It’s been lovely over the Christmas and New Year period. I’ve tried to avoid work as much as possible. Obviously when working for yourself it’s difficult to avoid it 100%, but it’s the first Christmas in a long time when I haven’t been overwhelmed with work, and I haven’t come down with a big old man-flu. This is good.
However, I was able to turn off when Christmas approached because I knew that there wasn’t anything urgent that needed doing. With the passing of 10 days all those non-urgent things have become great-big-super-urgenty-urgent things. This is bad.
All my “ideal working day” plans dreamt up over the Christmas period have gone out the window on the first day of work. Instead I have a plan for January that could be summarised as “forget anything lovely for a month”.
What isn’t on that list is Janathon. In my ideal working day I have a 90 minute slot between 11 and 12:30 which is for exercise. It’s there because of the other commitments – taking the children to school, catching up with programmers, catching up with clients, picking up the children, trying to have a life and so on. The ideal time that I can find is after programmer time and before lunch time.
I took the children to my parent’s house this morning for a sleepover. The intention being to get some time for work, but by the time I was back home it was already 12:30. So half the day gone with only a little work done and bugger all exercise. All that considered, I went out for a 5k run, around the block. If I didn’t do it at that moment, then it would never get done.
The weather was beautiful, perfect. It was sunny and probably freezing cold, but I didn’t feel it. I’m still feeling a bit lardy and slow after Christmas so I kept at a pace that I felt happy with. I got around the block in 35:41 which Runkeeper told me was the 14th fastest that I’ve done it in. Very happy with that.
Given that time is tight, I’ve taken to listening to audio books when I’m running rather than motivational music. The effect is that I feel like I’m getting two things done rather than just one. My next step is to see if I can go out with a voice recorder again and dictate stuff. I’m pretty certain that’s not ideal, but it would feel super-productive.
Still, now it’s back to work. It looks like I’ll be at it until late tonight putting together a presentation (yay!) and then full-on tomorrow just working down a list of things that I need to do. I have my “new rules for lifting” inspired workout to do, so chances are tomorrow will be a resistance training day. That counts, I think, so onwards and upwards.
Keeping up with the spirit of putting music videos in these posts, here’s Hero by Neu! from 1974. Another one of the gems that we listened to on New Years Eve.