Too busy?

I am busy.  I am *very* busy.  I have an awful lot on my calendar.  I have quite a number of volunteer activities.

I'm not just involved in the churches (good thing), but also with Community Policing, Emergency Support Services, the hospice society, the trail maintenance crew, the Sunshine Club (the "old folks" activities in town; I'm already on the Board), Lazy Ass Hikers, the Jesus Film Festival, Reconciliaction, and a variety of minor side projects, such as security seminars, arts walks/seminars, a speaker's bureau/club, a computer club, grief guys, an experimental CISSP seminar, grief bibliographies,  and writing sermons.

I am probably *too* busy. 

Part of the busy-ness is deliberate.  Part of the busyness is activities that are aspects of cognitive behavioural therapy for depression.  Being busy gets you up (as in, out of bed).  Being busy gets you out of the house.  Being busy forces, you to do something rather than Just simply lying in bed.  Being busy is also a distraction: you are not focused on how miserable and depressed you are.  So being busy is a good thing in terms of my depression and mental health.

Yes, being busy has its limits.  You can be *too* busy.  As Number One Daughter puts it, I am probably under "self-induced freneticism."

At the moment, it is a bit of a balancing act.  I am trying to keep busy enough to get out and get exercise because I walk everywhere and that makes the people at the mental health clinic happy.  But there's also the attempt to balance the necessary activity and distraction and keep it from overwhelming me so that I can't get some of the other stuff done.

I am behind in accounts, although only marginally.  I am not exactly behind in taxes, but I haven't yet had time to get all the bits and pieces together.  I am behind in transcribing some of the writing and pieces I am trying to produce.  I am trying to use time most effectively.  I am dictating this to "Live Transcribe" while I am walking to a Community Policing shift.  When I get to the Public Safety office, I will connect to their wifi, copy all of this text, stick it in an email, and send it to myself.  Later on, I will edit this, because "Live Transcribe" is *really* not all that great at ensuring that what gets said makes any sense, or has the right punctuation and capitalisation in it.  So, at some future date, I will need to find the time to pick up the message out of the email, and edit it for posting.  Sometime thereafter I'll stick it in the blog.

So, even this is keeping myself busy, to a certain extent.

But I've had an executive meeting with the Sunshine Club this morning, during which I was asked to make an appointment for my only free morning this week, in order to look at the Sunshine Club's backup system, which is apparently having some kind of problem.  I am, as mentioned, walking to my Community Policing shift.  I haven't finished editting a bunch of stuff that I dictated over the weekend.  And I have some other things to do, like fold the laundry that I washed on Saturday.  And, to take a look at my pile of mail and random papers that I just tend to throw on a corner of the desk, and haven't gotten to for a while.  (I suppose that's my in-basket.)  So I need to clean up my in-basket and make sure I'm not missing anything important, but I need to get the time for that.  Tomorrow I have the aforementioned meeting about the Sunshine Club backup system, then I have to go to the Public Safety office.  Not for another Community Policing shift, but to review, with the boss, the fraud and security presentation that he's going to be giving on Wednesday, and wants me there for backup.

A while after that there *is* a Community Policing shift.  And so it goes.  I don't have an awful lot of free space in my calendar right now.

I don't think that's a serious problem at the moment.  I don't think that I'm in danger of missing appointments, or missing doing things that I need to do.  But I am a little behind.  And I did promise the Lazy Ass Hikers group leader that I would suggest another art walk, since the first one was a success.  And I promised the Sunshine Club that I would send an announcement for the upcoming Super Sale in to the paper for the "What's On" column.  So, I need to work on that as well.

Some of the things that I have booked into my calendar I have booked in to reserve that time and make sure I don't book something else on top of it.  But those events may not happen.  For example, later, in the week, I've got another couple of community policing shifts on Friday and Saturday.  At the moment, nobody else has signed up for those shifts, and we never go out alone.  The one on Friday we could cover if anybody else signed up, since we'd be covered by someone in the office.  The one on Saturday, however, will only go ahead if a Captain with a key for the building and a code or the alarm system signs up, and if we have a minimum of four people in total.  So either of those shifts could fail to happen.  If they fail to happen, then I've got more time to work on some of the leftover work that is sitting in my email.

I've also booked two spots on Thursday and Friday mornings, because Thursday and Friday mornings tend to be the time that the trail maintenance crew goes out.  Although last week the long range forecast indicated that Thursday and Friday would be sunny this week, a more recent forecast has indicated rain, in which case we wouldn't be going out.  So, again, those might be open times that I can use to work on some of this stuff sitting waiting patiently in my email.

So, as I say, I'm not quite panicked about not getting things done.  But I am realising that some things are being delayed and I'm wondering if I should leave more spaces, open in the week, for getting work done.

But, as I say, it's a balancing act.

If I leave too many open spaces, then I have blocks of time with nothing to do.  But "nothing to do" is a flexible concept.  I should probably watch some of the movies that I have been recording off the television channels that are part of my communications package (but which I very seldom watch).  I've got quite a few movies in there.  And I'm sure that there's a week's worth of watching time.  So maybe I should back off and open some more gaps in my calendar, knowing that, even if I don't have work to do, I can sit in front of the TV.  Which I tend to reserve for the evenings when I'm tired anyways.  But there's no reason that I couldn't watch TV during the day.  After all, the shows are recorded and I can watch them anytime I want. 

It's a concern, and I'm gonna have to work on my time management.  But not in the way most people think of it.

I've also got to find time to shop tomorrow in order to get a really good deal on a bag of apples, and to get a bag of carrots which are on sale this week ...