time management – Page 10

Drowning in information

The last couple of days, I have not kept on top of my e-mail inbox as much as I otherwise might, in an ideal world. And I have a fair amount of e-mail coming in, what with one thing and another and follows and notifications and updates and this and that, not to mention a small spike coordinating with a couple of people for splitting shipping on an absolutely lovely jewelry sale.

I had 431 e-mails in my inbox. 303 of them were unread.

(In a fit of composure of which I am rather proud, I did not actually flee screaming from the keyboard. Go me.)

I now have only 335 in my inbox, and 210 of them are unread. Am hoping I can get the unreads down to double digits by the end of the ~~night~~ weekend.

There has got to be a better way to handle my e-mails. However, I am pretty sure that actually having the metaphorical space to implement that better way involves a through unf*cking of my inbox, and that currently feels more than a little daunting. (Plus I am running low on junk TV to put on while I work on this, so my options seem to be “get distracted by interesting entertainment” or “get bored because there’s nothing in the background”.)

(…wow, talk about a first-world problem. I will stop complaining now.)

Regrouping.

I haven’t written anything–well, outside of online communications and work-related email, which I generally don’t count–in a day and a half, which is annoying because I was on a six-day streak before that. I know why, and it’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.

It will not happen today. There. I have said it, so now I have to make it true.

In other news… well, there is a nineteen-and-change year-old-cat sitting on my arms while I type, gently pulsing and purring and being old and delicate and imperious. Doesn’t interfere with the typing, at least, although I do need to crane a bit to see over her to look at all of my screen. And I’ve just been reminded that vacation pay is issued upon request, which means that it’s been quietly accruing for the last few weeks.

Am finding that Night Vale Community Radio is actually very pleasant to listen to, being something between “background noise” and “actually requiring full attention”. It’s funny in a highly bizarre way, and while I can think of a few descriptors, they are a bit obscure, so I will just go with the slug that “It’s as if Stephen King and Neil Gaiman created a SimCity and let it run on its own for forty years.” The more I look at fiction, the more I find there’s a dearth of the unapologetically weird stuff. (There’s some – and there is obviously going to be a bit of disagreement over what’s “unapologetically weird in the service of the story’s mood” and what’s “bad worldbuilding” – but it’s rare. Suggestions welcome!)

Cluttered time.

Like (I guess) many people, I have accounts on several websites that I’d loosely classify as being social media sites–some (like GoodReads or Pinterest) less so than others (such as G+ or Twitter). And what I am coming to realize is that I do not think there is any way on earth I can possibly keep up with all of them. Because on top of those, there’s LJ, Dreamwidth, a deliberately scattered approach to Facebook, I haven’t even begun to look at Tumblr, and then there are all the inidividual blogs and sites and and and…

Ugh.

I am breaking out in hives just thinking about it. (Alright, to be fair, I was breaking out in hives anyway, and if you want to get technical it wasn’t hives but more yet-another-bout-of-dermatographia which come to think of it is really hitting the point where I should make an appointment about it, but…)

I used to manage to keep on top of, more or less, via Google Reader. Since that closed down, I know I’ve basically missed months of content. I can’t quite bring myself to write it off, but I can’t figure out how to catch up, either.

And today I topped four hundred e-mails in my inbox.

How do you manage it? How do you track everything you’re interested in? What sites do you follow, and how often do you check in?

Keeping moving.

Today felt a lot longer than Tuesdays usually do. I didn’t sleep well, which I imagine is part of it, and it took me a while to wake up. And most of the day seemed to go on strictly Sisyphean tasks; laundry when more clothes will be worn, dishes when more meals will be cooked and eaten, cleaning the litterboxen, and on and on. It was raining this morning, which was actually kind of lovely, and I wasn’t able to make it out for that; in fact, with one thing and another, I wasn’t able to make it out until after dark, which always feels a little as if it doesn’t quite count.

Still. I did make it out, and the house is cleaner than yesterday.

I’m hoping to sleep better tonight (a goal which I am sure I will get to a lot more quickly if I stop typing, but I also want to get this finished), and for tomorrow… not sure. Thinking I may need to start blocking out specific chunks of time for specific tasks in order to keep the day from slipping away.

