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My vacations usually consist of me eating, sleeping, playing games, and worrying about all the stuff that I should be getting done but am not.
I had two weeks off over Christmas and New Year and the first week followed pretty much that pattern. In the second week, though, I started to get a bit bored and decided to write up a to-do list of things that I'd like to get done by the end of my vacation. There were 18 items on the list ranging from the trivial (put the door back on the breaker box) to the physically challenging (burn 3,000 calories on the exercise bike) to the intellectually challenging (sort out a complicated procedural issue at work). Most of the items were things which had been needing doing for quite a while. Although I was on vacation there were five work-related items on the list, but the other 13 were personal.
So how did I do?
In the six days that I had left of my vacation I completed nine of the 18 items on the list. A tenth item was 80% complete and another was 44% complete, so I give myself a score of 10.24 out of 18, or 57%. I even overachieved on one item, racking up 310 calories beyond my goal on the exercise bike.
I'm pretty pleased with that result. It was an ambitious list and I knew from the outset that I wouldn't be able to finish them all. In particular I knew that I wouldn't achieve my goal of catching up on all of my back issues of The Economist. I'm not the world's fastest reader and The Economist tends to pretty information rich. It would have required more than four hours of reading each day for six days straight. I might manage that for fiction, but for news and analysis it's too much.
I'm not sure where to go from here. Unsurprisingly, progress on the list has all but ceased with my return to work this week. With less free time through the week I'm thinking of making the list a monthly thing, but it will be a challenge to find the right balance between a list which helps to inspire and focus my energies, and one which becomes a dreaded task master.
I had two weeks off over Christmas and New Year and the first week followed pretty much that pattern. In the second week, though, I started to get a bit bored and decided to write up a to-do list of things that I'd like to get done by the end of my vacation. There were 18 items on the list ranging from the trivial (put the door back on the breaker box) to the physically challenging (burn 3,000 calories on the exercise bike) to the intellectually challenging (sort out a complicated procedural issue at work). Most of the items were things which had been needing doing for quite a while. Although I was on vacation there were five work-related items on the list, but the other 13 were personal.
So how did I do?
In the six days that I had left of my vacation I completed nine of the 18 items on the list. A tenth item was 80% complete and another was 44% complete, so I give myself a score of 10.24 out of 18, or 57%. I even overachieved on one item, racking up 310 calories beyond my goal on the exercise bike.
I'm pretty pleased with that result. It was an ambitious list and I knew from the outset that I wouldn't be able to finish them all. In particular I knew that I wouldn't achieve my goal of catching up on all of my back issues of The Economist. I'm not the world's fastest reader and The Economist tends to pretty information rich. It would have required more than four hours of reading each day for six days straight. I might manage that for fiction, but for news and analysis it's too much.
I'm not sure where to go from here. Unsurprisingly, progress on the list has all but ceased with my return to work this week. With less free time through the week I'm thinking of making the list a monthly thing, but it will be a challenge to find the right balance between a list which helps to inspire and focus my energies, and one which becomes a dreaded task master.
