… and just like that, it’s the second half of December.
When I left the Priority Health office on Thursday afternoon, I began an extended vacation period that doesn’t end until the morning of January 4. So far, I’m off to a good start. On Thursday I had dinner with Chris and Sheri after work, then did a focus group for the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters at the Craft Beer Cellar. On Friday, I did some Christmas shopping, saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi and attended the annual holiday party of my social writing group—and I bought a Best Buy door-buster item, a 49-inch TV that will replace the sad 28-inch version that had been in my living room. Yesterday, I enjoyed the annual Christmas party hosted by my beloved grandmother, St. Dorothy the Matriarch.
Evenings have been consumed with reading, which is something of a novelty lately. Just finished A War Like No Other, a history of the Peloponnesian War by Victor Davis Hanson. The landlord re-cemented some of the bricks in my office fireplace, so I’ve been reading by the fire with an adult beverage and a lap cat. Very serene.
But despite the “vacation” label, it’s not really a time of vacation. I’m not going anywhere, save a one-night trek to Chicago for a NAHQ planning session. Instead, I’ll be at my home office (mostly) or the Caffeinated Press office (occasionally) to get caught up on all the stuff I intended to do in 2017 but haven’t yet managed to finish.
This year, I’m doing something different. Instead of just looking at my mile-long task list, I’ve affinitized my tasks (I use Todoist) into projects. What’s new is that I’ve scheduled these Todoist projects by day, so each project has an assigned day:
- 12/15: Christmas shopping
- 12/18: Professional associations and consulting
- 12/19: Reading list curation & content/distribution strategy for my erotica novellas
- 12/20: Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters
- 12/21: Personal writing projects
- 12/22: Politics and health & wellness
- 12/23: Vice Lounge Online
- 12/26: Personal hobbies
- 12/27: Caffeinated Press (marketing, seminars, the lit journal, governance)
- 12/28: Personal finance & home stuff (filing, deep cleaning)
- 12/29: Caffeinated Press (finance, operations, editorial)
- 12/30: Caffeinated Press (transition work for the lit journal)
Overlaying all of this is my current consulting work for DotDash and ongoing Caffeinated Press work doing manuscript reads and some editing/development work on our anthology and two novels in progress. And I’m taking the actual holiday-days off entirely as downtime.
I think my to-do list is eminently reasonable and will clear the deck for a strong start into 2018.
If you, dear reader, take some vacation, I hope it’s safe, happy, healthy and relaxing!
