Fail better

A climbing vine hiding in the shadows of steps. I played a bit with the contrast on this. Must remember how much that helps with making things jump out.

Today was the first work from home day after vacation, with one of the major goals being to get started sooner and work more smoothly than I had been before vacation. I can't say that it was a complete success, but I think I failed better. I like that way of looking at things: for a lot of things in life, the goal isn't really to do it perfectly, but to keep trying and keep failing better.

The plus side is that I got up and did the grocery shopping first thing, as planned, and that went very well. I also got the laundry done between doing other things and thinking through work problems. And I got a long period of mostly uninterrupted solid work done, understanding and reworking some patches.

The minus for today is that I'm increasingly feeling like I prioritized badly and what I did today was not really the highest priority. It's something that I need to get done, so this is not a completely grounded feeling, and there are pluses to doing what I'm doing. But it's been niggling at me. I also didn't start on real project work until late again (afternoon, although not as late as was typical before vacation), and I didn't work from my to-do list, so some fast tasks didn't get done today. All of that plus some goofing off during the day created pressure to run late and not stop when the day was over, which meant that I didn't get this post and photo done early, which in turn means that I didn't get a review written this evening. However, I'm letting tasks move to later days instead of pushing my schedule, which is exactly what I want to be doing.

I think ideally I'd like to post the photo and the noodling about life in the morning instead of the evening, since in the evening I want to be writing book reviews. I may try experimenting with that tomorrow.

So far, a firm schedule is looking like a fairly good idea. We'll see what happens when we get to the weekend, when there will be more pressure to stay up late and do things with friends. I haven't quite worked out how to fit that into my schedule yet.