Meeting Monday

In honor of the winter weather throughout much of the US, have a picture of snow. This was taken during a freak spring snow in Nanaimo a few years ago.

New week, new focus, new plans. I'm starting off the week somewhat deluged with meetings, including a meeting with the executive director of my part of the organization to express some concerns about a proposed plan. That's unsurprisingly eating a lot of brainspace. Tomorrow, I have a pile of upgrades, patching, and conversions to work on. Then the rest of the week should be more open and provide some time for project work. I'm hoping, though, that I can also work between meetings; that's something that I was bad at towards the end of last year and that I'd like to get better at.

Primary goals for today: finish the planning, organization, and completion of quick tasks I left from Friday, and then start making progress on testing packages for the next phase of the current big project. I'm taking it as a very good omen that I woke up by myself before my alarm and feeling quite rested.

I'm always surprised by this each time I get back from vacation, but once again I'm struck by how little energy I have in a week to do anything productive other than work. It's extremely difficult to find the energy to work on Lintian, for instance, or new releases of software that aren't work related, or Debian Policy. There's a long weekend coming up, which should help, but it's just a mite frustrating and long weekends are sparse. It would be lovely if I were able to do some of that work in the evenings, but even though I have the time, mustering the energy is very difficult. I always say that I wish I had more time to do all the things I want to do, but actually I couldn't use the time if I had it unless I also got more energy in each day. Eight hours of heads-down, concentrated work takes a lot out of one.

Some people have a regular job, work on Debian, and have children. I have no idea how they manage it.