The Work From Home Shift

Blogger ate my Monday post. Here it is now.

Alternative post title: If it takes me 6 hours to knit a mitten . . .

I've basically spent my entire adult life believing that I need more hours in the day. I've always overcommitted (I have a problem saying "no") and far too many evenings, I've heaved a great big sigh and thought, "If only I'd managed to get X, Y, and Z done today."

Lately I've been realizing just how much of my life revolves around unrealistic expectations and guilt. It's not a fun way to live, you guys. It really, really needs to stop.

You see, the thing is, that I always think I should be doing more. I should be making more money, writing more, exercising more, cleaning more, being more giving of my time. That's where the magical thinking about, "If only there were more hours in the day" comes in.

Because I work from home and most people do not, I tend to believe that if I am to be accepted by the outside world, I need to work eight hours day at my desk, just like everyone else. Good God, I wouldn't want to look lazy, would I? If I spend an hour out of what is technically my eight hour day starting a batch of bread or cleaning the bathroom, the guilt starts to seep in. "Real people" do not clean their bathroom on workdays, I think to myself.    

Happily, I think I might be developing some methods to finally let all that heavy, mucky guilt go.

The first thing that happened was my friend Rose introduced me to Leonie Dawson last week (this post specifically) and I keep going back and reading and re-reading Leonie's 15 hour work week post over. It makes so much sense to me and feels like just the affirmation I needed. When we focus on doing instead of working it's amazing what we can accomplish. Although I'm sure you are an excellent employee, chances are you could accomplish everything you get done in a 40 hour work week in your outside of home job in a  20-25 hour work from home schedule. That's just the way things are.  

For example, in my early days of being homeschooled, (gosh, I really should be pretty good at this "work from home" thing by now) we tended to have 3-4 hour school days. That is, we managed to accomplish everything you would have done in a normal 7-8 hour school day before lunch. How? There was no walking down the hall from classroom to classroom. No wasted time when you were done with your work and had to wait 15-30 minutes for all the rest of your classmates to finish up. The same thing goes when you work from home. You can let go of expectations about how long something should take you and focus on the finished result instead. (Also, no meetings!) If you accomplish everything you need to do in a day, who cares if it took you eight hours or not? 

The secret to these condensed school and work days is focus and tuning out distractions.

I just love this quote about focus from Leonie's post: 

Great,” I hear you saying. “I know, I know, I’m supposed to focus. Seriously, that’s like the most overused productivity word ever.”
 
To which I say “That’s nice, but are you fucking doing it?”

I'm making "are you fucking doing it?" my mantra for the week and we'll just see what happens to my productivity. (Good things, I hope.)

Stop me if this sounds familiar, but here's what's been happening when I sit down to "work" lately. I get everything cued up to go. And then suddenly I have an urge to open up approximately 6-7 tabs in my internet browser. I check my stats on Etsy. I read a few blog posts.All of these thoughts start rushing through Am I thirsty? Am I hungry? Do I need a cup of tea? Should I go to the bathroom? Maybe I should research a designer for a new blog design. Did I get around to those social media posts I've been meaning to do? Then I go back to my blog post and find a blank screen and a blinking cursor.

When you work with that level of focus, let me tell you, sunset comes around pretty darn fast. 

I've been spending all of this time thinking I ought to act like I was working when in fact, I was really just posing as someone working. There's another mantra I like to pull out at times like these when productivity starts to take on sort of mythical elements: "Would you pay yourself for what you're doing right now?"

I got another big nudge towards focus and productivity last week when I committed to knitting five pairs of mittens for bridesmaids at a wedding the second weekend in December. It takes me approximately 6 hours to knit a single mitten, so that's pretty easy math: 10 mittens at 6 hours each = 60 hours of knit time. The mittens need to be shipped by December 1 to give them enough shipping "wiggle room" to arrive on time so that means between Saturday (when the yarn for the mittens arrived) and December 1st, I need to find 60 hours of knit time along with keeping up with all the rest of my work commitments.

At first such a task seemed impossible, ridiculous, "what was I thinking?", etc. etc. And then I realized, if I let go of the social media surfing and the other mindless time wasters, 60 hours in the span of 15 days isn't so bad. That's just 4 hours of knitting a day and I don't ever get any work (other than knitting) done between the hours of 4 - 10 p.m. anyway. If I stay on task, everything will get done just as it should be. In fact, the first pair of mittens are already done.    

