As mentioned in the previous post, Jasper was home sick today. So I was mostly hanging out with him through some very cranky hours today. The one sick day reprieve? Nap time. He started rubbing his eyes around 12:50pm. By 1pm he was out. He wound up sleeping until almost 4:00 (though I was only banking on a 2 hour window). Let me just say, it was the fastest 3 hours of my life. I managed to crank out:
* A post for Gifted Exchange
* A post for this blog
* Emails regarding a potential new market - sending in clips and so forth
* Another revision of a previous Scientific American column
* A draft of another Scientific American column
* Most of a draft of a feature piece comparing the December 1958 Good Housekeeping with the December 2008 Good Housekeeping
This actually turned out to be a couple thousand words of material, all done in three hours of solid, pedal-to-the-metal work. Of course, it's not sustainable long term. These drafts will require many more hours of editing and such, and I totally ignored emails, phone calls and research that will need to be done at some point and would have been done had I had my normal 10-11 hour workday. But the point is, if you only have a certain number of hours to work, you will get your work done in that amount of time. That's what kills me about people (mostly men) who insist that their work cannot possibly be done in less than 12 hours a day, or some other amount of time. You know what? Get off the phone. Stop responding to stupid emails. Focus on exactly what needs to happen and ignore everything else. If you had to be the primary parent for a child and work during nap time, you'd figure out a way to do an 8-hour job in 3 hours. Working sweatshop hours is more about feeling important than anything else. That's not a core compentency, and we fool ourselves if we think it is.
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