I’m still waiting to hear back from the swim camp guy. I finally make a decision, and now I can’t execute it. If his is full, I can go to Ireland… at this point I just want to nail something down. I’m going to give him tomorrow, and then email again.
On the bright side, I feel like I’ve made a bit of a productivity breakthrough. In early January, I felt like I was wasting working time on going through the kids’ school boxes and my Goodreads stuff, but they reminded me of something I’ve forgotten in the last decade of kid-raising multitasking – sometimes, to get things done, the best strategy is to grab hold and worry it like a dog until it’s finished. I’m working on a lot of different things right now, and I like it (being easily bored by routine), but I have been very scattered in my approaches. Sometimes you’ve got to block everything else out and get ‘er done. And if other things fall apart a little bit in the meantime, you’ll put them back together.
Finishing the editing of this blog in 4 days has been wildly more successful than over the course of months – you forget where you were, what you were working on and how all of it works, and it takes extra time each time you come back to it to put yourself in the right place.
Later:
I am sad that it has taken me so many years to realize what a mental burden having unfinished, messy and/or unattractive things around takes on me. Taking a little extra time (à la Marie Kwodo) to make things finished, neat and attractive (hello all cup emblems facing forward) makes a surprising difference to the efficiency with which I conduct my life – totally worth the amount of time it takes. On the bright side, I could have realized it years later than this.
(Also, it would have been to some degree impossible when the kids were little. I’m so glad I spent time with them instead of spending it Kwondoing their shit. But perhaps there was a balance I could have struck.)