Unfuck Yourself:

Happy Solstice!!

I have some pretty impressive news.

For quite some time now I've been tracking my daily productivity with a personal metrics website. It's great because it gives me an 'at a glance' view of how I’m spending my time. (daytum.com, for anyone who's interested).

One of my charts is a pie of 'Work Life Balance'. Work is productive time like writing or research. Even blogging counts as 'work' because I'm writing 'something'.

After the most recent breakdown, when all my regular coping mechanisms starting failing one by one, the biggest slice of pie was 'Mental Health / Unfuck Yourself'. There were times when that section was almost half of the pie. I was THAT broken.

Over the last two months, that section has been gradually getting smaller and smaller as more of my coping mechanisms began to reboot and come back online.

*smile* as of yesterday, 'Mental Health / Unfuck Yourself' was the second largest. My current largest wedge is 'Writing  / Blogging'.  *even bigger smile*

Fuck yeah…

It's good to be back. 

Where the hell is my Ariste implant?! (i.e. struggling with identity)

In a fictional verse of wonder, written by Walter Jon Williams, people with multiple identities have one hell of an advantage.  A wetware implant that allows each voice to operate independently.  Each individual personality can be assigned to his or her own project, and the overall result is that one physical body's worth of a person can multi-task like a son of a bitch.  Aristoi

I've been trying really hard to let each of my projects flourish under the same level of care and attention, and the result I got was overworking myself into major meltdown space.

*sigh*

The experts have told me that I need to just focus on one thing at a time.

It's a struggle, but I see what they mean.

For the month of July and probably a good portion of August, I will be letting my Amanda Harris voice come to the foreground.  Amanda writes psychological horror and is participating in the 2015 Camp NaNoWriMo.

During the month of August I will be working on getting Amanda's work published.

September I will return to my anti-bully campaign, The Bronykin Alliance.

October, November & December I will be back with Amanda for NaNoWriMo2015

Past that... I'm not really sure... I have other voices that need attention.

If you need to reach me, my email is companion.anne@gmail.com

Life Hacking etc...

A month ago I posted that I'd be making new weekly entries on my hobby progress with my knitting.  LOL, yeah... that didn't happen.

I actually became so overwhelmingly obsessed with the yarn therapy that I fucked off everything else on my to-do list.

On the one hand, there are much worse things to be addicted to.  On the other hand, an addiction is an addiction and by the very nature of its definition, it's disruptive to the rest of ones life.  It was even getting in the way of my being responsive to the Beloved One's affections.  Not to mention how it was getting in the way of my other mental health progress.  Although, I should note as a side that my depression has gone from severe to moderate since I started knitting again.

My therapist and I agree on weekly homework assignments to further my mental health recovery process.  This weeks homework assignment is to begin tracking how much I do of what on a daily basis so I can build up to the end goal of better time management and greater productivity overall.

This is the very nature of Life Hacking.

Here's what I've implemented so far:

Goal Setting; Lifetick - website:

Pros	Cons
Easy to use Task list breakdown  Complete tasks to achieve goal Status, Journal and Reports	Limited capacity free version Expensive full version No free trial period

I think I need to research better free alternatives for Goal Setting

Personal Metrics; DAYTUM - website:

Pros	Cons
Incredibly versatile Multiple options for charts and graphs so you can SEE what is being measured Inexpensive full version	Hasn't been updated since 2010 (the creators abandoned the project when they went to work for Facebook) Inability to customize data with color groups (all visual displays are a simple gradient of the same color)

Task List(s); TickTick - website & cross platform apps:

Pros	Cons
Cross platform - will work an any computer or device Effortless syncing across devices Supports multiple, color coded, task lists with room for notes and sub-lists Ability to set recurring tasks Ability to set due dates	NONE

That's right, NO CONS!!  Though I will be suggesting to the developers that 'sleep' and 'snooze' functions be added to the recurring function.

--

The one major hitch here is that I'm using three separate programs in an effort to achieve better time management overall, thus it's a tad counterproductive, but I believe the process is sound.  The task list tells me what to do, the metrics tell me how much time I spend doing things and the goal setting gives me a finished, polished project.

Overall, I'm very happy with the progress I've made in the last few days.