Lame Excuses
Life • January 29th, 2007My dear husband has threatened to delete my site’s feed from his feed reader if I continue not posting, which is ridiculous since, a) I was the first one to threaten him because he hadn’t written in months and his feed was occupying precious space in my Sage bar, and b) he’s only subscribed to FOUR feeds. Right!… But I actually do feel guilty for my drop in posting frequency since last December, and hoping that some of you actually miss me, I wanted to let you know that I am in fact alive and intend to keep Mafe Maria alive, but these three recent facts have gotten in the way…
My parents’ Windows XP computer
God! To think that once I had to be convinced that a Mac was better than a PC. For the record, I don’t have anything against PCs. But Windows XP? Oh… that I hate… The stupid little bubbles that won’t go away, constantly interrupting me with useless messages like “Uhmm. It looks like you have some unused icons on your desktop”. I KNOW I DO! I keep trying to get rid of them (and you stupid bubble), and they won’t go away!
There was no way that I could write a blog entry from that computer. Too painful for vacation… Plus, I was on vacation. All I was able to do was to install Picasa so I could download my camera’s photos and post them to Flickr while we were away. By the way, have you seen our Colombia photo set?
My attempt to reupholster furniture
This turned out to be some process. Three weekends and it’s still going (!), and let me tell you: Arms are one UGLY bitch.
My new productivity goals
It always makes me smile when my mother makes a comment about how over-the-top clean I am, or how I need to relax a little bit and be less disciplined. She hasn’t lived with me for the past 10 years to realize how much I’ve changed from that. Clean house? It is Joey who many times ends up having to dust and vacuum because he just can’t take the dirt anymore. Me? I have many more rewarding things to do than clean a house in the dusty desert.
Discipline? Yes I have it. But something happened last year that made me a lot more self-indulgent, which is pretty dangerous when you freelance. Last year I only tracked my billable labor by month, with a target set at a time when I wasn’t expecting to have enough client work for the year. In the end I did meet my target, but I could’ve done a lot better. So this year I decided to do something about it.
Few things kick my butt as much as being under a curve. Knowing this, I made a very detailed plan of billable time considering holidays, vacation, and a potential maternity leave towards the end of the year. I created three scenarios:
- Minimum (35% better than last year)
- Lazy (55% better, and a relaxed work week)
- Target (90% better than last year, and requiring much more discipline)
I split each target by week, and then I charted all this. So this is how it works: Every week I shoot for Target, and worst case I must meet the weekly Minimum. The hope is that if I keep military discipline I should do very good this year, but if I slack off a little bit, I should end up at or above Lazy. Worst case I’ll do better than last year.
Here’s where the kick comes: I track my weekly progress every day, and seeing the dot below Target bothers me deeply. I don’t give myself permission to do fun things like blogging unless I’m on track to meet Target. Even with all this, right now I’m only at Lazy level. Believe me, it could be so much worse.
. . . . .
In other news, I’m very happy to announce that I have become tia for the second time. This shouldn’t excuse future lack of posts, but we may miss Petie and Chris commenting and/or writing for a little while. Maybe. I’m sure they won’t miss us.
