Perspective

I see that I started work again and disappeared from here. *heh*.

The first week back after a long vacation is always interesting, particularly at the start of a new year when I've been thinking through schedules and focus. A few realizations from this week:

• It takes a lot of mental focus to do a full week's work, and more effort if I'm doing a better job. There are hours in the day for me to do other things around work, but while during vacation it seems like I can use those hours, it's quite difficult to do that in practice.

• I get a lot more work done when I really focus on doing work. No music, no TV, no radio, and carefully shutting everything else down except what I'm working on. The flip side is that I lose focus after a while, but rather than starting a persistant distraction, getting up and doing some little chore works much better. After something that takes about five or ten minutes, I get focus back.

• If I invest the time and energy into working properly, I get way more done than if I'm multitasking and distracting myself. This means that I can work fewer hours and get the same or more done. But it's more exhausting, which means it's important that I really do work fewer hours and cap my work time at forty hours. Otherwise, I burn out.

It's been a great first week. I'm still playing with balance, but it's already much better than it was at the end of last year.