Back to work

Sand under water

I'm keeping a Zen-like mood from the calm of vacation, so you get more sand texture, this time under water.

This was about as good of a first day back to work as I could have hoped for. The only place where it fell short is that I didn't make forward progress on my current big project, but just about everything else worked. The schedule worked, I felt unhurried and capable, I crossed things off my to-do list, I made commits on multiple projects, and I worked out a tricky bit of work I've been wanting to do for a while. I'm feeling very positive about it.

Tomorrow, I need to do grocery shopping, and then I get to work from home. This will be another significant test, since I've had a great deal getting started when working from home before vacation. I'm going to do shopping first-thing to see if that settles me down, and then see if I can dive directly into work before getting caught up in answering e-mail.

I'm still working on my evening schedule. I'm supposed to be in bed reading by now, and I'm running late. I did that yesterday as well by about a half-hour. This may just be acceptable variation, or it may be something I want to push harder on. Still deciding.

In general, one of the challenges is how much I want to have a fairly strict schedule and how much I want to let things move around. Ten years ago, this would have been an easy question: moving things around was how I was the most productive. But as I get older, I'm finding more and more signs that I'm benefiting from a fairly strict schedule. Among other things, it seems to be useful in kicking me out of sitting around staring at the screen being unproductive. But I still haven't figured out the balance.

(You're likely to get lots of noodling about schedules and time management for the next few weeks. This is what I'm always like immediately after clearing my head from vacation.)

Posted: 2010-01-05 23:11 — Why no comments?

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