This morning, I’m up a little later.  I have an app on my phone that wakes me up within a 30-minute range so I’m not getting jarred out of sleep (called Sleep Cycle for anyone interested.  I’m not making any money from this recommendation).  The sun’s already up, but I see the swing of the moon fading against the sky.  The crickets have gone under with the dawn.  So I’ll see them tomorrow.

I have a bit more time this morning, so Twitter for a few minutes, and off to story.

I’m having fun cycling the depth more in these scenes.  It’s amazing what I’ve learned doing a story a year.  It helped me solidify how to get details into a story, something that was always a challenge for   The crutch words flag where I might need to think more about the details.

Then off to work.  And I end up working 45 minutes over today.  On Friday!

I work at managing myself there.  It’s an emergency and it’s easy to leap into flight or fight mode, turn reactive.  The culture of knowledge work today keeps you reacting, constantly, making it easy to burn out.  Human beings aren’t made to be in flight or flight non-stop.  The days of when I spent my work day focused entirely on reacting, I’d come home exhausted and completely unable to be creative—to the point it spilled into the weekend.

So I focus on keeping calm and taking a step back when I veer into the reactive mode. I know if I let it take over, even for the 45 minutes, I’ll spend the rest of the evening trying to recover…and maybe not sleep well.

There’s a book called Work Clean about using mise-en-place in knowledge work.  One of the things the author mentions is when you start wanting to get reactive and sloppy is to slow down.  So I’m flattening out my reaction.

By the time I shut down, I don’t feel like I have to go over the wall.  I go out to my local restaurant.  Friendly faces recognize me and ask if I want coconut ice cream.

Of course…