This is a planning/productivity post - somewhat outside the normal remit of the blog but stick with it.

So I’m currently ill (it’s an inner ear thing, I’m fine as long as I don’t move my head much and it should be gone in a couple of days).

When I came out of A&E last night I looked up the file ‘ill.txt’ in my ‘retroactive plans’ folder. I wrote ill.txt the week after I had the flu last year - it contains a list of things that I did while I had the flu that I shouldn’t have done and things that I should have done but didn’t do.

So this time I’m trying to get outside at least once a day for some fresh air and sunlight (hopefully keeping the body clock in sync). I’m making an effort to keep to normal wake-up and sleep times because I had awful trouble with flu-based nightmares last time. I’m also making sure I’m eating cooked food with vitamins and stuff, as opposed to comfort gouging on Jammy dodgers.

I’ve got a variety of files in my retroactive plans folder - I have notes on air travel (e.g. remembering to put your book in the seat pocket as soon as you get on the plane because then you can read it during taxi/takeoff as opposed to waiting until you can get it out of the bag), conferences, Christmas, paper writing, and giving talks. Once every few months I’ll look at the list and see if I’ve got anything coming up that I should do a little extra prep for.

I find this useful - I thought I’d share it in case anyone else also finds it useful.