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Lately I have found myself feeling like I am juggling chainsaws on a highwire. Taking care of Ben. Taking care of mom. Trying not to lose Kris in the shuffle. Tending to various and sundry crisis on either of the websites that I run (Look! A hacker defaced JamesAxler.com! Look! Someone went psycho on the Pat Pack board! *argh*). Have I mentioned work? I either find myself blocked (frequently because of the time difference, and having to wait until late afternoon for a particular meeting before I can do anything constructive), or else I find myself buried. Amidst all of this, I am finding more frequently that a message has dropped through the cracks that I really meant to respond to or deal with. Not so good.
A few days, however, someone asked a question in the green about taming their inbox. In one of the responses, somebody linked to a white paper on managing incoming email. One of the major points, which I had never really thought about before, was that what really matters isn't the volume of email, it's the message count (the number of emails currently sitting in the inbox). The comparison was made to the old video game Tapper, where you control a bartender trying to keep up with the increasing demands of customers. It's not how many beers he has served up that counts, it's how many thirsty customers he has currently waiting to be dealt with.
There was quite a bit more, but in a nutshell I have decided to try to archive my messages better and to not use the inbox as a storage area. Clearing out the message load in my personal email was fairly easy, I only had a few hundred messages in there to be scanned through. Cleaning out my work inbox is a different beast entirely. When I started the process two days ago I had nearly 8,000 messages sitting in my inbox. EEK! I have begun plucking away at them, and have reduced the count by over 1,000 messages so far. I'd say perhaps 3/4 of the messages I have deleted, with the rest being archived properly in relevant sub-folders where I can find them quickly in the future if need be. I would guess that it is probably going to take me several weeks to get through my work inbox.
But even with what I have done so far, it has reduced my stress at least a little bit. So that's good.
In other news:
Mom's PT level has been remarkably stable for the past three weeks. For three Thursdays in a row she has come in at either 4.4 or 4.5, which is exactly where the doctors want her to be. So that's nice. As for her back/leg pain, the muscles have at least finally loosened up. She is still having some pretty serious nerve pain, but the chiropractic seems to be making progress. The chiropractor gave her some different excercises to do this weekend, and hopefully by Monday she'll be able to bear some traction which will help relieve the current pressure points. I need to make an appointment with the chiropractor myself, my lower back has been bothering me a bit lately, and I'd rather catch it before it goes out completely and knocks me out of working for days on end.
My sister announced her engagement last weekend. She is getting married on June 25th to a guy she went to high school with. I remember him from way back when, and I am just assuming that he has grown up a bit in the past two decades. He would pretty much have had to... Seriously, from what I have heard he seems like a good guy, he makes my sister happy, and I think he will be a good influence on both of her kids in general and Miles in particular (he could really stand to have a strong, positive male influence in the house). So that's nice for her. I'll be up in Seattle for the week leading up to the wedding.
I will also be in Seattle for work from March 21st - 25th. The first night I definitely have booked, and probably the second night as well. If there is anybody who has a burning desire to see me while I am in town, drop me a line and we can figure out a time. Odds are I will be staying downtown right next to the Cheesecake Factory and I won't have a rental car, so you'll have to come to me.
It also looks like plans for Kris' and my wedding are starting to firm up. We're looking at the last week in July, but don't bother clearing your schedule; neither of us is interested in a big wedding (read: any kind of wedding in which people actually attend). We are happy to take cards and gifts (and cash!!!), but the extend of anybody sharing the day with us is probably going to be a friendly email from us mentioning that we got hitched. Then we are going to jet off to New York and spend a week or so seeing Broadway shows and wandering around the city. Yay!
Well, that's all I got for today. Time to go put Ben to bed. G'nite.
A few days, however, someone asked a question in the green about taming their inbox. In one of the responses, somebody linked to a white paper on managing incoming email. One of the major points, which I had never really thought about before, was that what really matters isn't the volume of email, it's the message count (the number of emails currently sitting in the inbox). The comparison was made to the old video game Tapper, where you control a bartender trying to keep up with the increasing demands of customers. It's not how many beers he has served up that counts, it's how many thirsty customers he has currently waiting to be dealt with.
There was quite a bit more, but in a nutshell I have decided to try to archive my messages better and to not use the inbox as a storage area. Clearing out the message load in my personal email was fairly easy, I only had a few hundred messages in there to be scanned through. Cleaning out my work inbox is a different beast entirely. When I started the process two days ago I had nearly 8,000 messages sitting in my inbox. EEK! I have begun plucking away at them, and have reduced the count by over 1,000 messages so far. I'd say perhaps 3/4 of the messages I have deleted, with the rest being archived properly in relevant sub-folders where I can find them quickly in the future if need be. I would guess that it is probably going to take me several weeks to get through my work inbox.
But even with what I have done so far, it has reduced my stress at least a little bit. So that's good.
In other news:
Mom's PT level has been remarkably stable for the past three weeks. For three Thursdays in a row she has come in at either 4.4 or 4.5, which is exactly where the doctors want her to be. So that's nice. As for her back/leg pain, the muscles have at least finally loosened up. She is still having some pretty serious nerve pain, but the chiropractic seems to be making progress. The chiropractor gave her some different excercises to do this weekend, and hopefully by Monday she'll be able to bear some traction which will help relieve the current pressure points. I need to make an appointment with the chiropractor myself, my lower back has been bothering me a bit lately, and I'd rather catch it before it goes out completely and knocks me out of working for days on end.
My sister announced her engagement last weekend. She is getting married on June 25th to a guy she went to high school with. I remember him from way back when, and I am just assuming that he has grown up a bit in the past two decades. He would pretty much have had to... Seriously, from what I have heard he seems like a good guy, he makes my sister happy, and I think he will be a good influence on both of her kids in general and Miles in particular (he could really stand to have a strong, positive male influence in the house). So that's nice for her. I'll be up in Seattle for the week leading up to the wedding.
I will also be in Seattle for work from March 21st - 25th. The first night I definitely have booked, and probably the second night as well. If there is anybody who has a burning desire to see me while I am in town, drop me a line and we can figure out a time. Odds are I will be staying downtown right next to the Cheesecake Factory and I won't have a rental car, so you'll have to come to me.
It also looks like plans for Kris' and my wedding are starting to firm up. We're looking at the last week in July, but don't bother clearing your schedule; neither of us is interested in a big wedding (read: any kind of wedding in which people actually attend). We are happy to take cards and gifts (and cash!!!), but the extend of anybody sharing the day with us is probably going to be a friendly email from us mentioning that we got hitched. Then we are going to jet off to New York and spend a week or so seeing Broadway shows and wandering around the city. Yay!
Well, that's all I got for today. Time to go put Ben to bed. G'nite.