CD and I finished our study on Life@Work: the Art of Balance yesterday. The book closed with questions: Are you satisfied with how much time you spend on your family? Are you doing what you need to do for your community? Are there work habits you need to change? Does your schedule include time for sleep and self-care as well as time for prayer and mediation? There was a bit of discussion about how systems and support can make a difference.

I think we all know that I haven’t perfected the art of balance quite yet.

However, I think I may have made some progress since we began that study on Ash Wednesday. Leaving aside the events of my life during that time, I think I’ve gotten better about schedules and margin. I really try not to have my day set up so that any interruption makes it impossible to finish. I don’t leave for class so late that I screech into the classroom at the last possible moment. I’ve sorted out my clients so that I don’t just try to do every job as soon as it arises, but instead I have two or three projects a day. I’ve been fitting some of the needed unbillable stuff into my day. I’m putting people out on the calendar, and saying no to work that I don’t have time for.

I’ve taken some time off and done some things for fun. I’ve arranged for someone to come in and clean once a month. This is not a huge thing, but CD has done the same, and she says it encourages her boys to get their things picked up at least once a month, and it encourages her to maintain the cleanliness of the house.

A propos of those two topics, here’s the bra I’m working on. I didn’t finish it yesterday, but it is developing more bra-like characteristics. It’s sitting on my very messy nightstand.

The area where I’m really not doing well is in taking care of myself. But here it is the first day of June. What a great time to recommit to eating right, exercising, and reasonable amounts of sleep and downtime.

In addition to church, a walk, and sewing yesterday, I also watched a movie with my kid, graded papers, and did some more homework for my online class.

We’re using deprecated tags and generally practicing some out of date code. I don’t understand why; there’s quite a bit of online discussion for this class, and the teacher seems smart and knowledgeable. I don’t like building bad code, and I don’t like practicing stuff that’s not right. I thought about going ahead and building the assignment correctly — it’ll look the same, but be more modern — and then I thought that might seem obnoxious.

I don’t want to be obnoxious about it, but I did ask just in one little example why we were using a couple of particular elements instead of the more up to date ones. Maybe I’ll get an explanation.

Well, my financial sector IT guy is IMing me, so my workday has begun. Happy Monday to all!