Silver Seams

Take your vitamins

Wed, 22 Jul 2020

It has been just short of two months since I started using TaskWarrior, and I gotta admitā€¦ itā€™s going well? Iā€™m not sure if itā€™s TaskWarrior or the vitamin D (you can skip to that if youā€™re 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 šŸ“¦ 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? Doesnā€™t work for me.

I also love note cards. I have played around with ā€œS.H.E. cards;ā€ I have card boxes and colored notecards and Post-It notecards and colored pens and highlighters and all that. Also doesnā€™t work for me.

TaskWarrior is the first to-do program that has actually worked for me, and I donā€™t know why. I think itā€™s because itā€™s easy to enter stuff and check it off, but thereā€™s enough friction in the process of tweaking priorities that I donā€™t spend time adjusting things so that everything comes up in the order I want (i.e. ā€œI donā€™t 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 ā€œYou have more urgent tasksā€ will bug me enough that Iā€™ll do the top task Iā€™ve been putting off.

Vitamin D?

I donā€™t know if itā€™s that TaskWarrior hits the sweet spot for me, or that Iā€™ve been taking my vitamin D regularly, but Iā€™m 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 Iā€™m 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 werenā€™t, was supplemental D. Itā€™s not a magic bullet: vitamin D wonā€™t cure ADHD, itā€™s just that lacking vitamin D can cause some of the same symptoms, or worsen them if youā€™ve already got them. And I was 5 ng/mL last year, and 21 ng/mL this year, so thatā€™s gotta make a difference, right? (Normal is 29+, but Iā€™ve only been regularly taking it the last couple months and I imagine it takes awhile to build reserves back up.)

So if youā€™re not taking a multivitamin, take a multivitamin. And wear sunscreen.


Comments are not available.


Patreon logo

Even non-members can shop on Patreon now!

Coffee logo

Was my site helpful? Buy me a Ko-Fi!