tired, but productive

cattitude had to get up early today for an 8:30 medical appointment (routine testing), and I woke around when he did, so we both left the house an hour earlier than usual. That meant, of course, that I got downtown an hour or so earlier than usual. I used that to walk from Columbus Circle to my office—a reasonably brisk walk across Central Park South and down Sixth Avenue, just under two miles, I think, and the sidewalks didn't get crowded till the mid-40s, and not really bad until that last two blocks along 32nd Street, which is always heavily trafficked. With that, I still got to work earlier than usual.

I spent about three and a half hours in meetings today. That's more time than I spent in meetings in October. One of the things I like about my job is that they don't make me go to pointless meetings. That's still true: the discussion was sensible and I think, and hope, productive, and it was appropriate for me to be there. Appropriate enough, in fact, that I invited myself to the second meeting. Both were with outside contractors/vendors, who are apparently going to be implementing a content management system for us. Jon and I were at the first meeting because our boss, who is on vacation, asked that at least one of us sit in on her behalf. I took the second because I've been there long enough to know about how we handle art, and how we (the science team) would like to be handling art. Afterwards, I went into Wendy's office (she's my boss's boss, as well as the person who hired me to be an editor here), talked a bit about what was said, and then went back to my desk and wrote an email summarizing both meetings for Marilyn (cc'd to Wendy and Jon). The 3.5-hour number counts the time for writing it up as meeting time (I have to track what projects I work on, in rounded half-hour increments; "meetings" are a category on the spreadsheet). Having gotten in early, I didn't leave early, so a bit more time than usual. I'm on salary. Nonetheless, I actually fill out two timesheets. One is a very broad "worked/vacation/holiday/out sick/other" sheet of paper, in day or half-day units (and I do like being able to take personal time in half days); the other is the half-hourly one, which someone uses as information for budgeting.

I also stopped on the way home to pick up a prescription, and I think that's enough for one day on which I woke up early. I don't think this would have been possible if I were all the way on standard time.