Coffee heat rising

Time management

Prioritize the Freakin’ Priorities!

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It is SOOOO hot that it is physically impossible for Person nor Beast to get anything done. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Actually, no: I’m determined to come unstuck.

The past few weeks have put me into a kind of coma. I get up, walk the dog, feed the dog, fart (interminably!) with the pool, then plop down in front of the computer and…and…yeah: sit there. Allll day long. Reading the news. Corresponding with friends. Reading the news some more. Reading those links that Google sticks in the pages upon which it forces you to rest when you enter a search. Writing a blog post (which is akin to writing a diary entry). Posting it to Facebook. Cruising Facebook interminably. Playing Internet games. Reading the news some more. Playing some Internet games some more. Fighting with the hazy swimming pool some more. Writing a Quora post or two. Driving to the grocery store or some odious appointment when forced to it. Fight with the pool again. Playing Internet games some more, again….and so on until around 6 p.m., when it’s time to feed the dog again, wrestle with the pool again, and waste some more time watching PBS news.

In short: I get exactly NOTHING done.

So…something’s gotta happen here. Decided it should be A Schedule: Set aside specific periods of time in which to do things. Write Ella’s Story, which I dropped and forgot about as I sank to the bottom of Lake Comatose. Post Fire-Rider segments, which also have languished. (Interestingly, revenues from Amazon have risen, suggesting the idea of posting freebie chapters from the various books actually does boost sales.)

And today I did, somehow, manage to drag myself around to preparing, finding images for, and posting Part VI of Fire-Rider and then posting links on Facebook and Twaddle.

Sounds great, eh?

Except that already tomorrow a fly will drop into that ointment: Not one but two workmen are slated to show up between 10 and noon. If one of them doesn’t soak up the entire day, the other will. Together they’re guaranteed to put the eefus on the “hour-a-day” scheme.

The pool is still foggy. A little better than it was this morning, but still a disaster area. I figured out it has something to do with the filter, which is operating in a suspicious manner.

The hand lesion that was found to be on the verge of flipping over into a squamous cell carcinoma is not healing. It hurts. It itches. And this morning I find a white spot — a very itchy white spot — right at the location of the original white nasty itchy actinic keratosis that send me to the dermatologist in the first place. And it’s growing. Growing very fast.

So, come Monday I’ll have to traipse halfway to Yuma AGAIN — just the drive there and back consumes almost two hours. This thing is going to have to be removed surgically…I can feel that in my bones. And how many gerzillions of hours will that consume? Don’t even bother to try to estimate.

Tomorrow morning will be consumed with trying to explain to the pool guy what has been going on — complete with photos — and, probably at the same time,. trying to explain to the Cox dude what the goddamn VoiP modem they stuck on my computer did yesterday, dragging me offline in the middle of an Amazon movie.

In the meantime, here’s something you can do for pore, pore pitiful me… 😀

This post at Quora is racking up more “likes” than any squib I’ve ever stuck up there. How’s about you visit that link, enjoy the anecdote (true story! 100 percent!), and if you so choose, click “like” at the bottom of the post? The thing is inching toward 1,000 likes…and I would get quite a kick out of it if it actually did reach that coveted goal. Share it on Facebook and Twitter and whatever other platform you haunt.

In the time-wasting preoccupation department, how cool would it BE to rack up 1.000 votes for that post?

Moving on: after about three hours of sleep last night, I cannot hold my eyes open even though the sun has yet to slide beneath the humid, hot horizon. And so…away….

 

How to Restore a Tired Whiteboard

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Can you believe that it was four years ago that I dreamed up the idea of velcroing a whiteboard calendar to the door to the garage, where I would be forced to look at the current to-do’s whenever I fly out to the car? The calendar idea came in handy, but ultimately I found that a blank whiteboard with a to-do list — no dates painted onto it at the factory — was a lot more effective in goading myself to get down to work on the tasks of the day.

One reason for that is that the little squares on a calendar just don’t have enough room to list the 87 berjillion things you have to do every day. And another: I don’t necessarily go out in the car every day, and so don’t necessarily look at that calendar. The office though? Yes, I go in and out of that place many times a day.

Whiteboards don’t last forever. What makes them erasable is a smooth, polished surface. And after you’ve scoured that surface clean often enough — whether with a special whiteboard eraser or a microfiber cloth or a Kleenex or a paper towel — you inflict a matrix of scratches that merrily captures the ink from a Magic Marker. Eventually the whiteboard becomes a ghost-catcher, and the to-do’s of times past take up permanent residence there.

Not feeling much in the mood to pony up God only knows how much and to traipse around the city or search Amazon to acquire a new office whiteboard, I decided to try to restore its surface. Some Web-surfing elicited a number of suggestions. A bunch came up, some of them conflicting. So I contrived to amalgamate the ideas that seem to make the most sense, and came up with this:

Erase everything, as best you can, from the tired whiteboard.

