Productive
I had intended to do all sorts of things after I got back from Chicago last week: finish up some work stuff before the end of the year, make progress on a bunch of projects that I've been stalled on for a long time, fix some long-broken things in various websites I'm semi-responsible for, make my house more presentable, etc. It seemed like a nice solid block of several days (before my return to work tomorrow) in which to get things done.
And then Bruce killed himself, and then I came down with a stomach bug (norovirus or something like it), and I got almost nothing useful done from Thursday morning until Saturday night. I pretty much lay in bed and read Facebook for most of that time, except when I was in the bathroom or fitfully sleeping.
(Well, okay, I did finally do my end-of-year donations; that actually ended up taking up most of Saturday. So that was productive, but it didn't help with my backlogged to-do list.)
Sunday around 5 pm I realized that the stomach bug had been gone for most of the day and yet I still hadn't gotten much of anything done (although I had finally taken a photo of each of my stuffies, the first step in my long-planned project to catalogue them), and time was getting short before my return to work on Tuesday. And Twig texted me and asked how I was doing, and I said I was having a hard time being productive, and somehow that admission in itself was enough to prompt me to get started. A few minutes later, Twig suggested starting with a small or discrete task, and I replied:
Oh, I’ve been doing bits and pieces of them. Just now I went into the other room and stood for a few seconds wondering why I was there, then came back out, then remembered that it was to get my checkbook, then went and got my checkbook. So that’s progress. :)
And then the productivity snowballed. I got my task list back in order, I did some photo-labeling work, I made a couple of donations that I'd failed to make on Saturday because they'd been in my unmanageable task list instead of in my donations list. I bought some stuff (online) that I've been meaning to buy for a while, I did three loads of laundry (and learned that mixing bleach with vinegar results in chlorine gas, but fortunately I'm fine), I checked on a couple of bills I'd feared were overdue and found that I'd already paid them, I paid my overdue cell-phone bill. I sent a suggestion to WisCon programming, and sent a note to a friend asking for advice on framing another suggestion. I watched an episode of House of Cards in order to be able to return a Netflix DVD. I found a low-on-battery smoke detector that had been chirping obscurely in the garage for the past couple of weeks, and put some checks in envelopes and prepared them for mailing. I started recording financial stuff in Banktivity again. I reinstalled Mail Act-On.
Then I decided to put together a list of my favorite movies I saw in 2016, so I sat down to enter the past several months' worth of movies into my minimal movie database system, only it turns out that the code doesn't work on my new computer, and it turns out that php-mvc (which I used to create it) was replaced with a new system a couple years ago, and I figured this was a good opportunity to finally learn to use gii, the code-generation tool that's part of yii, a PHP framework I've been desultorily quasi-learning for a long time now. So I spent a couple of hours on that, including learning about foreign keys in MySQL and changing my database schemas to better fit what gii expects. It didn't end up working as well as I'd hoped, but I made some interesting progress.
I had planned to try to get back on a regular sleep schedule, and to try to get to bed before midnight, but things had gone so productively that I felt like even though it was late I should keep going. So I narrowed down my task list to a last ten or so items for that night, and decided I would do just a little bit on each of them before I went to sleep.
And I did! I trimmed my nails, I completed and submitted an Amazon order, I broke down a single cardboard box in my living room (I had previously said that doing that was my New Year's resolution), I dealt with a few pieces of mail in my papermail stack, I moved a couple of items off of the bookcase that I'm trying to clear off, I wrote and sent a couple of emails, and to finish off the evening, I did a little bit of fiction writing.
Didn't get to sleep until well after 2:30 a.m., but it was with a feeling of satisfied accomplishment.
Of course, today there are still a multitude of things on my task list. But still, it was nice to make progress.