Catching up after catching up

Well, I overdid it at Thanksgiving. But not in a bad way. We had a really nice time and we reconnected with friends and family we haven't seen in months... or a year. The drive back home took an hour longer than usual, due to the heavy traffic, but it was because we took a more remote route that steered us away from the backups and endless red ribbon of tail lights, and led us through the northern Mass countryside. It was dark, of course, but traffic was flowing. And it was a good thing.

But I can definitely tell I'm not the spring chicken I once was. We "landed" on Sunday night, and I've been going full-tilt boogie ever since... till last night, when I started to come down with something (and me with that 10:00 p.m. conference call I had to be on... global commerce waits for no one). I had been feeling steadily worse, over the past few days, and I had a sneaking suspicion my constitution was going to rebel today. Sure enough, first thing in the morning, it said, "A 9:15 meeting in Boston?!"

I'm not joking. And don't call me Shirley.

Anyway, the upside of being down, is that today I can catch up on my notes -- transfer the wild scrawlings in my notebooks into meaningful collections of cogent thought. It's very artistic and all, to have all sorts of partial words and phrases scattered about, but dude, I've gotta get some WORK done. So, I'll use my time today to catch up with housekeeping stuff that must be done, but often gets pushed aside, once I land in my cubicle and the action starts to pick up.

I generally do pretty well about planning my days. I'm quite fanatical about it, actually... and I probably save myself a good 1-1/2 to 2 hours of churn each day, just by thinking everything through up front, before I launch into my day, preparing-preparing-preparing, and getting clear on my priorities and the steps I need to take. Without my planning, well, all bets are off. The price of velocity is mindful care.

So, there we have it.

Anyway, enough of this break. I've got an 11:00 call I've got to get on, in a few minutes. In some ways, this is turning out to be a very productive day.

Maybe this is what the Taoists mean when they talk about "doing without doing"