You will need to acquire:

  • A bottle of 70% isopropyl rubbing alcohol, available in supermarkets and drugstores
  • A can of Turtle Wax (carnauba wax for cars), which you can get in an auto supply store, a Home Depot or Lowes, or of course the ever-present amazon.com

First, wipe the whiteboard clean with 70% rubbing alcohol, easily available in any grocery store. This does get the marker residue off pretty well. I used one of those Mr. Clean wall scrubbers to facilitate the process, but on reflection suspect those things may be a bit harsh for the purpose.

Then, go away and let the surface dry completely.

Later, come back with a can of Turtle Wax. Slather on a generous layer of carnauba wax.

Go away again and let this stuff dry completely. I let it sit for several hours.

Now come back again and buff it shiny with a clean, dry, soft cloth.

Et voilà! Like new! No: BETTER than new!

Spin Those Wheels!

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Well, really, I can’t complain SO much about wheel-spinning. Even though I managed to evade working on the Big Annoyance of the Day — shoveling a foot-deep stack of accursed paperwork off the desk — a bunch of stuff actually has gotten done. Ditz, it’s true…but stuff that needed to get done.

Do you ever feel like, even after you’ve managed to power through a lot of tasks, that you still have been spinning your wheels half the day?

Done:

🙂 Clean out pool pump pot; clean out pool strainer basket; reinstall pool cleaner, run pump
🙂 Figure out why irrigation system stopped working (FAIL!)
🙂 Water citrus trees manually
🙂 Water other plants manually
🙂 Spray Dawn detergent solution on plants infested with skeletonizing bugs
🙂 Repair back gate latch
🙂 Repair kitchen cabinet pull
🙂 Pick up mess in house
🙂 Change bed; wash sheets & towels
🙂 Cook and concoct dog food
🙂 Clean up ensuing mess in kitchen
🙂 Pick up dog mounds
🙂  Drag trash out to alley
🙂 Post today’s chapter of If You’d Asked Me… (how to handle harassment of cute young teenager)
🙂 Post link to that on Facebook
🙂 Enter comments in FB writer’s community

Not Done:

🙁 Write the next installment of the Drugging of America series
🙁 Iron jeans
🙁 Write more of Ella’s Story
🙁 Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper

AND…as you might guess, “Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper” is the chore that all this wheel-spinning has been designed to avoid. I hate, hate, hate dorking with paperwork.

So I put it off. The bills come in. The checks to deposit come in. The statements come in. This nag, that nag, and the other nag comes in from various vendors and doctors’ offices and creditors. They all get tossed on a table.

They’ve been sitting here for upwards of a month now. The table is beginning to groan under the pile’s weight.

Yes. I’ve paid the bills. But all the rest of it is just sitting there.

It is going to take several hours to plow through all that brain-banging shit. And no. I just do. not. want. to. do. it.

Should write the next Drugging of America piece. And could. That also will be a time-consuming and energy-sucking task. If I start on that now, not enough time will be left in the day to fart with the pile of paper distractions. To say nothing of enough ambition.

One thing I probably could do is have the credit union send statements electronically. That would create three fewer pieces of trash to be plucked out of the mailbox. I’m already downloading all the transactions into Excel as it is.

But you just know, don’t you, that whatever form they use to send these proposed electronic statements will not readily convert to Excel. So that will just inflict three more pieces of useless electronic junkmail to deal with. Like I don’t have enough of that?

So little worthwhile stuff comes in the mail anymore, I hardly ever bother to open the thing. Now that the mailbox has to be fortified and locked, the extra effort entailed in tracking down the key, traipsing it out to the curb, wrestling with the mailbox lid, relocking it, traipsing the key back to the house, and hiding it again makes picking up the mail counterproductive. There simply isn’t enough real mail in there to make it worth being bothered to walk out there and wrestle it out of the box.

Consequently, these days I pick up snail-mail about once a week.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to count: EIGHT out of nine pieces of delivered mail went directly into the trash.

That suggests that about 90 percent of mail being delivered by the U.S. Post Office is junk advertising circulars.

And, therefore,  for every piece of nuisance paperwork that arrives here, nine pieces of trash have to be toted to a recycling bin. Ninety percent of delivered mail represents pointlessly destroyed trees, pointlessly polluting paper mills, pointlessly polluting ink manufacture, pointlessly expended gasoline to tote trees, paper, ink, and junk mail around, pointlessly expended power to run those mills and drive the printing presses and operate the equipment to recycle trash that is never even opened or looked at.

That pisses me off. It ought to piss you off, too.

Oh, well. /rant.

I’d better get up and go deal with the pieces of paper that actually do require attention. Of a sort.

