The Virtue (of Vice) of Keeping Busy

When retirement was first thrust upon me, I felt as if my greatest enemy was idleness. I felt that, if I did not keep my mind totally engaged for all of my waking hours, that it would suffer for lack of exercise. However, I have built up steam in my writing for Examiner.com, I find that I have now built myself a task queue, partly as a result of the impact that my writing has had. From this I have discovered that not only can that queue not be taken care of on any given day but also that I need to give myself breaks if particular tasks of that queue are to be given the attention they deserve. Those breaks often involve afternoon naps, facilitated by my habit of getting up around 4 AM to swim laps for about half an hour. Somehow I have come to recognizing that keeping busy all of the time can be counterproductive and that the breaks I take (and how I take them) have become a fundamental part of my game plan to work through my task queue in productive manner. I suspect that there are work cultures out there that appreciate this approach. However, it took my getting out of the Silicon Valley rat race to find that appreciation for myself.