and yet, i spend a lot of my time doing nothing. some of my activities are entirely passive: i watch tv. i watch jef play video games. i read other people’s blogs about productivity, for christ’s sake.

i also have the habit of thinking about doing things, rather than actually doing them. when i was younger, i got more satisfaction out of planning than doing. probably some perfectionism going on there. that’s getting better, and now i would much rather get on with the doing than just mentally masturbate over it.

still, despite my long list of things to do—things that i really enjoy, things that are right there, things that need to be done—i find myself slowing down after just a short burst of activity. my brain goes blank. i don’t feel any desire about anything. it’s sorta zen, i guess, and completely uncomfortable. it makes me feel like life is passing me by.

according to my counselor, this is because i grew up in an underachieving family and have already accomplished more than they ever taught me to expect from life. my parents didn’t model for me a productive life full of growth and learning. so while i can imagine what i want, i’m not quite sure how to get there, and i just … run down.

i’d like to change this. i’d like to be able to schedule a full day for myself and know that i’ll actually do it all. i’d like to be able to turn my brain off and just plow through a bunch of doing and not look up til it’s all done.

i had the idea to start small. so i might make a list of five or six 5-minute tasks, and then plan a time to do them all in order without stopping. (it seems like i really lose traction during transitions from one activity to the next.) eventually, i’d like to be able to go steady for several hours without needing to veg. thirty minutes seems like an appropriate place to start.

1. set all my email accounts to run through gmail
i have at least five email addys—the real personal one, the online spammy personal one, the one from my old employer, the freelancer one, the online spammy freelancer one, and probably a couple others. because i was using dreamhost’s “spam assassin” feature, i couldn’t run all of them through entourage. so i would leave a browser window open and check my junk mail folder every few minutes. total PITA. now, everything runs through gmail, and i can use its omnipotent search capabilities too.

2. check my feeds, gmail, the weather, and the news through iGoogle
this is the big one. i used to mouse through my bookmarks every hour or so as a mental break looking for new blog entries. then once i was reading a blog, i’d get caught up in the archives for an embarrassingly long time. (have i ever mentioned that i spend much more time passively thinking than actually doing anything? it’s a family trait i’m trying to outrun.)

now in one glance i can see what’s new and worth reading. if there are no updates, i have to actually think of a reason to visit a blog. and really, that’s a lot of work, so i normally just skip it.

3. simplified the auto-pay on my bills
i’m a freelancer who spends more than she should, has erratic income, and yet wants to pay down debts and save as much as possible. all my bills were set up to be paid automatically from my checking account, and it was annoying to never be quite sure when they’d be withdrawn or how much exactly i would need in my accounts.

i simplified everything (and got rid of my worrying) in three steps:

• any bill that can be charged to a credit card now goes to my amazon card, which i pay off every month.
• any bill that has to come from a bank account (the utilities and my student loan) now goes to my savings account.
• i decided how much i’m willing to spend on food, gas, and other basic expenses, and am sticking to them.

now i can leave just a little money in my checking account and know that there won’t be any unexpected charges that put me below zero. this means i can send bigger payments to the credit card i’m paying down and leave the rest of my money in my high-interest savings account.

(edit: i’ve also started using yodlee moneycenter to centralize all my bill accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, and other things. it’s a great tool for seeing everything at a glance and staying on top of due dates and account activity.)
that’s an awful lot of mental energy freed up. what on earth am i going to do with it?

1. Don’t drink any soda for six months straight.
2. Don’t drink any soda for one year straight.
3. Go down one size every 3 to 6 months. (0/5)
4. Take one college class on any subject.
5. Finish Jef’s big cross-stitch present.
6. Read 70 books that I already own but have never read. (0/70)
7. Host a dinner party for which I cook everything from scratch.
8. Take a dance class alone or with Jef.
9. Do the Apple Cider Century once.
10. Go for 75 bike rides in the city. (0/75)
11. Read two chapters of Harry Potter in Greek.
12. Spend a week in Europe.
13. Pay off all credit cards and don’t run up balances again. (1/3)
14. Pay off $10,000 of school loans. ($0/$10,000)
15. Repay $10,000 of house down payment to Jef. ($0/$10,000)
16. Start an investment account for retirement and contribute $5,000. ($0/$5,000)
17. Put $5,000 in an IRA or Roth. ($0/$5,000)
18. Reconnect with one high school friend.
19. Reconnect with one college friend.
20. Write a series of 20 stories of my church experience. (0/20)
21. Eat vegan for one month straight.
22. Design and make a 60s-style dress for myself.
23. Eat 3 servings of vegetables every day. (0/1,001)
24. Mumble mumble mumble.
25. Get contacts.
26. Do a chin-up.
27. Squat my weight as a one-rep max.
28. Visit Canada.
29. Finish Harvest Moon.
30. Install crown molding, plate rail, and baseboards throughout house.
31. Completely declutter the house and keep it that way.
32. Make tarte aux poires en cage.
33. Bake and decorate a tiered cake.
34. Go cross-country skiing.
35. Create a reading nook somewhere in the house.
36. Hike through a state or national park.
37. Grow a veggie garden.
38. Decide on a career path (writing, IA, or content management).
39. Get three steady clients.
40. Finish the “candle in the wind” project. (more on this later)
41. Learn to cook six Indian dishes. (0/6)

i do have other goals, but i’m not sure how to break them up or word them yet. jef and i have a lot planned for the house, but somehow “rebuild the chimney” doesn’t seem to fit on this list … kinda like “brush my teeth every day” doesn’t.

if today is the official start date, the end date will be february 27, 2010. and now, i’m going to go work on #6 and #31.

i used to drink three cans of diet coke a day. then six. then i started drinking coffee in an effort to drink less diet coke. so now i drink lots of both. i’m a bit tired of it all, which is shocking since i really do enjoy the daily countdown-to-headache.

but this morning, it just had to be chai … chai and excedrin.
here’s a bit of fun: how much of your favorite drink would it take to kill you?

if this is gonna happen at all, i’m going to have to haul needle for the next three months. so i’ve started the megabirthdayboy photo gallery and will (theoretically) post daily pics of my progress.

check it out (and pardon the horrible pic from yesterday; can’t fix it cause i’ve already done a lot more).

(this is a friend’s dog… a friend who clearly wants the terrorists to win.)

highlights:

“Research from around the world has begun to produce a picture of humans today that is startlingly different from what humans looked like in the past. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone what he calls a form of evolution that is ‘unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.’”

“The biggest surprise is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 years to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today than previously, according to a U.S. study that directly measures the problem; human bodies do not break down as they once did.”

“Common chronic diseases—respiratory problems, valvular heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and joint and back problems—have been declining by about 0.7 percent a year since the turn of the 20th century. And when they do occur, they emerge at older ages and are less severe.”

so much for the sedentary lifestyle being the root of all evil. it really pisses me off how quickly people forget that things used to be really bad. like an old friend of my family’s who wouldn’t get her kids vaccinated because there was a vaccination-related outbreak of polio when the vaccine first became widely used in the early 70s. she had obviously never seen america’s pre-vaccine numbers for polio… or the world’s.

i’m sure there are a lot of sources for this sort of info, but my first hints at how much better things have gotten came from reading The Devil in the White City. yeah, cars produce pollution. but when they die, they don’t decompose in the street. it’s like some friend of jef’s said: would you rather die of cancer when you’re 80 or typhus when you’re 14?

this was a little present for jef—my first attempt at 8-bit stitching.