Focus on the end product. FOCUS. Wring more out of the hours you have and stop wishing you had more of them. Let the guilt go and enjoy what you get done. 

 

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Where There's A Will . . .

I started out the new year with some of the most stereotypical reading material ever. In the early days of January, I churned through Kelly McGonigal's The Willpower Instinct, learning all the mind games we play on ourselves and how we frequently derail our best intentions. In the book, McGonigal encourages the reader to take on a willpower challenge to test out the concepts and ideas she introduces about the science and psychology of willpower.

We all have behaviors and habits we wish we didn't and thinking of a willpower challenge is less than challenging for most of us. For me, my default willpower challenge has always been procrastination. I frequently find myself scrolling through Facebook and Pinterest when I'm meant to be doing something else. So inspired by McGonigal's writings and since, it was a new year and all, I made the resolution to stop procrastinating so much. (Oh stop laughing you.) I also wanted to consistently get up at a time I deemed "a decent hour" on workdays.

And here we are, nearly at the end of the first month of 2013, at a time when the vast majority of New Year's resolutions have already been broken. And I'm proud to say that I'm still hard at work on my willpower challenges.

The getting up at a decent hour (which I declare is 7 . . . working from home is rough ;) actually turned out to be a cinch. When I realized the weather station that sits on shelving units around the corner from our bedroom door has an alarm, I simply started setting the alarm each night. When it goes off in the morning, I'm forced out of bed to turn off the alarm. And because I really don't care for the groggy sprint out the bedroom door to the buzzing alarm, I tend to wake up a couple minutes ahead of the alarm. Best of all, because I know I'm getting up at the same time each morning, I've started going to bed at a more consistent time too.  

But my procrastination willpower challenge is a whole 'nother beast. By being mindful of my habits and tendencies, I realized last week that I don't actually have a procrastination problem. Nowadays, I actually do get the vast majority of the things I'll say I'll do done. (Chalk up that one to growing older.)

What I lack is focus. (Oh look . . . shiny!)

I've always felt like I have a procrastination problem because I never manage to finish everything I think I should get done, even if I am finishing what I have to get done. 

So what's getting in between me and accomplishment? Oh, I don't know . . . maybe my penchant for having a gazillion windows open both on my desktop and in Firefox, which I flip between absentmindedly all the while I'm convincing myself that I'm doing something useful like writing a blog post or researching an article? Maybe the fact that I respond like one of Pavlov's dogs whenever I hear the "new email" chime?  

So as we move into February, I'm retuning my willpower challenge a bit. It turns out my procrastination problem can fix itself if I learn to tune out distractions and focus solely on each individual task I lay out before me.

In her series on handmade businesses back in October, Gussy Sews suggested that you only check twice a day. At the time, I found the idea horrifying. But I need to check my email all day, I thought. I need to respond to some emails asap. But really, whether I respond to an email within three minutes or three hours usually makes little to no difference.

My email doesn't need to be churning around in the background. In fact, I think this is a habit I picked up during my temp days as an administrative assistant. I often found myself with very little to fill my workdays. Having Outlook open at all times on my desktop gave me an allusion of purpose, even if, as a temp worker,  the only emails I got a regular basis were approvals of the week before's timecard.(Habits can be so silly when you get to the root of them.)

I'll be limiting my email checking in the coming weeks and I'll also be trying to cut back on my mindless internet surfing and we'll see how it goes.

The thing is, you never conquer your willpower habit. Sure, it might become an ingrained habit, but in truth, every single morning we are starting our willpower challenges all over again. Every day we have a choice to live up to the expectations we've set for ourselves to meet our long term goals, or we can choose the easier route with faster rewards. It's not easy conquering our willpower challenges, but it's most definitely worth it.


Did you make any new year's resolutions? If so, how are you doing with them? How do you stay focused?
 

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Winter Images

Can I admit something that has me slightly unnerved?

Last week, I did every single thing on my to-do list. As in, on Sunday morning there was nothing but crossed off items on the list from the week prior and there was absolutely nothing that I was supposed to do last week that needed to get rolled over into this week's to-do list. Let me assure you, this never happens.(Usually at least two rather important items have been kicked down the road each week.)

