Had a little excitement before dinner yesterday when my five-year-old daughter fell into the neighbor’s pond. She’s fine, was in there only a few seconds before pulling herself out, but I’m still a bit traumatized. Hopefully she and the other kids are too, just enough to make them more aware. I might tell this story in full later, or maybe not. Like I said, I’m traumatized.

Other than that, life has been pretty mundane. I’ve been walking a couple of miles every day while the weather’s nice. The van is still down and the hubs seems to be in no hurry to work on it. I am! It’ll be nice this weekend, so maybe we can get it running then.

I had a terrible time staying focused on work yesterday. It was turning into one of those days where I just float around and, at the end, wonder what I had done all day, so I decided to nip that in the bud. After a little research I found a couple of online time management tools, the best of which is Work Timer Online.

The Work Timer is going to be very useful for seeing where my time goes. The work I’m doing for others always seems to get done first to my WIP’s detriment, so by keeping a log of how much time I’ve spent on each project I can balance it better. The only problem is my spotty wi-fi connection. If the connection goes down before I’ve archived my time, it’s possible to lose that time. Not a huge problem, since it’s not like it’s billable hours I’m losing.

I also tried a web-based countdown timer. One reason I have trouble concentrating is because I have this irrational fear of losing track of time. It helped to set the timer and say, “I’m going to do this for 15 minutes, and there’s no way I can lose track of time because the timer will buzz me.” I kept thinking about the timer so I couldn’t completely lose myself in my work, but it was a LOT better, and I feel it will only get better with time. I didn’t care for the web-based timer I used, so I’ll probably just stick with Spacejock’s yTimer, which I’ve used for years for the kids’ Internet time.

I used to let organizing the activities get in the way of the activities. What organizational tools have you found to be most helpful?