I don’t know why, really, but I’ve been reticent to follow my to-do lists, lately. [I hear David Allen telling me that I don't trust my trusted system. He's probably right. I'm human, though.]

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty apathetic: work has been frustrating because we’re pushing paper and not building hardware. I know intellectually that pushing paper is what gets you to building hardware, and while we’re now on the verge of building hardware again, it’s just … gah. It’s not even that I suck at the paper-pushing—I think I do it really well. I’ve just not found much energy for it, and as a result, my work has suffered. I’ll admit it.

I’ll admit that part of my issue is that I really stunk at doing the vacation, and I realized as I drove home tonight why: I wasn’t gone long enough to matter. I don’t mean that from a “I needed a longer vacation”—which, hey, I do—but more from a “I was only going to be gone two days, so it’s not like I was a non-functioning team member that you just had to write off.” I don’t have the vacation banked to do a multi-week vacation, but I think one’s going to be needed next year. As soon as I have an idea of what hardware we’ll be building in the next 12-18 months, I’ll start planning in earnest: come next summer, I should have three weeks banked up. If I took two, I’d be gone long enough that everyone would have to just write me off for that time.

As to the title of this: I just got disgusted with myself today and started to return my faith to the system. It’s worked pretty well—I’ve gotten the bonus of having tackled some things, and the things I’ve gotten done have been relatively important. My @Actions mailbox is clear, and so is @Responses. I don’t owe anyone any email, and that’s always a good feeling.

I just need to wake up with this feeling in about seven hours and push on through tomorrow. Yep … more proposals.