To address my answers to the issues that I posted on the 12th, I did take Richard's advice on revitalizing my Getting Things Done lists and trying to focus the things in my professional life. For the most part, I was already doing this. I print out a page every morning called my "Focus Sheet" that details the projects I'm working on and discrete actions that I need to take during the day. It's not perfect and it can ramble on at times with scratch notes and pasted in paragraphs from e-mails but its better than nothing.

What helped me most was taking a page out of the Extreme Programming Pocket Guide by chromatic and dividing my tasks out into chunks with similarly sized estimates on them. I seem to be struggling most with the mid-range or 24-72 hour view¹ in accomplishing tasks and getting feedback and reward for accomplishing them.

I started working on a pile of similarly sized tasks and calculating my project velocity, I was able to imagine myself having an impact on the completion time of the furthest task by lowering the average actual time. For each two hour task out of twenty that I was able to complete in 60 minutes or less, the average estimated time remaining (based on my new velocity factor of 2) would drop in a very gratifying fashion.

On the other hand, if I let my mind wander or get distracted in the middle of a task, I wouldn't stop the timer. I would simply realize that if I kept up that awful rate and lowered my velocity factor anywhere below 1, I would be giving up that time later when the inevitable tasks at the end still had to be done -- and adding to the time I was stuck at my desk having those tasks knocking on my psyche.

So that's pretty cool.

I also managed to set aside a few minutes for myself and redo the design and layout of the front page of vees.net to something more interesting and useful. The net worth stock tickers I mentioned the other day are posted up there, along with a few of my more interesting pictures to break up the monotony of black on white.

Also the feeds have changed. If you were using the old XML feeds for my blog that were hosted on vees.net, they're all now in the /feeds/ directory of epistolary.org. If you are able to, please change their location in your feed readers, otherwise you'll hit vees.net and be 301 redirected over to epistolary.org with every refresh. It's not a huge deal but it will save you time and save me CPU cycles.

But enough technobabble.

Life's good, the cooler weather is helping my sleep a ton because I can wrap myself in a huge pile of blankets and not wake up either all sweaty in the morning or shivering in the middle of the night or both. This makes me happy, although the cooler mornings make it harder than usual to get out of bed in the mornings. If I can get a good night's sleep it will only be a matter of a psychological barrier to get started in the morning, not a physical one.

Now the sun is setting earlier and earlier and the suburbanites are locking themselves inside around 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening, leaving dark suburban streets all to me for my evening bike ride around the neighborhood. It's so lovely to hear nothing but the hum of the tires and the occasional dog barking in the distance. Makes me want to go out again even more the next evening.

The ACLU sent me my "I am a Constitution Voter" bumper sticker. I'm still not ready to plaster my car with political propaganda that can't be easily removed (like my Obama trunk magnet), but it fits perfectly and proudly on the back cover of my Eee PC. I'm sure most ACLU members are only referring to the nine out of ten amendments in the Bill of Rights that they don't talk circles around themselves trying to "de-individualize." I'm happy to throw my support behind all those and the individualized second amendment at no additional charge.

¹ Prospective in its noun form seems to be a great word to use to mean "the state of looking ahead," in the same way you can use perspective to mean a point of view. Why can I only find it as an adjective in the dictionary? Is there a better word that fits there? Am I stuck with "prospective perspective?"

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