There’s one dead giveaway your content was written by ChatGPT. It’s not the tone, it’s not the phrasing, it’s the em dash.

No normal, non-seasoned writer writes like that.

Sure, there are people who definitely use it. But 99.9999% of the population has never even heard of an em dash before. Let alone use it in their content.

Go die in a fire.

What are you doing right now? Right this very minute.

Stop for a couple of minutes and answer that question.

That’s all it takes. Just stop. Look around. Are you where you wanted to be at this time of TODAY? Are you past that? Did you get sidetracked? Are you focused? Are you floundering, confused, overwhelmed? Are you hungry or thirsty? Is your brain tired? Do you need a nap? Are you cooking with gas?

What are you doing right now?

Answer the question.

• bullet journals
• productivity apps
• to-do lists
• habit trackers
• Pomodoro
• time tracking
• GSD (Getting Stuff Done)
• etc
• etc
• etc

I have failed or I flail at any or all of these. To-do lists and GSD works the most consistently, but some days that’s not saying much.

Some of my Twitter friends and I are productivity enthusiasts, which is to say, we try. And flail. Sometimes fail. We run through methods to see what we like, what we don’t like, what will work provided we work it, what won’t work or what we won’t work.

Mostly we do it for the stationery.

Not really. All we really want to do is get our stuff done so we can do other things that make us happy. That’s all any of us (productivity enthusiasts or not) really want.

That’s what we tell ourselves anyway.

My main method of wrangling my productivity or lack thereof is a combination to-do list, a dun-did list, and mind-mapping with a splash of GSD. (Bullet journaling is beyond my comprehension.) I’m not always faithful about this. But!

I have several problems, three of which are:

1. I’m addicted to procrastination (which is a form of thrill-seeking)
2. I’m only able to focus on one thing at a time and I lose time like crazy, and
3. I’m terrified of getting everything done. What would I do then?

But I ran across this: WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW? I don’t know where. I meant to make a note so I could link back to the article. But it only built on an idea I had when I heard the local college’s clocktower chime.

I have alarms on my phone set for 9a, 11a, 3p, 7p, and 9p and I use distinctive ringtone(s).¹

This one thing, more than anything I have tried thus far, has managed to make me more aware of my daily pace. Even if I don’t write in my journal, even if I don’t have a to-do list, even if I don’t have a dun-did list, when I hear my distinctive ringtones, I know exactly what time it is and I can make a mental note of where I am in my day and what I still need to do.

I don’t wander around so aimlessly now if I’ve hit the wall.

And so I leave you with these and two questions:

What are you doing right now?

What’s your most effective productivity mechanism(s)?

I am sitting at a table in my local public library, my laptop, a bottle of water, and my Galaxy Note in front of me. I have headphones on and I am listening to nature sounds because the not-very-socially-graced woman behind me (she and I have a history) is muttering to herself loudly enough that it’s clear she wants someone to ask her what she’s working on and her laptop is making funky bubble-popping sounds loudly.

I am at the library to escape loud mutterings, machine-made noises, and children who don’t care if they’re worming into my brain space.

A child, boy, ~9ish, whom I have never before seen in my life, comes up to my table as if I had birthed him and almost leans on me.

A child is perfectly comfortable with almost-snuggling up to a strange woman who’s obviously trying to block out the world, asking if he can play on an expensive device.

It never occurred to him I’d say no.

If the strangers won’t go to them, they will go to the strangers.

But I’m an author and as authors will do (or try), we must market. And marketing was happening on Facebook. And, not coincidentally, that’s where my fans were, too. I made a page. I have a personal account, too, that’s really not so personal. So I went there and I posted there. Then Facebook changed the way it displayed what I posted, which was to say, there was a precipitous drop in how many people were shown my posts from one day to the next. Facebook is doing Things, and those Things are cutting out the end user from stuff they want to see. Therefore, why should the content creators continue to supply content?

I will be ramping up my blogging again because there is no reason for me to be on a platform I hate if my readers won’t be shown what they have asked to see.

I will also be starting a newsletter for those who don’t care for blogs.

Because you know what? I have two (yes, two) books coming out on May 1, 2014, and I’d sure like people to know about them. Facebook’s not going to help you find out about them anymore.

And so. This blog’s probably going to look like a Tumblr for a little while because a) I like to share things I find beautiful / useful / funny, b) I’m short on words right now, and c) I want to share my Zen as I stumble my way around life post-bucket-list to find it.

So this morning around 10:13 a.m., I read a piece in HuffPo about a possible alternative chronology to the New Testament that puts a new spin on things. I thought it was an interesting concept. I RTd the link, though I forgot from whom I lifted it.

My friend replied: [deleted tweet]

Another friend replied: [deleted tweet]

We had a nice little chat about that that lasted all of about 1/2 hour. Then I had to go do grownup things like work and take care of the gas leak I had and arrange for a plumber and new water heater.

