I always feel bad complaining about feeling busy when much of what’s making me busy is fun. So, I won’t complain, but I have been busy for the past month and a half or more. From doing a lot of coordination of the Sugar Hill contradance weekend to attending two separate weddings on the west coast, every weekend seems to have something scheduled. And every busy weekend means time that I can’t keep up with my normal personal chores. And every day off work seems to result in a clump of emails demanding attention. Next thing you know, I’m feeling scattered, even though there’s plenty of rest and relaxation going on in my life.

Saturday I spent hours taming my inbox. As I discussed last November, I like to have 38 or fewer emails in my inbox at any given moment (because I can fit 37 on one screen), especially at the end of a work day. I marveled then at what an impact the out of control inbox seems to have on my psyche, and the marveling continues. And, when I feel scattered, I never feel like I have time to write to my blog.

This got me thinking: I could develop a Scattered-David index… something like the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, that takes things like how many emails are in my inbox, how long its been since I wrote to my blog, maybe somehow it could track my purchases of plane tickets…. anyway, take raw data like that and compute some “Scattered-David index” that would give friends and family some sense of what’s going on with me when I’m feeling to scattered to post to the blog or what have you. The essential thing would be that it’d have to work without me doing ANYTHING, so I’d have to write a program to see how many messages were in my inbox and stuff, and have these programs run automatically every day or whatever. Once I had the number I could do things like show graphs and stuff.

Fun to think about. If I felt like I had more time to play with things like that, I’d probably give it a try. But, hey, I have to get a lot of work done this week before leaving next weekend for Boston for yet another wedding. I’m hoping things will be pretty calm between my return from that and Thanksgiving. Maybe I’ll even renew my efforts to blog more often. But meanwhile, at least my responsibilities are mostly fun and rewarding!