As I type it is eight hours and a few minutes until the exact time I’ll be exactly 37 years old. It will happen at 20:02:23 UTC today. That’s 1:02:23 PM Pacific, 4:02:23 PM Eastern.

I should be asleep right now, but I stayed up late to finished getting the podcast out the door. I’m off for a short bit of sleep, then up to do the election updates, then off to work. At the exact moment above, I’ll be in a meeting at work. Then I need to leave work a little early to take care of reregistering my car before my current registration expires. Then I will probably come home and collapse.

Oh yeah, those using actual calendar anniversaries rather than the actual length of a year might not notice this anniversary until tomorrow. But I know better. Years are 365.242199 days long, and because of the distribution of leap days and such, the actual time of the anniversary drifts over the years when compared to calendar dates and times. My calculations of course take that into effect.

Anyway. Time for a brief nap before I have to get up and do stuff.

To folks who schedule meetings for a time two hours before I normally come into the office, causing me to get up way early in the morning so I could finish my morning election updates in time to catch a really quick shower, then rush through traffic that is heavier than at the time of day I usually go to work, meaning I had less time than I thought I had, so that when I finally got to the parking garage I had to almost run the couple blocks to the building to try to be only a couple of minutes late, only to find out in the elevator on the way up when I checked my iPhone to be sure of the room, that the meeting had just minutes earlier been moved to Friday afternoon… to folks who do that… please don’t.

Oh well, I’m now at work two hours earlier than normal, so once I get myself from this building to the building I normally work in, I’ll have some extra time to catch up on things, which is always good.

But still…

So, I took most of two weeks off. Well, sort of. I consider the two weeks to have been 23 Aug to 5 Sep. In a “normal” two weeks, for the sake of argument, I would have worked 80 hours. There was an actual national holiday during those two weeks, so lets call that 72. But I wasn’t really completely off. I went in a few times, I did some conference calls, I checked in on email a few times. Added up, those things end up being approximately 24 hours of work during that time. So really, I was sort of 2/3 on vacation. Out of 9 work days, I worked 3 and vacationed 6. They just were not actually divided up quite that cleanly.

So there were several purposes to the vacation. One was of course just relaxing. Did that. One was watching the conventions. I did a lot of that, but not as much as I wanted to or I should have. Also, I watched too much on news channels, and not enough on C-Span. Finally thought, I wanted to spend a lot of time on some of the personal projects I’ve let myself fall behind on over the last year. (I’ve allowed election stuff to occupy a large chunk of the time I would otherwise spend on such things.)

I had split those projects I wanted to spend time on into five categories: Quicken, Old Email, Genealogy, Reading, and “To Do”. To Do included a bunch of other projects of various sorts and sizes.

Over the course of my time off, whenever I was ready to sit down and work on stuff, I’d pick one of those five randomly (at first using random.org and later using MachDice on my iPhone). I did use the further restriction that I could not work on the same category twice in a row, so really each time I was choosing from four possibilities. Once the random item was selected I would set a timer and work on that item for one hour.

So, in the last two weeks, these are the totals:

• Quicken: 5 hours
• Old Email: 2 hours
• Genealogy: 4 hours
• Reading: 1 hour
• To Do: 7 hours

That gives a total of 19 hours.

So I still did more work for work than on my home stuff, even on the vacation intended to work on home stuff. Sigh. Next time I try this, it will have to really be a contiguous bit of time with no work, rather than no work interspersed with bits of work. That didn’t work too well, because it takes me awhile to switch mindsets.

Of course, I did do the other stuff. I relaxed, I went to Bumbershoot, I was there to take Amy to her first day of school and pick her up again, I watched a lot of political coverage, etc.

And yes, I did do a lot more of those other tasks than I would have otherwise. So that is all good I guess.

And I think I will keep the five categories and the dice roll to pick between them for awhile. And maybe try to make sure I do at least two of them per evening or something, and more on weekends.

Of course, my average for the two weeks I was “on vacation” was just 1.36 hours per day. So maybe targeting two hours a day when I’m not on vacation is overly ambitious. Maybe I should start with seeing if I can reliably do 1 hour a day.

Posted from my new iPhone

16GB. White.

50% chance of Tropical Storm force winds, 15% chance of Hurricane force winds.

Have fun Ivan!