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 OK! it is now a week after my classes ended, and I've got enough breathing room to do a blog or two (or three, or six. we'll see how many I can get it.)

It took that long to take care of all the things that had backed up while I focused on the time sensitive big projects. But now I'm back to current. I have an issue with that though. I've got a nice system that keeps things from slipping through the cracks. No buried emails or upcoming events I failed to put into my calendar. It works pretty well for that. not perfect, but especially for really important things, good enough.

But it takes a pretty hefty amount of time to maintain. It's like the equivalent of middle management. Not actually producing anything of import, just trying to facilitate the actual work getting done. And like with middle management, it has the tendency to get bloated and sluggish, because... I don't know why. Maybe it's a "who watches the watchmen?" thing because nobody is making sure the managers are being efficient. Probably there are some competing incentives.

With me in specific, part of it is just the nature of email, to be full of distractions that are so easy to get distracted by. It's kind of like I'm fighting my genetically programmed tendency to be curious. That was great in the bush, where curiosity could lead to useful discoveries, but when there are effectively infinite interesting rabbit trails to go down via the internet, that tendency would lead to never sticking with any one trail long enough to get an actual rabbit.

I could go the "unsubscribe from everything" rout, an Odysseus contract that makes it easier by changing the environment, but I don't know if that will cause missed opportunities I'll regret. I think the certainty of missed opportunities caused by wasting my time on email may be worth it though. Suzannah recently discovered a place in gmail where you can see all your subscriptions and unsubscribe from any that you want, and I think I will do that right now. I'll probably keep a few, but just the bare minimum.

Hopefully this is not another rabbit trail. (I used to call them rabbit holes, but I think rabbit trails is a bit more accurate. They're not taking me to Wonderland. Just... around.