Catching tasks

I fell out of the habit of doing this daily when I was adjusting my schedule for a 4am wakeup on Saturday. That turned out to be a bad idea. I think I would have done better if I'd just not tried to adjust my schedule at all and just woken up and then gone back to sleep. I ended up not being able to sleep Friday until nearly normal time and did basically that anyway, but with the mood drawbacks of shifting schedules. (The network work went great, though.)

I can shift about three hours fairly easily. More than that, and I struggle with jet-lag-like problems. I find this very frustrating, since it means I'm getting less flexible. When I was in college, I used to yank my sleep schedule all over the place without a care, including doing 28-hour days for one quarter. I don't think this is a skill that's actually useful to me any more, but I don't like losing capabilities that I had.

The weekend was great, although partly hurt by a couple of killer headaches (muscle-strain headaches, since they were positional). But this week has been great so far. I've put in well over eight hours both today and yesterday, which means I have free time for later in the week, and I'm knocking lots of random stuff off my to-do list. Today in particular, I got several things that I'd correctly put on my to-do list when they came up that, under my previous systems, I would have forgotten about entirely. That's the inspiration for the picture.

The one thing that I'm feeling a bit wry about at the moment is that this will be my worst month for writing reviews since I started doing them regularly. Ah well. I'm trying not to beat myself up over things like that; it will get done when it gets done, and it's something I'm doing for fun. And in retrospect, it makes sense: I've been spending this month doing very intense writing for work, which drains that part of my creativity and makes it hard to come home and write even more.

I have been reading, even though there isn't the public evidence of it, and have three books and three magazines queued up waiting for me to write reviews. One of those books is Quicksilver, which I think is more than adequate as an explanation for why I read only four books this month. Reviews will hopefully show up early next month, but I'm very intentionally not going to push myself to write one tonight. Instead, tonight I get to start a new book.