I am feeling so scatter-shot lately. My planning is half-assed, my execution is a quarter-assed, and what-exactly-am-I-doing-with-my-life-anyway?

Constantly trying to assess my predicament – am I saying “yes” too much? (Probably) Not listening to my body and my Inner Jessica (Probably). Submitting to procrastination and distraction and laziness and clutter and half-assed-ness? (Probably).

Last night, I had things to do – a social work event, a cool kid-lit event – but I was out late watching poll results the night before and away from my office all day and far from where I needed to be and even before it started snowing, I decided not to go. It felt like the right thing to do, to take a night off to recover.

It felt nice.

But sitting at home is the quickest route to feeling scatter-shot, for feeling like I’m not doing the right activity, procrastinating too much, indulging, distracting myself; when my mental game is off, free time is sometimes what I need but feels like a spotlight is shining on everything that is wrong.

But smart, happy people know that moments are moments, nights are nights, weeks are weeks; your life is more than the sum of every self-disappointment.

If I were to chart out my nights for the past few months – the feeling good nights and the feeling bad ones alike – the boxes would be filled with…

– Reading books, lots and lots of them, re-reading, new reading, fiction, nonfiction, “required” and fun. Almost thirty books since August 1, while working full time, without a syllabus.

– Taking care of myself and my home and my relationships and spending time with friends

– Writing. Writing books, writing book reviews, writing posts, writing emails, writing good versions of all of these things, writing bad versions. Writing that feels good and writing that feels bad.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about looking at your work from different perspectives, in order to keep the day-to-day and the short-term and long-term in some semblance of harmony. My day-to-day – my “runway” in GTD-speak – feels hectic, scattershot, and this is not ideal.

But that imaginary chart of my nights, the one where it looks like Jessica spends her time not worrying, procrastinating, being lazy, being messy, but writing and reading and socializing and just being a human (not a super-human)? That is what I want my life to look like.

The view from 50,000 feet is pretty okay.