Wed, 22 Jul 2020
It has been just short of two months since I started using TaskWarrior, and I gotta admitā¦ itās going well? Iām not sure if itās TaskWarrior or the vitamin D (you can skip to that if youāre not interested in to-do list stuff). Stephanie over the river at Exit 343 Designs (maker of the sticker pictured on my Barbie Dream Cameo) wrote a nice article on work-life balance that prompted me to revisit the organization topic.
Now, I love me some paper journals. I have a fun purple Leuchtturm 1917 notebook š¦ that I really tried to make work. Bookbinding is another one of my hobbies. I love Traveler notebooks. There is just something satisfying about paper notebooks. All this should add up to great organization, right? Doesnāt work for me.
I also love note cards. I have played around with āS.H.E. cards;ā I have card boxes and colored notecards and Post-It notecards and colored pens and highlighters and all that. Also doesnāt work for me.
TaskWarrior is the first to-do program that has actually worked for me, and I donāt know why. I think itās because itās easy to enter stuff and check it off, but thereās enough friction in the process of tweaking priorities that I donāt spend time adjusting things so that everything comes up in the order I want (i.e. āI donāt want to do that thing, so I will massage the priorities such that it never quite makes it to the topā¦ā) Eventually its gentle āYou have more urgent tasksā will bug me enough that Iāll do the top task Iāve been putting off.
Vitamin D?
I donāt know if itās that TaskWarrior hits the sweet spot for me, or that Iāve been taking my vitamin D regularly, but Iām not going to change either one as long as it works.
See, I grew up in a swimming pool, and I have redhead skin. So I basically got more than my lifetime safe UV exposure before I turned 17, and I avoid the sun as much as possible now, even more than my nerdy lifestyle naturally does. Which means Iām usually D-deficient. When the kid (who is both fair-skinned and holes up in a dark bedroom with a computer 24/7) came up the same way, I finally got around to regularly keeping D on hand.
And a doctor pointed out something I had forgotten: D deficiency can cause attention issues. One of the first things we were given to try when the kid was little, in ruling out things that acted like ADHD but werenāt, was supplemental D. Itās not a magic bullet: vitamin D wonāt cure ADHD, itās just that lacking vitamin D can cause some of the same symptoms, or worsen them if youāve already got them. And I was 5 ng/mL last year, and 21 ng/mL this year, so thatās gotta make a difference, right? (Normal is 29+, but Iāve only been regularly taking it the last couple months and I imagine it takes awhile to build reserves back up.)
So if youāre not taking a multivitamin, take a multivitamin. And wear sunscreen.
š¦: Technically, that's an affiliate link. I recommend showrooming on Amazon and buying somewhere else though.
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