View From the Bushes

I think all of us have this vision of what we should be able to accomplish in a day. Very rarely does that vision of what we should be able to do match what we actually get done, even on really productive days. For me at least, this gap leads to a variety of emotions not the least of which are stress, futility, regret and occasionally, despair. I was reading Slashdot today and I noticed in the Ask Slashdot section someone had posted the question, "Getting Things Done?" (the most salient piece of advice in the associated comments was that the first step for getting things down was to spend less time posting comments on the web.) Since I'm always interested in getting things done, I thought I'd take a look.

As it turns out, the person posing the question was interested in opinions on a book titled "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity". So I thought I'd check it out; as a read up on it, it sounded as if my current organizational system bears a strong resemblance to most of the principals he espouses, though apparently lacking the futility and despair which seem to plague me. As encouraging as this was, I was also wary of buying a book which was nothing more than a collection of platitudes I had already heard. I thought it might be useful to see the book so I headed for the nearest Barnes and Nobles for lunch. At this point I could launch into a discussion of the two different kinds of book shopping, but it will probably have to wait for another time, the central point being that I was unable to find it, but I did find his most recent book, and since I figured I had already had stumbled onto "level one," it wouldn't hurt me to jump right into level two. What I was able to read over lunch seemed pretty good, but I'll let you know.

My guess is that most of my readers could care less about my personal quest for enlightenment, and are really just interested in the end result. To those I promise that something new (probably a Xenogenic NPC) will be available by the end of tomorrow, though with a little bit of luck the cartographer will finally send me the maps, though I've got to tell you that with the new exotic setting of the NPC's a single one is probably worth about 1/3 of an adventure. The NPC I've been working on is an evil ranger who should be a lot of fun.

Finally, we turn to the tour. For those who don't like the tour coverage, I want you to notice that not only have I kept my pledge to only spend a paragraph on it, but also my blog has been running to four paragraphs rather than the normal three, so you're not missing anything. Today's stage was basically a textbook flat stage with the exception of a really nasty crash just past the 1 km to go banner. Since it was within the last kilometer everyone gets the same time, and it looks like none of the overall contendors was seriously injured though Robbie McEwen did go down pretty hard, which is a shame since he was the only one keeping the final bunch sprints exciting, particularly now that Cipollini and Petacchi have dropped out, which, I feel, significantly diminishes what had promised to be a real sprinters battle.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross