I’ve been amazed by all the posts and stories from people having time to do all the things they have been putting off. They are taking the “extra” time made available during our current lockdowns, and learning new skills, playing old games, and basically just relaxing. Unfortunately, I’ve not had that ability.

On March 12th, I presided over an emergency meeting of the board and production team of the non-profit theatre group were I am currently President of the board. We were two weeks from opening night of this year’s performance, and the governor of our state had just announced that groups of 250 people or more could not meet. The group decided that we could not, keep rehearsing, and had to quickly develop a plan for how we could restart rehearsals and the production, when restrictions were removed. We’ve currently moved the show date to early August, and I am hoping that the dates hold.

I had hoped that this break would free up my evenings to relax a bit, but instead I still had to submit the group’s main yearly grant proposal. Given that this is my last year as President of the group, I’ve been working hard to document and automate many of the processes, something I had wished had been done before. Due to COVID-19, the deadline for the grant was moved to our a few weeks, which was a good thing for my automation, but meant that I filled the time with more work on the grant.

The other automation I’ve been working on is to complete the transition from Quicken to Quickbooks for the non-profit’s financial management. The amount of manual work that the group does to generate reports and budgets for each production, has been amazingly high. So transitioning to quickbooks would greatly improve the reporting, and also benefit in the generation of grant proposals.

These two activities easily filled the vacuum of time that opened due to the show shifting. (In my best Ronco – Ron Popeil voice) but wait, there’s more. I’ve been working to nominate new board members for the non-profit, cancelling all our March ad buys for the show, and rescheduling them for the August date. So that takes a bit more time.

I had planned on working on re-adding Twitter support into my app – Wasted Time. If you follow my blog, you know that last year, I completely rewrote the app in Swift UI and Combine making it available for the Mac and Apple Watch, on top of the original iPhone version. The twitter API I was using is no longer supported, and I would need to completely rewrite that part of the app, which I didn’t want to cause to delay the app. Of course, I’ve not had time to circle back and work on this, but I have plans. 😉

It seems that the extra time has been filled with extra work.