Sip, Read, Test, Meet, Write, Eat, Sleep, Repeat

For those of you who regularly follow my blog, you know that one of the recurring themes throughout my posts is how there never seems to be enough time in the day to do everything I want/need to do. In my defense, just about every task you can think of is going to take longer for a blind person like me to complete. Whether it’s drafting an email, or reading an article. Making a peanut butter sandwich or commuting to work. It’s not an excuse, it’s just a reality that comes with being blind, reluctant or otherwise.

But independent of the whole “tasks taking longer” thing, I’m also someone who likes to stay busy, continually challenging myself to do more and looking to take things to that next level, which is a rather counterintuitive behavior for someone who already has plenty on their plate.

As a result, I constantly struggle with how to fit it all in, how to strike that right work/life balance. How to effectively manage my time to focus on  the client work that helps pay the bills, without losing sight of  those other passion projects of mine, like my blog for instance,  who’s value isn’t necessarily measured in dollars and cents. How, at the end of the day, I am able to get done what I need to get done, while ensuring that I’m also budgeting time for things that contribute to my professional development and/or personal enrichment.

Of course, this is easier said than done, as evidenced by the fact that I find myself sitting here on July 27, just now getting around to posting my first blog of the month.

Ugh.

Well first, I should probably clarify something…

It's not like I haven’t written anything this month, I actually try to do at least a little bit of writing every day, and I’m  continually adding to my growing collection of story ideas, outlines, partial notes and early drafts.

But getting a blog from concept to draft to published post is an altogether different story, that requires a completely different type of focus, a real time commitment, which is the part I am still trying to get better at.

It also helps if I am in the mood, be inspired when I sit down to write something, but those spontaneous flashes of inspiration seldom ever happen at the exact moment you have a bunch of extra time on your hands, so the trick is to try and channel your creativity into these sporadic half hour blocks of time that pop up throughout the day, or that random Sunday morning up north when you wake up early and can’t fall back to sleep, and so on and so on…

Again, easier said than done.

If I was a full-time writer, if all I had to do was focus on my blog, well, that would be a entirely different deal. But like I have already stated, the blog is just something I started up to promote my Accessiversity testing service, and while I’m glad to use this platform to help advance the important conversation about different accessibility and disability-related topics, I’m right back to trying to find places to squeeze this all in.

I know that these pressures and stressors are not unique to blind people, nor am I alone when it comes to these feelings of frustration or inadequacy, when us humans inevitably find we are not able to live up to what are often unrealistic expectations that we set for ourselves. we are all busy, everybody struggles with their own version of trying to cram their super-sized extra value meal life into that flimsy 24-hour paper bag that we call time, and let’s face it, once in a while a few fries slip through the cracks and end up getting dropped on your Subaru’s nasty floor mat in the process.

But if you’re anything like me, there’s nothing more disappointing than a wasted French fry. Well, maybe just that occasional gut punch at the end of particularly busy months when you feel like you have somehow let yourself down.

To combat this, I try (not always successfully, I might add) to divvy my days up into a sort of routine that allows me to devote at least a portion of time to all of these different things that I need/want to do, including of course, writing.

To use another every-day life analogy, most days my routine can be summed up like the instructions you might read on the back of a shampoo bottle.

Sip, Read, Test, Meet, Write, Eat, Sleep, Repeat.

So, here’s how a typical day might go for me…

I begin most days around 5:15 a.m. when my wife’s alarm goes off. When she gets in the shower to start getting ready for work, that’s my cue to head downstairs and get a fresh pot of coffee brewing.

Usually there will be enough coffee leftover from the previous day to microwave a cup, which I (try to) enjoy as I sit at the kitchen table and do a little reading, scrolling through the news feed on my iPhone or starting to go through my email inbox while I wait for my wife to come downstairs.

Each morning Teresa and I are able to spend at least a few minutes together, chatting and catching up while we sip on a quick cup of coffee, before she has to eventually leave the house, generally between 6-6:30 a.m., to make it to work on time.

