Time for work and time for play

Something my father always used to tell me,

There's time for work and time for play.

This comes into play in a big way in this discipline. Last weekend was time for play; we went apple picking, spent time with friends, visited family in Maine, went to a local theater show and didn't get a lick of work done for most of the weekend. But we had fun. During the week I plugged along at my usual pace, which is basically 2 hours of work before leaving for "the job" in the morning, quick details and phone calls at lunch and 2-3 hours in the evening usually broken up by diner, the gym, reading, and Wii MarioKart.

This weekend we really wanted to start our initial sales push out in the field, so there were a lot of details to button up and things to prepare. So this weekend was the time for work. I got an especially early start at 3am Friday morning to get 3 hours of work in before the "job", and cane right home to plug away for another 4 strong hours.

By "strong hours" I mean that they were very effective hours.

When working, work; when playing, play.

To stay effective, at least for me, it is critical that I spend the extra 5 minutes a day updating the official to-do list. It helps me stay on track by giving me something to come back to in times of aimlessness.

Saturday was squeezed for all it was worth as we neared a milestone in the assembly of our new product. Packaging was assembled and verbiage was finalized for some supplemental materials. We did get in a walk in the rain and about 40 minutes of video games, but we switched off playing games and doing assembly, I considered this to be "play time" but while still getting work done. Sunday was much the same as we worked steady all morning together and went out selling in the afternoon. After 3 straight (successful) days of working and not a lot of sleep, we transitioned out of work mode, stopped by the Redbox to rent a movie, (We got the Forgotten Kingdom which was very good) and had some dinner and apple pie to follow.

Dinner was leftover soup. We've been trying to cook a lot of one thing so that leftovers are plentiful and we don't have to do as much cooking.