Let Me Sleep, originally uploaded by pittsinger.
Being an ambitious and over-scheduled individual, I planned many things to do today:
- Another pass through my taxes, looking for more deductions and potential errors
- Thinking of, finding, and buying a birthday gift for my niece, whose party will be tomorrow
- Setting up new project management software
- Writing a long-overdue post on the play Flight at City Theatre (which, in short, I recommend you go see, as it is wonderful)
- Writing a post for the Big Big Design site about the talk I gave this week on how to use LinkedIn
- Migrating more posts over to this blog from the old one, so I can close the old account
- Writing a letter to the lovely India Amos, in response to the one she wrote one to me
It’s now nearly 9pm, and I completed one of these tasks: I wrote to India. I didn’t have a stamp with me though, so I failed to get it into the mail.
What did I do with the rest of the day?
- I walked to the coffeeshop (where I planned to write the letter plus draft or at least outline the posts on Flight and LinkedIn), where I ran into one friend after another and spend a few hours finding out what everyone has been doing these past many months.
- I bought bread and cheese at the grocery store, carried it home and made a simple but delicious sandwich.
- I took a two-hour nap. I thought I’d sleep only a half hour or so, and indeed I awoke after a half hour, but felt so cozy I shut my eyes for a few minutes more. Then I awoke another 90 minutes later.
- I sat at the computer, just to catch up on email and simple tasks, and started to look at the things we need to update in a blog that we’re redoing for a client. I decided I would only clean up the spam comments, which had gotten out of control. Then, I thought maybe I’d just upgrade to WordPress 2.5, which is so much better and which we need to upgrade to anyway. And then it was 7pm and I hadn’t eaten dinner.
- I made and ate dinner.
- I putzed around a little bit more with the blog, setting up some more plugins that we’ll need, then looked at some other stuff that was related.
I feel somehow guilty about the nap, but not about the other stuff. Why should that be? Surely if I was that tired, I needed a little rest. And while all the other tasks were useful, I hadn’t planned any of them either.
I think I will set up that project management software right this instant.
1. Be careful with that wrote-letter-but-didn’t-put-stamp-on-it thing. That’s why it took me more than a month to finally send you that one lousy letter—because I wrote you a nice, long one and then carried it around in my handbag for several weeks, never remembering to address and stamp the envelope and actually mail it. Eventually the letter was so stale that I had to write a new one.
Right now I am going through a similar process with my rent check.
2. Did you wake up cranky from your two-hour nap? I’m always useless for the rest of the day if I take a nap that’s longer than forty minutes—groggy, confused, and a bit belligerent. “Sleep poisoning,” that’s called.
3. Is one supposed to eat dinner before 7 pm?
Your day was about five thousand times more productive than mine, which was spent mostly shopping for stuff I don’t need, and then boozing and eating cheese with my friend Christine.
India!
1. Fear not. I have already placed a stamp on the letter, and it’s sitting in the designated ready-to-go spot. With luck today it will be joined by a couple of bills, to escort it safely into the hands of the USPS.
2. I didn’t wake up cranky, although I know the sleep poisoning of which you speak. On this occasion, I had had a pretty decent night’s sleep Friday night, so I’d already paid down some of my sleep debt. I was a tiny bit cranky that I’d lost a beautiful weekend afternoon to napping, but I got over that.
3. I enjoy a late dinner as a rule, but I notice that if I don’t get at least a snack sometime around 4 or 5 I become kind of stupid. Not a big deal unless I’m working on websites, which I was. There was danger I’d absentmindedly screw things up. Fortunately I got a little food into me, and no blogs were hurt in the process.
My day may have been more productive than yours, but yours sounds worlds more fun.
I just sat through a presentation on Basecamp, so your post is oddly timely. Looks like a pretty neat app. I build a lot of intranet sites with SharePoint and I’m intrigued by the cross-organizational sharing capabilities of Basecamp. And the interface seems to be very user friendly. I liked the comment on their site: “Even the white haired old guys can use it.”
Danielle, that is indeed a strange coincidence. The Basecamp interfface is indeed user friendly, although I get frustrated by the fact that to-do list templates can’t have pre-defined assignments. Also I would like to see a critical path — there are some things that Microsoft Project does well, and critical path is one. But still, Basecamp has much to offer.
Also: Can I use your description “oddly timely” as the new tagline for this blog?
I think I may set up rotating taglines. John Carman described me a couple of months ago as “not that much of a lush,” and I like that one too.