Productivity is actually really hard!

Wordle 578 3/6

🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Before taking the kid to school and T. to work yesterday morning I sent a quick email in response to something that came in the day before. The trip went fine. Traffic was bad but uneventful for me overall. I got back around 8:50. This will be in unusual detail for reasons that will be apparent soon.

While writing yesterday's post I also expanded on an earlier one because I felt like gushing and did a couple minor work things and minor WoW things. Then, I wanted to continue my general productivity effort, so I cleaned the kitchen before my 10:00 meeting, rather than after like I normally would. 

That meeting ended at 10:35. Productive enough. One minor immediate due-out, an email that took literally only 5 minutes or so, plus some upcoming soon. After that I did some stuff in WoW that was generally minor, easy, with no risk of getting "sucked in", so to speak, absorbed to the point that I'd neglect other things. 

Around 11 I jumped because I suddenly remembered I planned to prep dinner. It's a slow cooker recipe we haven't tried before, both for variety and because this would be another late night. That was cooking by 11:20.

Around then I also posted a few comments on Reddit and had a quick snack. (4 comments and 427 words over the course of the morning, which sounds like a lot now that I actually check.) I helped T. edit a self-review thing for her job and emailed her some plans about tonight and tomorrow. I also updated a few tasks in the tracker at work. I also tried to reach out to my doctor by phone and online for more information on physical therapy, because I haven't been good about self-directed exercises, and did a few self-directed exercises myself. Less than 5 minutes of them, but anything is better than nothing, right? Finally, I emailed the architect to see where things stood and when we could expect progress. 

Somehow, it was 1 PM by the time I had done all that. Where did the time go? Very little of that truly matters and I still had several more things I wanted to get to (calling the vet and cleaning up after the dinner prep, to name two), but I still spent almost 2 hours not on either work or games! Curiosity about this is where the detail comes from.

Around 1 I had lunch, simply a PB&J. Over the following 2 hours I called the vet (inconclusive), cleaned up after dinner prep, read an article T. sent me about a TV show the kid likes, and sent several messages/emails about general organizational stuff at work. Around 3:30 I was tempted by WoW and an article and discussion at Unfogged, but first I managed to get through folding laundry, a little cleaning of the heap on the dining room table, emptying the dishwasher, and getting a gym bag together. Helped by note-taking here to reify this stuff, among other things.

Finally I took out the trash. Then it was around 4:45, time to go get the kid. I drove to school and took her, two friends, and their mother to swim class. Normally the other girls' parents would get them all there but their car is in the shop. Swimming lessons started at 5:45. Meanwhile I talked with the rec center staff about some account issues, making sure all our ducks were in a row. Then I jogged. 2.11 miles in 25 minutes on a treadmill according to my app, 2.3 miles or so according to the treadmill. Less then the usual loop, but I wanted to take it easy anyways.

After that, I drove the friends to their home, and then the kid and I home ourselves. We got there around 7:20. Then dinner, a pot roast. I liked it and I think T. did too. The kid tolerated it. I cleaned up while T. put the kid to bed, and I sat down in front of the TV around 8:45. 

We slept poorly. The kid came into our room to get Kleenex because she was out, and then the cat came in, and the kid woke us up a couple hours after that.

So what's it all mean?

A few takeaways come to mind. In no particular order:

• Everything takes longer than planned/expected. I'm not sure if this is because I'm not used to being organized or a general Murphy's Law type thing. For a few examples between 3:30 and 4:45, putting together the gym bag required running all over the house and out to the car. When coming back from the car I found the mail, which included a bill (I got it ready to go out in tomorrow's mail) and generally added to the heap on the dining room table.
• Structured procrastination works. I've had fun with this idea in the past. But in all seriousness, if I had written out a to-do list for the day with all this on it, I would have been horrified, got at most one or two parts done, and spent the rest of the day avoiding it. Instead I had a to-do list with one or two items on it and just kept going.
• Warcraft isn't the problem. Obviously this is impossible to be sure of and this is motivated reasoning, but still. 
• Reddit could be, though. 400 words about the game, plus some more later while waiting for the girls to get out of their locker room. Impressive, but maybe not in a good way. For the record, this is around a thousand words, but in a much better cause, and a big chunk of it was done during lunch and other downtime yesterday.
  
• This isn't sustainable. All the conditions were right yesterday. They might not be the next time I try to have a day like this.
  
• It's hard to care about vague stuff. Very little of this was satisfyingly concrete. Almost nothing was "done", especially not the big, important stuff.
  
• Good for me. Despite realism about efforts like this going forward, I want to give myself kudos.