I'm Not on Your Vacation

[cue the tiny violin choir...] Yesterday, I spent the entire day indoors. It was a beautiful specimen of a Cape Cod day: birds chirping, waves crashing, sun warmly shining behind a pillow of puffy clouds. But there I was, slumped on a futon, shades drawn, concentration musak blaring, churning out a day-late assignment rife with moving parts/details that had I strayed for even an hour to go for a dip, I'd be left to backtrack over piles of papers and draw the work out all the more. By the time I hit send and emerged from my cave around sundown, I felt like a visitor to a new planet – eyes blinking, lungs hungrily filling with fresh air, positively parched in a way which only a mind-numbing beverage could quench. 

This is not ideal. My ideal day goes something like this: 

8am – wake up, make a nice breakfast, meditate, do the 7-minute workout, followed by 15–30 minutes of yoga.
9:30am–12noon – Sit in on one or two conference calls, sift through and send emails.
12noon–2pm or so – Focus intently (read: stay off Facebook) on work, completing and submitting assignments that are due. (I rarely work ahead, sigh). 
3–6pm – Head out to enjoy late-afternoon lazing on the beach/bike riding/running errands around town.
6–7pm – Catch up on the emails that came through during the afternoon, maybe send out invoices/pay bills/etc.
7–9pm – Dinner at home, on the beach or at a restaurant – this is when I tend to socialize – a key component to not becoming a very weird hermit.
9–11pm – Enrichment – reading, working on a crafty project, or, admittedly, catching up on TV shows I was too busy to watch first time around. 

No matter how you work, keeping a schedule makes a huge difference. It's not always easy, like when peeps from all ends of the earth make their way through the Cape on their hard-earned August holidays, and the call to while away a day on the beach with them is louder than a seagull's squawk. When I take a full day off to play in the sand, I have to make up for it at some point, hence yesterday's lockdown. Life is about balance: being able to enjoy the moment one day and hunker down the next.