I realized today that I have so much to do every day now that it’s a problem. It’s not a problem of not having enough time (though it’d be nice to get more hours in the day), but a problem of allocation. I’ve so enjoyed keeping busy — I’m so much occupied with pleasant, fulfilling activity that I’ve actually stopped reading Lolcats! — but I don’t really know anymore what I need to get done every day, so it’s all too easy for me to get involved in one activity and consequently forget to make time for the others. So I postponed my art class today to make a time budget, setting down what I’d like to get done every day and allocating it into several general categories. The big ones are work/art, household, and misc, and then there are several smaller categories like bug time, internet, and errands. I broke these all into blocks of time, because it’s easier for me to visualize my day that way. For instance, if I know I want to work four hours in a day, I can get lulled into thinking I have plenty of time “later”, whereas if I divide that into two two-hour blocks, I realize that I’d better get one done before lunch and the other before dinner. I’m very pleased with this scheme and look forward to trying it out.

The time budget also makes me more motivated to make the best use of my time, because I can see clearly that these are all things I want to do. It’s a good thing I made this budget today, because we’re in a heat wave and it would have been so tempting to just let myself sink into lethargy. Instead, I saw what mattered to me in this day, and I set about doing it in spite of feeling sticky and overheated. Also: Erik and I went out right before dinner, when the house gets the hottest it gets all day, and spent that time in the air-conditioned car and having dinner at an air-conditioned restaurant. Now we feel refreshed and cool. Erik’s been working since we got home, and I made some drawings (including this one) and did some other work.