Just in case anyone else is trying to remember what routine medical care looks like, here's the list I made for me, X, J, and Kit of checkups one or more of us might want to schedule now that the adults are vaccinated and dropping covid numbers are making it safer for Kit to go out as well:

General physical + bloodwork (including annual review of meds for interactions and needed changes)
Eyes
Ears/nose/throat
Teeth
Shoulders
Arms/hands
Back
Knees
Feet
Skin
Cardio
Pulmonary
Neuro
Psych
Sleep
Allergy
Endocrine
Gastro
Colorectal
Gyno/urogenital
Chest-o-gram
Medical/assistive device maintenance/replacement

Also regular personal care:

Therapy
PT/personal training/gym
Massage
Mani/pedi
Depilation
Haircut
Dietitian/nutritionist

You might want to schedule one or more of those too! And let me know if I missed anything...

I'm looking for a meal planning app/site that:

* Works on a Mac (browser-based is fine)
* Lets me put in my own recipes
* Doesn't count calories/calculate nutrition, or lets me turn off that "feature"
* Calculates portions consumed and remaining
* Ideally doesn't suggest other recipes (I don't know why I'm shocked that most meal planning apps are in fact meal plan apps that tell you what to make, but that is not what I want)
* Ideally makes shopping lists
* Realizes that at a single mealtime, different people may be eating different things

That last one seems to be the sticking point, and I don't understand why! Surely the need to pack children's school lunches or accommodate a picky eater is not unusual. But all the screenshots I see have a single recipe for every meal of the day, as though everyone in the house is going to eat Easy Strawberry Parfait with Granola for breakfast like it's a sitcom. This isn't the same functionality as being able to add side dishes to the menu; dishes need to be specifically assigned per person per meal. Otherwise Monday breakfast will say "Omelette, smoothie" and I won't have any idea how many omelettes and how many smoothies we'll be making.

Regarding portions consumed and remaining, I want to be able to start the week with, say, 16 servings of chili, and allocate them throughout the week—but only to me and J, because X doesn't eat chili, and on some days I might have chili for lunch while he has chili for dinner—and know how much will be left to freeze at the end of the week. If we plan to make six servings of pasta on Tuesday, I want to be able to allocate four of them for dinner Tuesday night and two more for lunch the next day. I can use Airtable for most aspects of meal planning, but not for this one.

Am I going to end up writing my own app or doing this in Excel or something? Why is this so hard?!

EDIT: I figured out how to do it in Airtable. Grarh.

I was stressed out over the weekend because I've had a cold (just a cold!) for a week (everyone else in the household sneezed for a day and was fine, so I guess I'm special) and that meant a lot more time off over the holidays than I was expecting, and I wanted to hit the ground running today. So last night, I cleared out my work inbox and rejiggered my open task list to have clearly designated tasks for each day this week, making sure to leave room for any additional tasks that come in as the week goes on.

Today I was able to start work right away after the morning round of meetings, did all my designated tasks, and completed the last one 15 minutes before the end of my work day. I even had time for breakfast, lunch, and "tea" (usually actual socializing over hot beverages, but there's construction happening in our main room at the moment, so I went into J's room and ate a bit of chocolate and called it good enough). And I did good work without rushing, because I knew what I had to do and knew everything else could wait.

I feel sort of irritated that this worked, because it's exactly the sort of thing that well-meaning people advise one to do if one is struggling with one's workload—divide big tasks into small pieces, do one thing at a time, work smarter not harder, etc.—and I hate well-meaning advice from well-meaning people because it's so often totally wrong for my actual brain and situation. But uh. This time it wasn't. Huh.

(And then I also feel irritated with myself for not trying this sooner.)

As soon as I started planning the next day's tasks so I could hit the ground running, I realized I was doing "spend five minutes outlining the next scene" from Rachel Aaron's 2k to 10k method, so I decided to see how I could apply her other two pieces of advice by evaluating when and how I work and looking for ways to boost my enthusiasm. I actually did the evaluation last month and realized that I do my best work in the afternoons, using my laptop in bed, with minimal interruption, so I blocked out two hours every afternoon for head-down intensive work time and immediately started doing more and better editing—my boss actually PM'd me to ask "What clicked? This is a huge improvement". I also do more and better work when I get enough sleep, so I continue to refine my bedtime protocols. As for enthusiasm, I'm driven by relationships and encouraged by success, so I remind myself of nice things other people have said about me and my work, sign into meetings a little early to chat with coworkers, and save small quick tasks to do when I need the boost of checking something off. I hit a slowdown after lunch today, and doing a bit of data entry got me back in the groove.

Work isn't writing. But I'm the same person when I'm working that I am when I'm writing, and I know a lot about my writing process, so it's interesting to see how transferable that process is. If I get backed up on tasks, I remind myself that I get to edit my outline. If I need a jumpstart, I set a 25-minute timer and ask coworkers to do work sprints with me. It's working better than I expected.