Friday, October 28, 2011

A Nice Slow Day

I've done my best today to take the day as slow as I can here at work to try and attain some balance to the frustrating early part of the week. I got everything critical off my desk this morning and then deliberately spent the rest of the day doing non-critical things.

One of the things that heightens my work stress is the conflict between the ordinary things and the extraordinary things. The extraordinary things tend to bump the ordinary things out of the way, where they simple start to stack up because, even though they are ordinary, they still have to be done. We keep putting them off, putting them off and putting them off, with each cycle adding to their weight and urgency, until eventually they become extraordinary things in their own right. It is a vicious and all too familiar cycle.

So, today, as I often try to do on the Friday when everyone else is off, I tried, successfully, to reset that balance. I'd love to find some way to keep the balance from going awry to start with, but so far that magical solution has proved to be very elusive.

One of the things I did today was spend part of the day reading a wide variety of work related articles, on a fairly wide variety of subjects. I found some fodder to feed the thinking machine that is my brain.

Don and I drove up to Black Angus for lunch, where I had the filet mignon with shrimp and a piece of New York style cheesecake. It was excellent and we chased it around with some wide ranging and free floating conversation that started with memory and mid-life issues. I doubt we had any penetrating insights, but it was a good conversation all around.

From there I popped back to the office where I am winding out the day with about an hour to go. Then, I think I will head home and maybe start the weekend with about an hours worth of napping.
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