Once upon a time, it was so easy to say that I had no time. It might have even been true.

I would wake up before dawn to get out on the road before the traffic picked up, only to find that thousands of others had done the same and I’d be stuck in traffic anyway. Work was a constant flow of meetings and conversation and collaborative activity, punctuated by precious moments of alone time in which I tried to chip away at the ever-growing to-do list.

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A friend of mine, who had been abroad when the coronavirus hit globally and was fortunate enough to make it safely home without contracting the virus, clarified his intentions toward the end of the summer.

“I asked myself, ‘When I look back on this time, what would I regret that I didn’t do?’”

Using this guiding question, my friend decided to play more tennis and read more.

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The Notes app on my phone is full of entry codes to buildings, shopping lists, information about how to find my car in this or that parking garage, quotes I found interesting, lists of songs to play, and the truly inscrutable (“Dreamed I was schoolmarm to a teenage Jagger and Richards”).

It’s also where ideas go to die.

I’ve had this blog for just over a year, but I’ve been coming up with blog post ideas for much longer — they are all over the place. Not only that, I have a note from May 4, 2015 that says simply, “Daily blog posts.” Why did it take me nearly four years to follow through?

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Many parents are faced with the impossible task of being parent, teacher, and employee, all at the same time. Mercifully, the “teacher” role is soon to end, but the overwhelm has taken its toll already.

Whenever there are two or more things to do at once, we might bounce, like a human pinball, back and forth from one to the other. Which one is the loudest? Which one is the most insistent? Which one is the whiniest? With so many pings and people vying for our attention at any given moment, we quickly become overloaded. How can we possibly function?

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Okay, technically it hasn’t been daily blogging. I do give myself (and you) the weekends off.

But on February 28, 2019, I wrote my first article and clicked “publish.” And I’ve done it every weekday since then. And I have learned a lot over the past year.

There are two things that stand out the most. Unsurprisingly, they mirror the themes I like to talk about in my articles.

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