Waffle

It's half past nine on Saturday evening, and I haven't even started on the Feral update that's due on Monday. The odds of there being an update on Monday are not zero, but they are slim.

Yesterday after work, I made a conscious decision to tackle my to-do list in the order of easiest-to-hardest rather than starting with the most urgent or most important thing. This strategy has worked well in the past (except in situations where the most important thing is critical, which completing a Feral update is not). It eliminates the distraction of having little nagging tasks at the back of my head, and assures that the doable tasks actually get done even if the harder tasks end up taking more time than expected. So on Friday evening I took out the trash, did grocery shopping, washed dishes, and so on; I got the household chores out of the way so I'd have more time to work on the comics-related stuff in the morning.

Then I went to bed early, with the alarm still set to my regular workday wake-up time of seven AM. When the alarm went off, I turned it off and slept until noon.

Oops.

I guess I needed the sleep, but it did eliminate all the time savings I made by doing my chores the evening before. Still, I went on as planned:

My first task was setting up a load of voting incentives (Vote for ROCR on Topwebcomics and get rewarded with a behind-the scenes look at preliminary sketches for ROCR and related comics) and blog posts to remind readers to vote, all scheduled in advance. They are buffered until April 28, so I won't have to do any more until then. This took more time than planned; in all, I spent over five hours on the process. I will need to bring that amount down in the future.

My second task was a little more involved: I wanted to prepare a single episode of the old storyline The Corby Tribe for republication on the Drunk Duck mirror. To do that, I needed to reassemble the images and add two columns of text in a PNG file, and to do that properly, that is in a way that would allow me to reuse the result later, I needed to work with the DTP program I have, Scribus. This turned out to be less than intuitive (and wasn't helped by Scribus's Dutch localization, which like many open-source projects is of very poor quality). Also, it turned out that the master image needed a lot of extra work, so this, too, took several hours. I've got the hang of the basics now, though, and I expect that the next attempt will take less than half an hour.

The thing I've uploaded to Drunk Duck looks like this:

Image-ized version of the first episode of The Corby Tribe. Click for full view

By the time I was done with those things, with cooking dinner and the occasional break into the equasion, it was well into the evening and too late to get started on Feral. I may still do the work tomorrow, and maybe go back to pencil-only for a while. That's a fast process and one that I could do outdoors if the weather is nice enough.

I am, however, very concerned about my ability to get Feral updates done on a weekly schedule. It looks to me like the weekly schedule is dependent on me not having any other things to do during the weekend, and not oversleeping. If I had not lost five hours to oversleeping, I would have had five hours more today to work on it and would have been mostly done with the art. But i don't like cutting the schedule even further, and not having an update on Monday would leave me with 10 days worth of voter incentives without giving my audience anything to come back for that would entice them to vote. Bit of a waste, that.

I may need to make an unpleasant decision about Feral soon.

The other day, in the midst of what looked like becoming an ongoing conversation about tightwaddery, I posted about decluttering for the first time in months. That's no coincidence. There are four aspects of my life that I tend to get antsy about at the same time: money, clutter and mess in the house, my terrible time management, and my terrible organisation. These subjects are closely related: my disorganisation and clutter affect my ability to budget effectively; my poor time management affects my ability to budget, but also my ability to increase my income and my ability to fix the other problems.

Last evening, I did some financial decluttering: I went through the many files in the desk safe and threw out:

1. anything that was more than 10 years old (10 years being how far back an audit might go in theory);
2. anything sent to me by the Tax Administration, the local authority, my insurance company that was strictly informational except the very latest version of the document in question;
3. anything that was the debris of my financial administration, i.e. empty tax return papers, "sketches" of my old tax returns, scribbled notes, etc. It's possible that these things might be involved in an audit in the future, but I'll take that chance.

I also sorted everything that was unsorted, which I'm afraid was a lot. It was the most tedious way I could think of spending a Friday night, but it did help me feel better about a number of things:

1. I found out that I had everything I need to be able to file my tax return quickly so I can be on time for the extended deadline of September 1 (budgeting, time management, organisation)
2. I also found out that I had paid National Health Insurance advances over 2007 and 2008, which I should be getting back now that I'm on a salary and paying taxes/national insurances by the month. (budgetting)
3. Looking at my bank statements, I realised that for all the disorganisation in my budgeting cycle, there's one thing I'm pretty good at doing, which is saving. I put € 1600 in savings the month after I came back from Aggie's, and have enough saved up to cover a month and a half's frugal living expenses, a plane ticket (return) to the US if booked early and coverage for the financial time bomb I mentioned earlier. That time bomb will be defused once I've filed my taxes (budgeting)

So that's making me feel good about myself. I'm still not done with this round of decluttering and it's going to be a difficult one, because the last one was less than six months ago. But I need to do it just so I can move all the stuff from the studio there. There's a lot accumulated there over the past seven years.

More proof that the improvement areas in my life all relate: because I did not allow myself to go to the supermarket over my lunch break this week (budgeting), I was able to have shorter lunch breaks (time management) and I could use the time to make phone calls, dealing with some studio-related issues and contacting a driving school (organisation). That made my lunch breaks the one moment during the day when my own disorganisation didn't bite me in the ass constantly.