Getting Closer!

Today I finished knitting the back yoke of Catherine Parr. This was knit in the round to the armholes, split, and the yokes are knit separately. I've already threaded the live front stitches onto the needle, and it's ready to go.

My original hope was to have this done by the end of the year. But I've also been working hard on the crapghan -- I'm into the last 6 oz. ball on that, and believe me, 6 ounces is nothing when the whole thing tips the scales at 84. Yeah, that's right, it's a seven-pounder. I want that thing done so bad I can almost taste it. It's too big and heavy to lug from room to room, so I keep ducking into the back bedroom, where it lays on the couch in all its eye-killing glory, to add a few stitches.

If I can finish the crapghan this week, I still have an outside chance of finishing Catherine Parr before the end of the year, which is another one so close to the finish line that I can hardly stand it. Much depends upon my job. We keep having these odd production issues due to technical/software problems, and every time that happens, I lose several hours trying to repair things. And I don't have spare multi-hour blocks of time laying around just waiting for a technical disaster to claim them.

Take Saturday. Case in point. I rarely take a whole day off -- I'm almost always reading or editing for at least a few hours each day. But I planned to take Saturday off and wrap gifts, do some cooking, and, of course, play with my yarn. I'd bought a new movie some weeks ago and still hadn't watched it. (Marie Antoinette, the "new romantics" version.) And you know, a day off once every few months or so doesn't make me a slacker.

But then one of our books came back from the typesetter loaded with major errors due to this technical glitch, and I spent 10.5 hours in my chair, fixing the manuscript. Pissed me off.

I'm starting to give some serious thought to goals for the New Year, and much of my thinking now revolves around time management. Change begins with me. It may affect others, and they may resist it, but I have to initiate it or it won't happen. And you know, I'd like to actually wear Catherine Parr someday.

One of my favorite time management tricks is the kitchen timer. I keep one on my desk. Set it for 45 minutes or however long, and buckle down on a project. Then when the timer goes off, I stop. No matter what. I get up, walk around, refill my mug or water bottle. Throw a load of laundry in the machine, wash the dishes, anything that keeps me on my feet. I usually set the timer for between 5 and 15 minutes during this stage, and when it goes off, I stop, return to my desk, and dig back in to my task for another timed sprint.

It may sound counterintuitive, but it's a technique that can keep me fresh throughout the course of a day, alternating desk work (in long sprints) with short bursts of physical activity. And there's something mentally satisfying about portioning out my tasks -- so many turns of the timer for editing, so many for submissions, so many for management tasks. As an added bonus, I always know exactly how much time I've put in on any particular project. (It's an old lawyer thing -- tracking time per task and project for billing and productivity purposes.)

So do you have any time management or productivity tricks that you can recommend?