I mean, things that never get done have been accomplished. On Saturday, I washed the floor, a task that's been on my to-do list, since, I don't know, early summer. In the span of less than five days, I wrote, edited, queried and received payment for an article I'd been thinking about writing for over a month. And look, my Valentine's Day decorations (such that they are) are even up, a good three weeks ahead of schedule. What the heck?

Either I've really taken my new year's resolution and willpower challenge to start each morning at a decent hour and stop procrastinating to heart or else I'm forgetting to do something. Something big. (I am sure my recent burst of productivity has nothing to do with the fact that we're trying to conserve internet bandwidth at the moment, which means Facebook cruising, blog reading and other internet time sucks have been at an all time low - although, honestly, my busy-bee mentality did start before this most recent demise of the internet.)

So while I scratch my head and wonder what exactly it is I'm forgetting to do, here are some photos from the week gone by. (Sorry- no photos of mopping the floor. It was so filthy, I had to change the mop water halfway through. Bleck!)

It's been a windy winter so far and standing out in a bitter north breeze in the middle of the lake to ice fish hasn't sounded like a terribly good idea. So last Wednesday, we drove out on our lake so that we could still get a couple hours of fishing in and not totally freeze.  Don't worry, we tested the ice thickness in several spots before heading out: the thinnest ice we found was 14 inches.  Exercise: 0. Staying Warm and Comfy: A gazillion.

Okay, so the photo above is kind of deceptive. I actually spent most of this particular ice fishing trip inside the truck cab, finishing up Luisa Weiss's A Berlin Kitchen. Hey, it was windy out and it was a darn good book, even if it did make me really hungry. (It's a memoir with recipes.)

On Friday, we discovered what all of that wind was blowing in: snow.  

By the time the snow stopped on Saturday, we'd received a good 6 (8?) inches of fluffy snow. (I always underestimate snow accumulation which is how you can tell I don't own a tourist business in the area. ;P)

The winter forest really does look much better when wearing a snowy coat. I hope the winter enthusiasts are happy now!

Now that's the snow's fallen, the cold temperatures are here. We'll be lucky to see highs on the positive side of zero most of this week. Bundle up! 
 

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The Freelance Writing Trenches: Consistency

Did I ever tell you that I procrastinate?

I didn't?

I'm sure I've been meaning to tell you that. I just, you know, haven't gotten around to it yet.

That's right. Not only am I "Judge-y McJudgerson," I procrastinate. All the time. (I'd say I really am more than just a lovely bundle of faults, but really, are any of us beyond just being a lovely bundle of faults? Really?)

Source: Uploaded by user via Ruth Ann on Pinterest

 

I crave organization and schedules. I want color-coded day planners. I want to know that at 7:45 each morning I will be sitting down with my breakfast to check emails and that I will start my work day promptly at 8 each morning and that at 12:30 . . .

But the truth is: I'm hot or cold. Some weeks it's like someone started a fire under my bum and I bask in the glory of my own production. Other weeks. . . . Well, other weeks I bask in the glory of Facebook and Pinterest.

Source: google.com via Eric on Pinterest

BTW, what is up with that quote? Apparently I need to figure out a way to get to a living wage out of Facebook and Pinterest . . . .

Sometimes I imagine what would happen if I was actually consistent and could take those crazy productive weeks and those not so inspiring weeks and mix them all together to create a slow but steady pace for the year's 52 weeks. I imagine projects would be completed in advance of deadlines, clutter would diminish, and my blood pressure would lower. But I've never been able to maintain a carefully regimented schedule. I'm easily distracted (ooo, shiny!) and I'm not sure I'm capable of writing without a dose of stressful adrenaline that bubbles through my veins when I flip the day planner page and find a row of little deadlines staring straight back at me.

Still, some nice things would come from having a more consistent schedule and work ethic. It would mean that when an editor sends me a deadline reminder and I email back saying I'm nearly done with those stories that I'd really meant that I was nearly done with the stories not that, I'm thinking about maybe giving the sources for the story a call this afternoon. It would mean that I wouldn't being doing phone interviews at 7 and 8 tonight because I  would have done them ahead of time. But sadly, that's just not the case.

So here's to procrastination and the production it inspires . . . eventually.

 

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The Advantages of Crap Weather

It's been rather damp around here. For the last week, we've had a steady drizzle all day and all night. I've begun to expect little fairy rings of mushrooms to pop up in the backyard and fish to start living in a driveway puddle.

