For the first full day that Jude is away, I thought I’d track how I’m spending my time and see if there are any areas that could be improved. I’ve been cutting back on mooching around Facebook and trying to plan out the days as much as possible.

So I re-enabled my old toggl account and reacquainted myself with the ridiculously simple way of using it: basically, a big start/stop button and a space where the activity can be recorded. Actually, it has changed a bit since I last used it. The really massive button has moved to the be a smaller one at the top and there is a list of stuff that I’ve done, but in principle, it couldn’t be simpler.

So I’ve been clicking this thing on and off all day as I’ve been working through different things, and I think I’ve battled through the first day reasonably well.

The big bombshell at the start of the day was an email from the Young Voices organisation about their t-shirts. Long story short: Joel came home with a form for a t-shirt at a concert he’s singing at in March just before Christmas; form gets tidied away and forgotten about; deadline is last Friday; t-shirt doesn’t get ordered. You’d think that this is fine – a white shirt will suffice, says the email from the Young Voices people; but you’ve missed the deadline, so get lost.

Oh. Dear. This is basically my fault. I knew it needed to go in, but I’d let it slip. On top of that, Joel had said to me the other day that he really wanted the t-shirt because it would be something to remember the day by, and something to hand down to his children. This makes me the worst parent in the world and my appeals to Young Voices Towers were met with a “go away”. I’m sure they get it all the time…

I threw myself at the mercy of the school. Well, I emailed the office, explained the situation and asked if they had any bright ideas. As it was, they called me back to explain that they hadn’t sent in their form yet and “did I want to order one?”

Yes! OMG, Yes! Anything to stop our Joel from looking like the only child in a choir of about 5,000 that has parents who don’t love him enough to buy the blasted t-shirt (and a small light, apparently, which will be used at appropriate points in the concert)

Disaster averted. In fact, done with such efficiency that it didn’t make it’s own entry in the toggl tracking. It’s just part of an “Emails” entry in the morning.

As I write this, I’ve got 16 hours logged (from 6:30 to 22:40). 37 minutes of it, between 12:03 and 12:40, was my walk. Taking a radical new route of turning right at Yew Tree Road, taking in Heskin Lane and the back via Southport Road and County Road.

Another 36 minutes was taken up by my 20 minute run. The extra 16 minutes was general faffing about before and after, getting changed, digging my shoes out of the running bag and checking that Joel was ok – plus trying to make myself semi-decent before picking up Lily from the Scouts. Joel had returned from Cubs earlier armed with half a tree’s worth of calendar dates, church parade notices and cub camp letters. And an award for being in the “six of the month” last month, cool! So I obviously had to enter all this information into the calendar and evernote before running. Given my previous panic with the t-shirt, I was going to be all over the Scouts stuff.

It meant that I had a window of about 20 minutes to run before heading out again to get Lily. So I grabbed the opportunity, jumped on the treadmill and hauled myself (on the spot) over two miles.

So my day so far has been made up of 73 different logged activities, from preparing breakfast to writing this blog post, out of which about 55 minutes was spent exercising. Now I ought to go back, categorise everything and see just how much time I spent checking emails, planning the day and generally mooching around on Facebook.