I Can Buy Myself Flowers
Oct. 17th, 2023 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebeYesterday was a good day. I did my best to follow this new time-management system I found on YouTube, where you set up your Google Calendar with five different calendars that represent different priorities for your to-do list. "A" is for Appointments, those things that are non-negotiable. "B" is for Bottlenecks, or the tasks you need to do in order to be ready for your appointments. "C" is for Critical, relatively urgent tasks that you need to check off today. "D" is for Daily Routine, where you make time for the habits that allow you to be your best self. And "F" is for Flexible Ideal -- the stretch goals for the day, as it were. When you set your to-do list, you give each task a grade and a spot in the schedule so you know just how much time you have and how much you have to do.
It's made for a good complement to my Bullet Journal, actually, and I think it might be the missing step that allows me to manage my time better. It's easy to forget that time is a finite resource and you only have so much of it through the day, so actually pinning your tasks down to specific times through the day really help me right-size my day so I can have a more accurate idea of what a "productive" day looks like.
I was able to crunch through work, wash and fold laundry, do a bit of prep for my D&D game and Patreon using this method. I didn't feel bad about taking work time to pop down for a bit of laundry, either, because I had anticipated the need for this in my schedule and made extra time for QC checks to compensate. I had Duolingo and reading down as "Flexible Ideal", and I didn't hit either of those -- but I did find a way to build stat blocks for my PCs in Scrivener, so there's that.
R.'s home from Arkansas! It sounds like he had a good time, though there's the usual family stress. Our favorite gay brother contracted COVID before his mom's birthday party, so they weren't able to meet up or anything. And another recently-married brother might be having a hard time adjusting, which is no fun. :/ But we were invited to join gay brother and his husband for Tet in Vietnam, which sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We're torn between doing that and travelling to Little Rock in April for the total eclipse. The latter would be a lot cheaper, and hopefully we could go to Tet another year.
But then again, I'm not sure what we'll be able to do in the future. I've been doing my best to ignore it but the whole thing in Israel feels like a powder keg waiting to explode. It's disheartening reading the news of so much suffering, and all the conversation has been focused on who's to blame for it. Hamas is a terrorist organization that employs unacceptable means to achieve their goals, full stop. They should not have attacked Israel, should not be kidnapping Israeli citizens, should not be murdering innocent people.
At the same time, the hard-line Israeli government has been treating ordinary Palestinians terribly for a long time now and it feels like they've been just waiting for an excuse to escalate into a full-blown extermination campaign. It's really galling to me that the government is forcing Gaza residents out of town with no clear place for them to go and no good way to do that. The whole situation adds up to an awful humanitarian disaster where both sides are responsible for thousands of innocent deaths. And public discourse is so poisoned we can't even *approach* the idea of peace -- or holding the Israeli government responsible for its bad decisions.
Emboldened by the silence of its allies, how far is the Israeli government willing to go? How much suffering and bloodshed will they cause before someone finally says it's enough? And how will the rest of the Middle East respond to the refugee and humanitarian crisis that will come spilling over into other borders?
Right now I just don't see a good way out of this, and it's very likely things will get worse before they get better. And with the current state of international affairs, that's a very disquieting thought.
The situation has kicked up a lot of "background" anxiety that I've been handling OK for now, but takes its toll over time. I know, eventually, that the goals I set for myself or the obligations I've committed to will reach a threshold of burnout, and I'm trying to future-proof myself against it. But at the end of the day, what can you do? Work needs to be done. The house needs to be cleaned. Life needs to continue.
At least, with the calendar, I can check in with myself and lighten my schedule if/when I need to. And, hopefully, I can use the times where I'm relatively upright to balance out that slack. That's the dream, anyway.
Today will be a little less productive. Work flows right into gym flows right into dinner, so there won't be a lot of free time in the evening. I'll have to take my lunch hour to write, which works better for me anyway. It can be a struggle focusing once the Adderall runs out around 6 PM.
It's made for a good complement to my Bullet Journal, actually, and I think it might be the missing step that allows me to manage my time better. It's easy to forget that time is a finite resource and you only have so much of it through the day, so actually pinning your tasks down to specific times through the day really help me right-size my day so I can have a more accurate idea of what a "productive" day looks like.
I was able to crunch through work, wash and fold laundry, do a bit of prep for my D&D game and Patreon using this method. I didn't feel bad about taking work time to pop down for a bit of laundry, either, because I had anticipated the need for this in my schedule and made extra time for QC checks to compensate. I had Duolingo and reading down as "Flexible Ideal", and I didn't hit either of those -- but I did find a way to build stat blocks for my PCs in Scrivener, so there's that.
R.'s home from Arkansas! It sounds like he had a good time, though there's the usual family stress. Our favorite gay brother contracted COVID before his mom's birthday party, so they weren't able to meet up or anything. And another recently-married brother might be having a hard time adjusting, which is no fun. :/ But we were invited to join gay brother and his husband for Tet in Vietnam, which sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We're torn between doing that and travelling to Little Rock in April for the total eclipse. The latter would be a lot cheaper, and hopefully we could go to Tet another year.
But then again, I'm not sure what we'll be able to do in the future. I've been doing my best to ignore it but the whole thing in Israel feels like a powder keg waiting to explode. It's disheartening reading the news of so much suffering, and all the conversation has been focused on who's to blame for it. Hamas is a terrorist organization that employs unacceptable means to achieve their goals, full stop. They should not have attacked Israel, should not be kidnapping Israeli citizens, should not be murdering innocent people.
At the same time, the hard-line Israeli government has been treating ordinary Palestinians terribly for a long time now and it feels like they've been just waiting for an excuse to escalate into a full-blown extermination campaign. It's really galling to me that the government is forcing Gaza residents out of town with no clear place for them to go and no good way to do that. The whole situation adds up to an awful humanitarian disaster where both sides are responsible for thousands of innocent deaths. And public discourse is so poisoned we can't even *approach* the idea of peace -- or holding the Israeli government responsible for its bad decisions.
Emboldened by the silence of its allies, how far is the Israeli government willing to go? How much suffering and bloodshed will they cause before someone finally says it's enough? And how will the rest of the Middle East respond to the refugee and humanitarian crisis that will come spilling over into other borders?
Right now I just don't see a good way out of this, and it's very likely things will get worse before they get better. And with the current state of international affairs, that's a very disquieting thought.
The situation has kicked up a lot of "background" anxiety that I've been handling OK for now, but takes its toll over time. I know, eventually, that the goals I set for myself or the obligations I've committed to will reach a threshold of burnout, and I'm trying to future-proof myself against it. But at the end of the day, what can you do? Work needs to be done. The house needs to be cleaned. Life needs to continue.
At least, with the calendar, I can check in with myself and lighten my schedule if/when I need to. And, hopefully, I can use the times where I'm relatively upright to balance out that slack. That's the dream, anyway.
Today will be a little less productive. Work flows right into gym flows right into dinner, so there won't be a lot of free time in the evening. I'll have to take my lunch hour to write, which works better for me anyway. It can be a struggle focusing once the Adderall runs out around 6 PM.
