Take your vitamins

It has been just short of two months since I started using TaskWarrior, and I gotta admit… it’s going well? I’m not sure if it’s TaskWarrior or the vitamin D (you can skip to that if you’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 📦 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? Doesn’t work for me.

I also love note cards. I have played around with “S.H.E. cards;” I have card boxes and colored notecards and Post-It notecards and colored pens and highlighters and all that. Also doesn’t work for me.

TaskWarrior is the first to-do program that has actually worked for me, and I don’t know why. I think it’s because it’s easy to enter stuff and check it off, but there’s enough friction in the process of tweaking priorities that I don’t spend time adjusting things so that everything comes up in the order I want (i.e. “I don’t want to do that thing, so I will massage the priorities such that it never quite makes it to the top…”) Eventually its gentle “You have more urgent tasks” will bug me enough that I’ll do the top task I’ve been putting off.

Vitamin D?

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

So if you’re not taking a multivitamin, take a multivitamin. And wear sunscreen.