I don't mind it. The rain reminds of London and Ireland and Pacific Northwest and I find the temperate temperature easier to move about in than the typical hot sunny summer day. Besides, putzy weather's good for business at the museum and my blueberries needed some rain for plumping up purposes.And it offers me a break.

During the long summer days, it seems pointless to spend free time indoors. Not when there's gardens to weed, fish to be caught and exploring to be done. Although we did get out for a soggy hike on Wednesday afternoon, when I woke that morning to hear the steady pitter-pat of raindrops on the roof, I knew I had to cease my opportunity.

I washed the stack of dishes that were starting to teeter on the kitchen counter. I vacuumed and dusted. I even scrubbed the floor.

It wasn't glamorous,but with the crap weather outside, I had a moment to delay my crap summer housekeeping. I'm no neatnik, but I do feel a clean living space is an easy way to elevate your sense of worth and quality of living. That said, while a dirty house nags at my sensibilities, I'm pretty adept at tuning out those naggings. We spend most of the year in various states of squalor.

This morning I woke to shadows on the floor and the mercury in the thermometer steadily rising. Never fear, the cabin will look like a hurricane went through it before the day is done.

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Imperfect Timing

This blog post has been delayed twice.

First I took a Facebook pause to finalize Summer Crafting plans. The whole crafting tribe is headed north for some crafting good times at the cabin. It took months of planning, but at long last, the dates are set!

As I untangled myself from Facebook's vicious grasp, the phone rang. Not a telemarketer, not Andy checking in, but an actual source for the article I'm currently working returning my call and willing to give me all the information I needed. *gasp!*

These are both very good things.

Now, having missed lunch, I'm cramming a plate of nachos into my face while trying to get at least one more thing done on my to-do list before Andy and I sprint to town for gas, groceries and banking after his work day and before he heads over to fire training.

I had a feeling today might have a thing for imperfect timing.

The sneaking feeling started when I began making phone calls for my article over my breakfast oatmeal, only to find my two main sources I'd been counting on were out of town. Now what?

Frustrated, but undeterred, I hopped in the shower. As I lathered up my hair with shampoo, the power went out. As soap suds dripped down my back in the dark, I wondered what I supposed to do. Run down to the lake naked and rinse off? That didn't seem particularly environmentally friendly and even the more conservative option of wrapping myself in a towel and grabbing a bucket full of lake water to dump over my soap head at least 150 feet away from the shoreline seemed less than ideal. But just as I slid back the shower curtain, the power came back on. Disaster diverted! 

Full rinsed off (and clothed), I headed back to the computer to hammer out the first of two articles due on Friday. After what seemed like forever and many a grumble about "this being my day off," a perfectly formed article appeared in the Word document and I decided to take a break to check the mail. But when I opened the mailbox there was no mail inside! Either we received no mail today or I'd beaten the mail lady to the punch. *grumble, grumble, grumble*

And then I sat down to write this post and everything, sort of, magically, came together.

Like the saying goes: "Pobody's Nerfect." That goes for timing too. But that's okay. I can wait.

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A little recognition

I won a major award the other day. Okay, maybe not a major award, but it made me feel pretty good about things. One of my silly little radio commentaries received first place for writing in the 2010 Minnesota AP Broadcasters Awards.

Watch out Jane Austen!

I hadn't realized I'd been nominated, so the award came as an especially wonderful surprise -- just the thing to snap me out of my, what was going on, month-long funk. Now that I've had my press secretary (that would be me) deal with all the media requests surrounding this momentous event, I've had a chance to reflect on the experience. . . .

Honestly, I'm pleased as punch, but the last thing I want to do is make it seem like a bigger deal than it really is.Whenever I think of writers making a little too big of a deal out of their laudable (but still . . .) successes, I'm always reminded of that scene in Notting Hill in the bookstore:

Anna: Signed by the author, I see.
William: Yes, we couldn't stop him. If you can find an unsigned copy it's worth an absolute fortune.

Because the only thing we writers like better than seeing our name in print is seeing our names on a big ol' check from a publisher (or Publishers Clearing House, for that matter). And the writer's life is filled with oh-so-much rejection. When we do actually stumble upon some recognition, it's so tempting to keep patting the new feather in our cap until we've worn away all of its fuzz, acting like we have everything.