 

Time Management: The Meta-List

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So once again I find myself feeling that I spin my wheels a lot, I loaf a whole lot, and I don’t get many things done. This, as it develops, is not entirely true…but an investigation shows that I surely do not make the best of all possible use of my time.

The other day it occurred to me to list the things that have to be done, and how often (i.e., how many times per week), and the things that I’d like to do but that are not required for survival or sanity maintenance. This produced a couple of interesting lists:

Note that this does not include paid work. This is just the stuff that needs to get done to maintain the house, the human, and the dogs…more or less.

Doesn’t look like much, does it?

Soooo….WTF am I doing that blows away day after day after day with seemingly little or nothing gettin DONE??? That is the question.

Presumably, I answer that question presumptuously, what I’m doing must be LOAFING. Procrastinating. Staring into space. Surfing the Web (which is the same as staring into space).

What always gets me off my duff is a list. So the natural response to this presumption is to create a list. But what came to mind was not a daily list but a kind of weekly list: something that would posit all those things, above, which could be used to drive a daily list. Or rather, seven daily lists a week. How to construct such a thing?

Based on the frequencies suggested in the neurotic accounting above, I wondered how much time do I actually spend on these activities? Assuming I were to do them as often as I think they need to be done… Here’s what developed:

Decimals represent portions of an hour: .25 = 15 minutes, for example.

So…on a day when I was accomplishing all these things (and often I do have to do all those things in one day), I’m spending between 6 hours, 40 minutes and 12 hours, 30 minutes each day just on living tasks…not counting paid work. That comes to a potential weekly total of almost 62 hours.

Total waking hours vary by the season — I tend to sleep more in the winter because it’s dark longer. In general, I’m awake 15 or 16 hours a day, or 105 to 112 hours a week.

So in theory, the demands above do leave time to do paying work. To break loose enough time to handle a major project — approximately 40 hours a week — I would have to cut out cleaning, gardening, networking, physical therapy/yoga exercises, dog care, shopping, surfing the Web (i.e., reading daily news), blogging, and writing. Obviously, this isn’t practical…but as a practical matter, I rarely have a project that demands a full 40-hour work week.

But…think about that:

Just to keep up the house, the yard, and the pool, care for the dogs, care for myself, and have THE most rudimentary of all possible social life occupies almost 62 hours a week! No wonder I’m so tired by the time I stumble off to bed.

Admittedly, a seven-day week…but life does not stop on the weekend. When you’re freelancing, work does not stop on the weekend, either.

So, with this meta-list in hand, what would a typical daily routine look like? Days of the week would differ, of course, because not all of these things have to be done every day.

From the meta-list comes a slew of daily task lists:

Washing the hair is a major project — it requires several hours to dry, and so time must be negotiated around that process. On Wednesday, for example, the hair would have to be done early in the day so as to have it manageable before I have to leave for choir practice. And the job had better be done on Saturday, else I’ll be charging out of the house Sunday morning with dirty hair. 😀

What with the new allergy to something — very probably dog hair & dander — the floors now have to be cleaned every day. Fortunately the house is completely tiled…but this task includes cleaning under all the furniture as well as schlepping up dog hair in more visible places. Oh well. At least the house always looks nice…

Cleaning the pool is easy, but time-consuming. Blogging is time-consuming in a big way. Cleaning the house includes laundry, a multi-taskable job.  It also includes ironing, a nonmulti-taskable job…unless you regard watching Rachel Maddow while ironing as a form of multi-tasking. Writing is by its nature time-consuming, if you make yourself sit down and do the job. A mile-long walk with two dogs, one of which drags you forward and one of which drags you backward, is good exercise but can also absorb 30 or 40 minutes. The physical therapy exercises only take a few minutes, but if I were to actually do the yoga routine that I should be doing every day, that bit of self-care would consume an hour or so. “Water and tend plants” doesn’t look like much till you realize that I live in a xeric jungle. Today, for example, I started hacking back the blue plumbago and the Lady Banks rose at 10 in the morning and knocked off at about 3 p.m.

Come to think of it…I need to knock this off and get on with the next project. And so, to work..

Multi-Tasking on Steroids

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So, let’s see…as we scribble, Your Honored Blogger is engaged in

• A chat with an Adobe Acrobat representative
• A chat with a client
• Managing ISBNs through Bowker
• Riding herd on email
• Managing back-end ditz on Funny
• Updating and riding herd on file full of password & secret code arcana
• Writing this post

If I’m not mistaken, that’s SEVEN THINGS AT ONCE.

And really, I should be doing an eighth thing: signing into gmail on the iMac so I can upload 18 300-dps images to Google Drive for the ebooks dude.

I feel like the character in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the one who tried to record her life in four different notebooks and bring them all together in one golden notebook.

