Carving out time

You haven't heard from me all week, and you're starting to wonder if I vanished into thin air, lost my password, or what. Well, I've just been busy.

All last week, I was wondering why I was having such a hard time getting anything done. I had so much stuff that I wanted to get done, but never seemed to be making any traction on it. Then I looked at my calendar, and it all became clear.

Okay, admittedly, that screen shot is from two weeks ago, when I still had a full schedule of training. But nevertheless, I've been going to a lot of meetings. Some of them are necessary, some aren't. I realized that I'd have to defend my schedule against meetings.

That's what I've been doing the past week: I was declining meetings that I didn't need to go to, and making time to work instead. This involved studying, coding, the usual stuff. This week, I was getting stuff done— but I was staying there until 11:30 PM at the earliest, 1:30 AM at the latest. I wasn't getting nearly enough sleep. On the upside, spending all this time in the office gave me a chance to learn about the laundry facilities at work, but overall, I think it was more of a bad thing.

Next week, I'm going to be defending my personal schedule against my work schedule. I need to make sure that I give myself time to relax, to take care of personal errands, to visit with friends, sleep, and do all of the rest of the things I have to do that don't involve work.

You may have noticed that my "Recent News I Found" sidebar has had a fairly high number of life organization articles. (Remember that it's a separate feed from my blog. To subscribe to that, click the "Read More..." in the sidebar, and subscribe to the feed there.) I suppose that, as I'm finding my feet in my new job, I've been thinking a lot about getting my life better organized.

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