Well, obviously not "everything" since you got the feathers and the prince, didn't ya Kate?

I was interviewing someone in the fitness industry last week and we got to talking about how to succeed in the business world when you're your own boss. He'd been working to collect input from his clients (what we in the museum biz call metrics . . . museum people really can be kind of a buzz kill) so he would know how to improve his business. The issue was that people were more than willing to spill on what they liked about his gym but when it came to giving (constructive) criticism, they clammed up.

While praise is lovely and never fails to give us a warm little glow of stratification, we can only grow and improve if we are tested. Rejection just means there's still work to do. Criticism gives us an idea of how to go about that work.

Yesterday morning I checked my email first thing and found two rejections waiting for me from literary agents I'd queried about representing my novel. 

That'll keep me grounded. More importantly: it'll keep me working.

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A Whole Lot of Static

Things have been feeling a little static around here lately.

I couldn't figure out why time seems to have been going so amazingly fast since the new year.

Then I realized the weird passage of time so far this year might have something to do with the fact that this picture (taken January 2, 2011) could have been taken yesterday. No wonder I'm always surprised to find that we're suddenly at Thursday again each week. When there's so external indicator of time passing, each flip of a calendar page can be pretty surprising. All that static really messes with your senses.

I have hard time gauging progress when the world around me is buzzing with static. It's easy to feel like I'm not doing enough. Making kind of absurd goals like writing 50,000 words in one month, starts to sound like a good way to anchor myself in the present.

But even if the world is frozen and snowy and spring seems a long time off, time is passing. When I really look at things, I see progress and accomplishment.

So when I woke up on Tuesday morning with the stomach flu that Andy'd had a couple weeks back which I was so sure I wasn't getting, I tried not to feel too bad about what that meant for my 50,000 word count goal for the month of March. Instead, I gave myself permission to nap, to rest up a little bit.  I can't sleep until the spring thaw comes, but I can grab myself a little more energy to deal with winter's lingering static.

Stomach flu or not (hopefullly not!), I hope you're all giving yourself plenty of permission to nap during this late winter too!

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Forced Blossoms

"I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting."
-- Annie Dillard  

I've been working my way slowly through Annie Dillard's nature writing classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this winter. I grabbed the book at Half-Price Books this past summer, figuring if I was going to spend all this time writing in the woods, I ought to study one of the definitive woods writers. To be honest, it's slow going for me and Annie. I pick Pilgrim every now and then and always find wisdom in the pages. Yet in the time it takes me to finish a chapter of Pilgrim, I manage to read entire other books. I'm dabbling my way through this winter's reading, picking up a little of this and that, collecting plenty of helpful, informative kernels as I go, like Dillard's quote above.

Reading about Dillard's wintertime experiences at Tinker Creek, I was struck by the juxtaposition of, well, almost everything, the winter season offers.When the world is at its most externally abrasive, internal time seems almost mandatory and as a result, when the world is one frozen, leafless scene, we're often doing most of our annual growing.  This time of year, when my time is of my own design (for better or for worse), I can read and blog and write with only self-imposed productivity goals to add urgency to my days. For sure, this fallow time is my most productive writing period of the year.


I always wonder at the New Year being located at the end of December. To me, February always seems to be the time of year I feel most in control, when I can look back on the past 12 months and clearly see progress made.  In summer, I lose my sense of balance and start to feel as though I lead one life too many. Even after the summer job draws to a close in autumn, it takes me a couple months to regain that balance and once again become master of my own time.

In these quieter February days, I can really revel in a new writing assignment or idea. I can look back and see clearly the slow but steady progress I'm making down this writing path. Writing obligations become desirable, coveted, not just another thing to do. In the dark and cold, I'm a forced blossom, thriving not on the light and warmth but on the words flying from my pen onto paper.  Even in the deepest winter, I'm blooming.


How are you blooming this winter?

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You Can Do It, I Can Help . . .

Time, time, time . . .see what's become of me . . .

I hear this a lot from people who think they might have a book hiding inside of them or who think they like to pocket it a little extra cash by penning a freelance article. "How," they ask, "How do you make time to write?"

