Monday, August 8, 2005

Briefly: Productive and tiring day at work, interesting RPG session, and rain.

First, work. Not sure how to write this so that it won’t sound incredibly boring, but here goes: I’ve had trouble keeping track of things at work. Oh, I could reply to an e-mail, or make up a sticky to remind myself of an ongoing project, or write in an appointment on my calendar. But I have quite a few ongoing projects (most of them small, piddling things), and I wanted to have a better handle on all of them.

So I’ve started implementing the Getting Things Done system, which includes several neat little productivity gadgets: lists of Projects, lists of Actions, the 43-folder Tickler file, etc. But more importantly, it recommends a weekly review, in which you sit down and re-calibrate all of your projects and actions to ensure that you’re keeping up with everything.

I’ve been scheduling my work weekly review for Fridays. Seemed logical: Once the week is complete, tidy up everything. Didn’t work. It never felt like the right day, and I was frustrated that I was getting my work straight and ready to go with the weekend right around the corner. Plus, I really didn’t feel like maximizing my weekly productivity on Friday afternoons.

So I moved my weekly review to Monday this week. Lo and behold, it worked wonderfully; I was motivated to have everything ready to go for the new week, and I was able to focus and organize it all properly. So, um, huzzah!

The rest of the workday was full of productive work, which was good but tired me out. I went straight from work to the weekly RPG session, which was a tiring as well, for different reasons.

I’m playing with a fun group of guys, and I certainly enjoy myself, but they get distracted a lot. Almost everything I say is greeted with a joke. They get involved when something particularly dangerous happens, but that only happens once or twice each session (and I can’t lob life-threatening dangers at them every five minutes). I asked Saalon about this when I got home, and he promised to think about it and get back to me with some advice.

It’s just…frustrating that I can’t seem to engage my players. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong, or what I should be doing to make it right.

So I went home in the pouring rain. It’s welcome, after at least a week in the tortuous 90’s, but it fit my mood.

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