work efficiency once I get back to work.

Posted: 2008-03-02 23:35 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04