Here’s my second “daily” post for the month of March. Hm, yesterday didn’t go so well on the PRODUCTIVITY side of things. I had told myself I wanted to do some billable work, and then instantly frittered away my time on other things. I looked RIGHT AT THE TASK and couldn’t make myself do it. It was bizarre.

The task is, I must say, rather boring on the surface. I have to read up about HTML forms, Javascript events, and CSS. I feel that HTML, Javascript, and CSS are abominations that have only recently been made to behave in a civilized manner, so I have some innate disdain for working with it. I am also admittedly sick with a cold, but I seemed lucid enough yesterday to do a bit of reading if I could have forced myself to do it. Grah!

After some discussion in the coworking chat room, I described the feeling like I needed a roll of shipping tape so I could fill-up and seal a box. The shipping tape is somewhere in the house, but I don’t know exactly where. And when I finally find the stupid tape, I can’t find the edge and unroll it cleanly for fifteen minutes. It occurs to me now that perhaps I am not as mentally prepared to deal with obnoxious rolls of tape; clearly it’s getting under my skin in some way. Secondly, I’ve been reading a bit about akrasia, a Greek philosophical term regarding how people don’t do what is in their best interest. There’s some tidily-packaged blog posts that tell a nice story followed by some pleasant generalizations as the prelude to offering affordably-priced PDFs to buy; my takeaway from them was that there is also the concept of deferred gratification that I perhaps should focus on. I hate deferred gratification when the outcome will be of an unknown quality, but I don’t mind it otherwise.

I’ll try to cobble together an approach today that includes these insights. HTML/JAVASCRIPT/CSS TAKE 2.

On a side note, here’s what I did instead:

• Bought some interesting food at Trader Joes (tempura CAULIFLOWER)
• Found some nail polish to match my new fountain pen (vibrant pink!)
• Got the missing nut for the guitar jack (and the jack works!)
• Wrote an RFP for possible ecommerce help from a friend of mine.

Also, @jess found a cool CLI-based task manager called TaskWarrior. I like the idea of it! I may use their task DOM as the basis for my own visual tools…but that’s something for another day.