I had two days off in a row. The first one I slept in. When I finally got up, I kept it light and only did things I enjoyed. At some point I laid out the week ahead. What goes where. What lands when. That was the shape of it.
The next day I put in about sixteen hours, nearly without a break. I got No Wrong Place close to finished. I updated and redesigned the site. I built the Back Room, the paid room where people can actually meet and work on things together. I finished three articles. I started building Steady, a teleprompter that follows your voice, made for the podcast studio. I kept up with Substack, the articles and the chat and the comments and the Notes. I worked on The Gospel of the Grey.
The docket was still full.
That part stays the same. I have never finished all the projects I have. I finish plenty of them, and the work that gets done is real. The bottom of it has never shown up.
The docket stays full, so there will be more of these.
Subscribe to The Grey Zone →Some of that is just how finishing works. Something gets done, and the doing of it makes the next thing. Once a thing exists, it needs publishing, or maintaining, or fixing, or telling people about, or connecting to something else you built. And the tools keep getting better, which helps and doesn't help. I can do things by myself now that would have taken a room full of people not long ago. That never shortens the list. It just gives me more things I can picture building.
None of this is a complaint. I like this. I like making things and watching them come out real; I like learning the next thing; I like the movement of it. Nobody needs to talk me down off it, and if somebody handed me a short list, I would have it 3x as large by Friday.
The list is heavy, and I like it. Both at once.
What it does do is make the list useless for telling me whether I'm moving. New work shows up about as fast as the finished work leaves, so the docket reads full either way.
There is a difference between having more to do and having made no progress.
About a year and a half ago I had my own tarot deck designed. Original art, my cards, printed into a real object you can hold. I have a printed copy of it. Nobody else ever bought one.
Measured the way it was built to be measured; that's a failure. It was supposed to be a deck people bought, and it was not a deck people bought. But the images were mine, and having my own images meant the readings on the site could be built on those instead of on somebody else's deck. That idea, reading with my own cards, is one of the places The Grey Zone started. Not the only one. It's down in the foundation somewhere, and the site grew up out of that ground and kept going.
None of that was what the deck was for.
So, I keep records. That part is deliberate. I keep track of what got finished, and I keep the progress in mind on purpose, because that's what holds me on the ground when the list is doing its worst. The books and the articles have piled up into something with real size to it by now, and it keeps getting bigger. A full list can make the finished work feel smaller than it is, and the record says otherwise. The finished things are finished. Nothing on the list reaches back and undoes them.
I have a whole library of proof that I don't stop.
I am also nowhere near finished. Both of those are just true.
This is one of the finished things. If it gave you something, the kitchen takes tips.
Tip the Kitchen →That slow day I opened with is the one I keep every week. It moves around. My schedule at work moves, so the day moves with it, and whichever one lands is the one. I take it for my sanity. That's a plain reason, and it's the true one.
I don't forbid anything or sit there deciding what counts as work and what doesn't. If something is low effort and I enjoy it, I do it, and sometimes that thing is a project. I lay out the week. That's how the day goes, and the docket stays full through it all.
I follow the biblical advice about taking one day of rest every week. I think religion lost plenty through translation and dilution, but that instruction made it through. It doesn't ask what I finished first.
So, I take it with the list full. If I waited for it to be empty, I'd never take one at all. I sleep in, I stick to things I enjoy that don't ask much of me, and the work will keep.