And then this guy shows up six hours later: [deleted tweet]

And that’s where he started the fight without bothering to ask us to define our terms first. (First rule of Twitter when butting into a convo you want to involve yourself in: ask for clarification from the participants first. You’ll probably get a nice response and a welcome to the convo so long as you can keep it civil, even if you disagree.) Regrettably, we engaged for about three tweets each before we figured out he had no home training and blocked him.

But before I did, I did a little preliminary snoopage, as per SOP when strangers with an attitude butt into my convo six hours after said convo has been put to bed. Matthew Reeves is 20. He writes YA. How sweet of him. How … 20 years old of him.

I was 20 once. It was a nice year. I had fun. And yeah, I thought I knew everything, too.

So! He’s blocked and I go back to harrassing @mikecane, as per usual, interspersed with some time spent making my son do manual labor, and Matthew Reeves continues to rant at us, but who cares, right? Because we can’t see it and there are soooo many more interesting people on Twitter who really can school us on something.

But apparently Matthew Reeves needs to broadcast his point of view to the world, so without further ado, and because I’m occasionally a nice mommy to my own know-it-all son, I’m going to assist him in this endeavor:

Dude, I’m A Historian (but not in the subject being discussed). [dead link]

Bless his heart, picking a fight with two people he doesn’t know who are old enough to have shot him out of our vaginas, and is now mad because we won’t pay him any mind. Precious. Just precious.

And now he’s disillusioned: [deleted tweet]

Sadness.

Go away, kid. Ya bother me.

by Tax Deduction #1
(3rd grade)

Uh oh I get in trouble for drawing on the walls. “[FIRST MIDDLE LAST]!” Mom yelled really loudly. “WHY DID YOU draw a little dot on the wall!” “[FIRST]!” my dad snapped. “You are not going to have chocolate chip pie for 1 month.” “Ha. Ha, ha, haaaa, ha, stinky head!”* said [Brother]. “You are not having apple juice for 3 months.”

*do not say this to your mom or dad

Chapter 2

Now after 2 months I am getting bored. “When is my grounding over?” I asked. “After another two months,” my mom said.

Chapter 3

It’s been 4 months and I am not grounded anymore. “Hurray!” I shouted.

We are not obligated to go ’round the neighborhood introducing ourselves and presenting ourselves for your approval as The Right Kind of People. Not when we moved in five years ago. Not now.

It’s yours. Your obligation to come to us to find out who we are. Until you do that, your judgments about us are your problem, not ours.

If you had come to our door, you might have realized we are quiet, well-educated and well-traveled people who live our lives with honor and dignity. The county government and police department have, fortunately, already realized this, thanks to your meddling.

You will not take that dignity and quiet away from us because you hate that your 40-year neighbor died and we bought her house. You will not take that dignity and quiet away from us because you hate that the neighborhood demographic changed nearly overnight from the nearly dead to the newly hatched. You will not take that dignity and quiet away from us because we don’t spend 24/7 working on our lawns because we’re too busy working on improving the whole of our lives.

We pay the same taxes you do, even though we don’t make as much money as you made when you were working, and you are now retired on the Social Security we are paying. You can judge us and co-opt our children when you start paying our mortgage, for the infrastructure repairs you can’t see on this 45-year-old house, and for someone to keep our lawn for us.

If our biggest sins are that we keep to ourselves, we’re quiet, and we let our tax deductions have a bit more physical freedom than you deem is proper, and we don’t have as much money or free time as you do, we can live with that.

No, we aren’t The Right Kind of People. And if you are, then we don’t want to be.

And oh, P.S. We don’t need to be friends with you. We need you to mind your own business.

Ta ta for now, Rosella. See you in a bit.

2011: Widowed Mormon bishop and steel magnate Mitch meets corporate restructuring specialist Cassie St. James, a former prostitute. As they navigate a relationship, they work together to stop a man who’s destroying everything Mitch holds dear.

2. Make some pretty things.

a) An afghan (Tunisian crochet, the only kind I like) for XX TD.

b) A Hobbes doll for XY TD.

3. Get better at the ebook formatting thing.

a) Continue self-tutoring in SVG so I can get The Fob Bible completely digitized (text, no problem, but it’s graphics heavy).

b) Give more priority to embedding fonts.

4. Shamelessly rip off RJ Keller’s 2010-in-photos idea.

5. Get my foyer, living room, and dining room decorated and my art up on the walls, including my kitschy matadors ~1950 and my cheap bought-out-of-a-car-trunk-in-a-parking-lot-but-expensively-framed Pissarro.

6. Expose my real identity to you all (in case you haven’t figured it out already and no, my real name is not famous in the least bit) and my artsy-fartsy business because I think you might like it. But to do that, I need to work on the super-outdated website.

7. Get The Fob Bible into college curricula, where I think it belongs best.

8. Implement some fun ideas I have for The Proviso et al.

9. Get back on the low-carb wagon, exercise, and load up on the probiotics/coconut oil.

10. Sit down and relax, watch a movie with Dude once a week or so.

There. I fixed it.