The simple answer to is that writers don't make time to write.  Nobody does. There's no secret elfin factory manufacturing extra hours to the day. (But if there was, no doubt, the elves would chip away at hours and minutes and seconds and days in a tree like this.) We're all given 168 hours each week. How we spend that time is up to us. It's a choice. (Unless of course, you're my friend Sarah who's an auditor and works crazy hours this time of year. If you have a job which swallows your life whole, this time management post is not for you.)

Let's make something clear here: I am by no means the model student when it comes to allotting all the time I could to my writing pursuits. Like everyone else, I'm easily distracted.

But all that wondering about how to become a writer, all that waiting around for the magic key, kind of reminds me of that Mary Oliver quote: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

If you're really serious about being a writer, you need to at least put writing on your to-do list. And then, theoritically, you will do some writing and check it off the list. 

If you haven't noticed, I'm a big fan of to-do lists.I make pretty elaborate to-do lists for each week and am frequently disappointed when Saturday afternoon rolls around and I haven't checked off half of the things on the list. Because here's the issue: I fashion to-do lists with so many items that run the whole gamut of my lifestyle, when I looked at the long list I would get overwhelmed and inevitably I chose the task which requires the least effort on my part. 

Then last week I tried out a tip I found in the latest issue of Better Homes and Gardens: only put two or three things on your daily to-do list. You have to select the very most important things you need to get done in the day (namely, anything you get paid to do) and anything you feel guilty about not getting done, like that writing project. Make each tasks as specific as possible. Don't say "start writing novel." Instead write "outline chapters 1-3." You can't list making supper, hauling in wood, checking the mail or whatever other everyday tasks you're bound to do anyway. (I do however have to list "exercise" on my task list.) I still keep the weekly to-do list and then divvy up my tasks in little bite-sized chunks each day. Let me tell you, it felt really good checking off things on two separate lists and having a completely accomplished weekly to-do list last Saturday evening.

Try it out. If you can wiggle writing time into those few all important tasks you need done each day, you might be pleased at how the words start piling up on the page.

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Something in the Air

Lately, there’s been something in the air. At first, as a series of blustery days churned up the lakes, riled the trees, and brought in cooler air, I assumed that strange buzz in the atmosphere was simply autumn’s arrival. But the fact that temperature inside my work place today reached 91.1 degrees today pretty much debunked that theory.

And there’s still something in the air. A sense of energy. And even more than a sense of energy, some sort of urgency. Something that prompts me to keep going even when my mind tells me the day is done. Something that has me reaching for the “get some zzzs” herbal tea on an 85 degree evening.

Maybe it’s the result of the solar storms last week that painted the night sky in lovely shades of northern lights.

 

Northern Lights | WTIP North Shore Community Radio, Cook County, Minnesota

Or maybe it has to do with planet alignment. Whatever it is, the last week I find my days starting strong, only to spend most of the work day cranky yet after heading home and making supper, I am struck by a sudden urge to “go” just when it really should be time to turn out the lights. Andy calls it the “summer doldrums.” It doesn’t seem like doldrums to me exactly (at least not early in the morning or late at night) but it definitely feels unsettled.

Part of the unsettledness is perfectly logical. The first half of the month is always more frantic than the second half as I pulled together the month’s allotment of freelance articles. Once we hit the 15th of the month, things slow down, or at least, the manner in which things unfold is based slightly more on my whims.

Tori over at Rabid Ink wrote an interesting post on working to relax and it strikes me that what she writes about might be part of what’s going on around here as of late. This summer has been a juggling act of a wide variety of projects and it’s easy to view any sort of free time as procrastination. Instead of taking a load off at the end of the day, I find it more comforting to sit at the computer and attempt to tap out a few sentences, paragraphs. Keep that up for too long and there’s bound to be a strange sense of energy in the air that’s morphed out of my control.

So I’m giving into the summer doldrums, the solar storms, the planets, visit from muse, whatever this disturbance is. I will work on freelance assignments by morning and type out commentaries in the evening hours while simultaneously blogging, scouring Writer’s Digest and Fund for Writers for ways to hone my writing craft and improve my platform, and crafting editorial calendars. It seems silly to sit passively in befuddlement when something beyond me seems to be prompting: go, go, go. Someday soon, I know I'll wake up and find whatever it was has disappeared and it'll be same ol', same ol'. But until then, I might as well get something done.

Have the summer “doldrums” or some other strange force hit where you’re at? What do you do to manage it?

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