Lessing said the novel was really about fragmentation — both of the mental breakdown variety and the societal variety. And I must say…life feels a great deal like that.

Here’s what’s going on in some of the other “notebooks” today:

• At Writers Plain & Simple: Trying to get a grip on Twitter as a marketing tool.
• At Camptown Ladies Talk: Do You Love Me? Or Only My Picture: a rumination on a flap going on at LinkedIn.
• At Twitter: How do you  like this little discovery?

Red Gladioli on DarkThis is how the Tweeting Set manages to post more than 140 characters: create an image (background picture optional) and paste your message on that!

So easy: PowerPoint will let you do that in a matter of minutes.

What that allows you to pull off, then, is to post an excerpt from your magnum opus to Twitter!!!

Hot damn.

Now, frankly… So far I haven’t seen any steamy excerpts that move me to hurry right over to Amazon and download whatEVER. But miracles could happen. I guess.

Heh heh… The Camptown Ladies are starting to take on personalities of their own, sort of like fictional characters seem to do. (It’s an illusion, of course: a hallucination. But it entertains wannabe writers no end to imagine that their characters “come to life” on the page.) The Girls are reasonably well behaved (for the nonce). But we shouldn’t put anything past Aunt Tilly….

Well, we have another task to multi: Dogs are campaigning for dinner.

There being a limit to how many things one person can do at once, it’s time to sign off here. And so, away!

Almost Too Good for Words

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First crack out of the box this morning, The Good Gray Times reminded me that I have to prepare a dog-&-pony on editing for a meeting that will take place in about a week. Today’s paper brought this astounding bit of intelligence to the breakfast table:

The assault was described as a terrorist attack by the Belgian prime minister…

Man! Stay away from those fanatical Belgians!

I’m supposed to “present” on the subject of editing next week. Having been given a very vague topic, I’m feeling a bit at loose ends as to what to say. The morning’s instant of hilarity at least provided grist for a post at Writers Plain & Simple, a site I’ve neglected overmuch since we made the move to BigScoots.

That can be a start for the d&p, I guess… Maybe I should offer them something like 10 things to fix when editing your own work. Then I could hold forth about the passive voice, a subject one can easily spin out to 20 minutes of yakathon. I have a particularly good bleat about the passive voice. Restrictive vs nonrestrictive…always good for five or ten minutes. The abstraction ladder usually keeps people awake — lots of good images. EEEEeeeeee How can I say how much I don’t feel like writing this thing?

Yesterday I did make good progress on the second installment of the Ouija Lover series. Heh…now our supernatural hero has not one but two women in the sack. Hot diggety!

But alas, today is a TimeSuck day, so not much writing is gonna get done. On the slate:

• Assign at least 3 ISBNs (ideally, get it up to ten, but this is a time-consuming proposition)
• Post Fire-Rider VII to Amazon
• Create the “editing” PowerPoint
• Prepare hand-out to go with the PowerPoint
• Plug Fire-Rider VII on various social media
• Begin drafting an article for LinkedIn, which REALLY needs to go up next week
• Study Smashwords’ freaking endless set of formatting instructions
• Try to apply these to the first Fire-Rider installment
• Begin figuring out how to get FR up on Smashwords
• Figure out how to recruit people to review Fire-Rider installments, which entails…
• Figure out how to post FR episodes as freebies
• Remove cookbook widgets from all websites

In the absence of much editing work to assign to my associate editor, I’m hoping to foist the Smashwords formatting on her or on one of her underlings. A cursory read of SW’s godawful how-to PDF suggests that a strong grasp of Wyrd is all that’s needed. We both have that, with a vengeance; she’s probably more skilled with it than I am. And I think we could take one of the templates I’ve purchased and simply modify the styles to provide the desired font and type size.

Last night I took the cookbook off of Amazon. The formatting in the file that went online was a mess — something that was not visible in their click-bait “reader.” I had no idea what a fiasco I was publishing until I downloaded a full-bore .mobi reader and figured out how to make it work. Once the document was “saved” to Amazon’s server, I found I could not overwrite it with corrected copy, nor could I delete it and re-upload corrected copy.

The thing has a very complex layout structure, with heads, subheads, and lists. Smashwords will not let you use Wyrd’s automatically bookmarked level A and level B subheads…you have to go through the entire damn thing and manually enter bookmarks, then go back to the manually constructed TofC and enter links to those.

Well. With 125 recipes plus a four-chapter section on the 30-pounds diet, that is going to be a ridiculous job!

The print copy looks just fine. So I may just buy a bar code & UPC from Bowker and have it printed on the PoD’s cover, and then sell only hard copy on Amazon and Smashwords. Not promising, but better than just tossing out all that investment in time and money.

Frustrating.

But it was a learning experience.