Reset

Any plan to sleep regularly tonight is thrown out the window. By choice. I've had a harrowing week where I struggled to handle concentrating on my work, sticking with my commitments, and fending off distractions. I have to say I managed to wing it and churned out the reports, and gave that presentation the department has come to expect of me: colourful, fun, funny, informative, simple to understand, but with lots of heart and effort, and most importantly, everyone laughed and stayed awake.

What I've been behind on obviously is on other next action tasks, on my clinical cases at work. I also declined shopping with Mum and Mei Mei, which in Kennyisms, is almost blasphemous (and they had such a great time and a great haul!).

I feel guilty but I guess not enough as well. And really, at this juncture, I wonder how helpful is "guilt"?

I think guilt is helpful in terms of pushing for action, and for repair. Beyond that amount, instead of repairing, it becomes impairing.

So I slept at 8.30pm just now, without guilt, and with the quiet acknowledgement that I sorta kinda survived the week. I wanted to get back on track but not before rest. I planned to wake up at 4am. I woke up at 2am instead. And that's fine.

Vaguely, I recalled this tip regarding returning your email inbox to zero. Obviously, I paraphrase:
If you're faced with too much backlog, scan for life-or-death emails, otherwise transfer everything to a folder called archive.
Start afresh. 
Make sure you process everything from now on.
And slowly work on the backlog, bit by bit everyday.
Or even delete it.
If it's urgent enough, someone else is going to remind you of it.


Of which, this idea of a clean slate is very appealing to me.

So Melinda, this doesn't mean I don't need to repair the commitments I've made.
But for now, cheers to a reset.