Sunday catch-up

I usually write these entries on Sunday afternoons after we get back from our morning jaunt around the neighborhood — the farmers’ market, a coffee run, lunch ordering, what have you — and while doing errands around the house like the laundry. I like doing it this way because I have a lot more time to think about what to write without worrying about running out of time to work on my WIPs. I have nothing else to worry about as most of it is either already done or in progress. I’ll also clean out my email inboxes, run the PC cleaning software if needed, and of course leave time for giving much-demanded attention to our two cats.

I think of it as my Sunday catch-up time. And now that I think of it, it’s also a bit like how I handled Sundays as a teenager: it’s when I got most of my homework done as well. Yeah, I was totally a do-it-at-the-last-minute kid, even the term papers and projects I should have started weeks before. But while it was a terrible habit then, it’s actually a perfect one for me now. The only assignments I work on now are my own, and I can certainly crank them out if and when needed. I spend an hour or so working on an entry or two for this and Walk in Silence while I update the apps on my phone and ereader and the laundry finishes up, another half hour on the 750 Words, so by the time the early evening rolls around, I can focus just on my current WIP (in this case, the Remaster of The Persistence of Memories).

And maybe listen to some of the new music releases I’ve recently downloaded, of course.

It doesn’t always work out that way of course, but it’s nice when it all falls into place and I get all sorts of things done and out of the way. Makes the rest of the week just a little less stressful!

A little end of year cleaning house

I’m usually good at keeping things tidy around the house — inquisitive and/or destructive cats aside — but every now and again things pile up. There’s shredding to be done, we’ve suddenly accumulated a large pile of books to be donated, or shipping boxes that have only since been used by cats for shredding purposes, or what have you. Eventually I’ll decide that a cleaning session is in order.

I even need to go through my emails lately. I’m usually good at those, because Sundays are when I go through them while I’m running all the PC cleaning programs, but sometimes I lag behind. This usually happens when my Day Job schedule encroaches on the time I usually do the home cleaning. Point is, I’ve gotten myself on several mailing lists somehow and it’s clear that I’m only reading maybe about a quarter of them, if that. I’ll need to go through those soon enough.

Writingwise? Well, for the most part I keep my files well organized on my Dropbox account so I know where everything is. But over the course of the year, things can pile up. Pictures I’ve transferred from my camera and my phone, image scans, work-related paperwork, things like that…some of those don’t have a specific home and end up in a File These Away At Some Point folder. Do I need to keep them? Probably not. Some I can save, but most of them I can probably delete.

I don’t think I have any stagnant projects that need refiling, as far as I know. A few backburner items (which are rightly sorted in the Backburner Projects folder) but other than that, I haven’t made any major decisions to trunk anything lately. Which is a good thing, I suppose.

Either way, I like doing this at the end of the year as part of my process to start the next year fresh and clean!