Now, this next part of my daily routine, between 6:30-10 a.m. is the quietest part of the day. By the time the sun rises, our 130-pound Neapolitan Mastiff has already gone back to bed (after having gotten up to see my wife off to work) and I know that my teenage boys won’t be up for at least another three hours, so I can take advantage of the peace and quiet in the house to get some accessibility/usability testing done, or depending on what I have going on, perhaps even do a little early morning writing for the blog.

And then the meetings start. Weekly standing meetings, meetings with prospective clients—one Zoom session and MS Teams meeting after another.

And in between meetings, I will try to cram in some more testing, maybe respond to a few emails, send out some messages to new LinkedIn contacts, or make a short video to document some accessibility problem that I encountered during the course of that day’s testing.

Around lunchtime, I might pause long enough to grab something quick to eat--make a turkey sandwich, nuke a piece of leftover pizza, eat a Pop Tart – again, just depends on the day. If I’m lucky, I might have a work meeting over lunch at some place like Buddies Grill in Holt, or Art’s Bar on Kalamazoo Street in Lansing, but during the pandemic, these sorts of working lunches have been few and far between.

And the second half of the day continues much like the first—me splitting time between meetings and testing, sprinkling in some reading and squeezing in some writing whenever possible, occasionally sneaking off for a glass of water, refill of coffee or a handful of peanut butter pretzels whenever I feel my energy starting to get sapped.

Because I’m in the fortunate position of being a (mostly) work-from-home dad, I also feel a certain obligation to try and keep tabs on our boys throughout the day, to the extent that any parent can keep track of what their teenage boys are doing. They are good kids, and pretty self-sufficient, but I’m always there to remind them to help out with different chores around the house, less they feel their mom’s wrath when she gets home from work, or back when school was still in session and they were doing remote learning, I would make a point to regularly ask them about their classes just to make sure they were keeping up on their studies.

And yes, I try to chip in to help out with whatever household duties I can, whether it’s taking out the trash, or loading/emptying the dishwasher, or folding laundry—being blind doesn’t exempt me from those mundane parts of life that everybody else has to deal with too.

Now, none of us are big breakfast eaters – usually just a bowl of cereal, a banana, or a couple of pieces of toast – and the same goes for lunch. So, by the time 5 p.m. rolls around, our crew is all pretty hungry and ready for a big dinner.

After our unapologetic “early bird” late afternoon/barely evening dinners (ala some Florida retirees frequenting the all-you-can-eat buffet at their local Golden Corral restaurant) I like to maintain the stereotype for someone of my advanced age, and sit down to watch part of the evening news, and (fingers crossed) perhaps even close my eyes for a few minutes.

If it’s not too hot, and assuming that we’re not too tired, around 7 p.m. we might take the dog for a walk, or if we’re feeling really energetic/ambitious, maybe bike the Ram Trail into town to get ice cream. Evenings are also for getting groceries and running other errands, before sitting back down to watch some Netflix show together, or going off on our own to read. This is mostly when I try to do my pleasure reading, usually alternating between books that I want to read just for fun, and other titles that are more focused on acquiring specific knowledge and/or developing new skills, for instance, the books about computer programming that I recently started to read.

While I try my best to keep regular hours, it’s not unusual for me to have work meetings that run into the evenings, and I spend way too many nights working on the computer testing, or writing, or just taking care of things that I wasn’t able to get to throughout the course of the day. Again, not ideal by any means—I honestly just think it’s more of a function of today’s day and age with all of our technology and  work always being right there at our fingertips, normal office hours be damned.

It’s no surprise then, that on those nights after especially long, extraordinarily busy/frenetic days, you might find me unwinding, sipping on an adult beverage or two, as Teresa and I catch each other up on our respective days. And then it’s off to bed to start the whole process over again.

Sip, Read, Test, Meet, Write, Eat, Sleep, Repeat.

Like I said, it sounds like something you might find on the back of a shampoo bottle.