On the plus side, the collaborative writing project I’m in seems to have started slowly unstalling itself, which is nice. Touch wood and hope it carries on.

Quite tired.

The job hunt continues, and I think that’s enough said about that.

I’ve been tidying the house a fair bit, and while it was never horrible, it looks a lot less cluttered now. (I got rid of fifteen litres of yarn on Thursday, actually, and am rather ridiculously happy about that. Am currently trying to figure out how best to rehome comics and graphic novels.)

I lost two hours in the middle of the day, today, and while I don’t think it was a bad loss I wish I’d been a bit more productive.

And I’ve joined A Month of Letters because really, I have all these bits of stationery around and after a while an unused stack of paper can start to seem as sad as an unread book.

(I’m still working on books, too.)

One of our pets probably needs elbow surgery, and we’re still waiting to hear back from the surgeon (we, at this point, means both us and the vet we took her to see). I am trying very hard not to get frustrated at the delay, I understand that there are probably not a lot of veterinary surgeons in town, but I really want to know what can be done for her. She’s not okay, right now.

I’m trying not to get ground down. It’s mostly working.

Slightly surprised.

I could have sworn I’d written something here in the last month. Looking over where I’ve actually been typing, though, I can see how I didn’t manage that.

I’ve been chipping away at a couple of stories–one handwritten, one typed up, and it’s interesting to see how the pace is slightly different. I’ve also been working on a story for a game–the Story Nexus engine’s open to the public, now, and it’s got the potential to be a huge timesink. (You can check it out online over here.) And there were some repairs at home, so there’s some work putting everything back into place.

And I’m job-hunting, too, since my contract was not renewed. That last is probably the most draining of everything, to be honest.

Observations.

Yesterday, the cat had beef and beef-liver stew, in bouillon, with “a medley” of vegetables, parsley, and oregano. Seriously, looking at the ingredient list on that can, I would have sworn it was human food.

Yesterday I had hot dogs.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think I had the better deal (if nothing else, dinner was made, which was a really nice feeling right about last night). I’m just amused by the fact that I think my pets eat more healthily than I do. It comes from not having thumbs or wallets, I think.

In possibly thematically related news, I have figured out why I hate going to the gym when the gym employees are around. It’s like clothes shopping. Except the clerks really are looking at you and thinking about what needs to get fixed about your body, and you knew that going in, and you (quite likely) paid money to go there and… agh. Body image issues, how unsurprising to see you.

(Going when staff is not around is much easier. I do not think it is ultimately as productive, though.)

Not much more to say, really. I’m making a concerted effort to work through my reading list. (That goodreads widget down there? That is not a complete list of what I have on the go.)

Lost weekend.

Well, not entirely lost. But definitely feeling that a lot of it went to things that I’m not sure were worth the time.

I find I’ve been doing that a lot, lately, and I’m not actually sure what to do about it. It makes me unhappy, but the problem isn’t just “I’m not focussing on anything”, it’s “I don’t want to focus on anything”. Almost the antithesis of time management; usually I think of that as making sure you have time to do things, and this is wanting to make sure I had things to do during time.

I don’t like this feeling, in case it wasn’t clear. It’s been on my mind rather since Thursday, when the light of my life and I went by the gym, and their printer/fax wasn’t working, and him being him I proceeded to sit there and talk to one of the trainers while he poked the wireless network and the phone jacks and similar. And I remember her asking either “what inspires you?” or “what motivates you?” and I didn’t have an answer. She was asking specifically in the context of working out, mind, but I can’t find an answer at all.

At work, sometimes, I remind myself that I am being a responsible person who is helping to support her household. That’s about it. I can’t think of anything else.

I’m going to sleep on this (again; as I said, been on my mind since Thursday), and hopefully I will realize there is a reason to be feeling a little less disquiet than I am.

Getting there, day at a time.

I was saying to myself “tomorrow is Wednesday – nearly halfway through the week” and realized that no, in fact, there are five days left and I am not even a third of the way through.

It’s interesting, how much I divorce the weekend from the week.

It’s been a rather stressful couple of days at work; I’m replacing two people instead of one. Hopefully things will slow down tomorrow, when one of them comes back. Meanwhile, I am trying very hard to leave the stress at the office.