For many of you, this will be old news. Or, at least, news that you’ve heard before. A new version of old news. We are trying, once again, to organize our lives. To try to draw a slightly more visible line between work and life. To not wake up every morning and go to bed every night exhausted and wondering what we did with our day. I know this maybe sounds like whining given all the photos we post of all the fun stuff we do, but seriously, if we took pictures of us looking haggard all of the time, none of you would come back for a look. To be perfectly honest, those kids that we post pictures of are actually just robots we keep in the closet and take out when we need some blog traffic.

And so, we have established a schedule. And I have made a daily desk calendar that reminds me of my schedule.

I have various alarms set throughout the day that remind me what I’m supposed to be doing at any given time. I have built in time for filing, for getting up from my desk, for cleaning, and for eating, all things which I generally forget to do once I get my hands and head into a project. And I have built time in for blogging as well. But the real coup to making the schedule effective is that I completely turn off my email outside of the three short periods a day that I have allotted for email. It is a remarkable thing. You have no idea how many times I was turning my attention to the Inbox chime only to find that a sale was going on over at Overstock.com and oh my god don’t I need another set of high thread count sheets for pennies on the dollar????

It’s been going pretty well so far. I’ve tried very hard to stick to it. As you can see, though, some days are better than others for getting things done (all of the checkboxes are supposed to be filled in).

One of the most irritating problems is that ever since the hurricane, the town clock (which is just across the street) has been about 23 minutes off, so instead of chiming on the hour, it chimes at 23 minutes after the hour. And I feel my heart jump, thinking it’s time to the next item, only to find that I still have THIRTY-SEVEN MINUTES LEFT TO GO. It’s demoralizing.

The best part about the whole system is that at the end of the day, I get to fold the page over and be done with it.

And so I get to go to bed (never at 10 o’clock, as my schedule dictates, but since I get to check off going to bed regardless of when it actually happens, I don’t mind) with a powerful sense of accomplishment that carries me blissfully through to my 7 o’clock wake-up time (which, coincidentally, also never happens). We’re getting there, though. Getting there.

And, as an aside, for those of you who are interested, this is what I look like pregnancy-wise these days. Except subtract the boob volume from the boob area and add it on to the belly area. Yep. HUGE.

Getting there is right. In this case, I might actually be there several months before my due date. I’ve been assured there aren’t twins in there. And I’ve asked the doctor an irritating number of times.