It was hard today to figure out what direction I was going in. My expectations for the day kept changing, until they’d turned themselves inside out and ended up the opposite of how they started out. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. In fact, a lot of the time it would be a good thing if I didn’t plan out my own life and let the wind blow me whichever way it wanted. Because I don’t seem to be doing a great job being in charge of myself so far.

Despite plans to the contrary, I got sucked into working most of the day away. Well, the plans weren’t exactly to the contrary when I went to bed last night, but when I crawled out this morning, all I could think of was not doing anything all day that I couldn’t do while sunk into the depths of the recliner. I was conflicted, because I still have DE-7s and state sales tax returns to do before Thursday, but that’s four days away, and today is Sunday.

Then the time cards started coming over the fax. At first I was just going to let them go until tomorrow, because that’s still a day earlier than I usually do the payroll. Then I noticed that one time card was missing (Tim’s own, oddly enough), so I thought I wouldn’t be able to do the payroll today anyway. But I put a call in to Tim for the missing time card, so I’d be able to start right off tomorrow morning.

As the day went on, I pondered how much work I have to get through this week, and I decided to get a head start on the payroll. I would just do the time card extensions and figure the taxes and workers’ comp that would be due, but I wouldn’t actually write the checks.

As I got near the end of that process, the missing time card showed up on the fax. I wavered again, but not for long. I went ahead and wrote the paychecks and got everything ready to mail tomorrow. Won’t they all be surprised to get their checks a couple of days early, I thought. More importantly, won’t it feel good to me to have the most onerous task of the week done before the week even starts. Yes, it will. That’s how I answered myself.

And that’s how I spent my whole Sunday, the day of rest that I was going to use for its intended purpose, working on a task that gives me no satisfaction except (a) completing it, and (2) cashing my own check when I go to the store tomorrow to pick up a few groceries. It wasn’t the perfect way to spend the day, as it was happening, but it’s a huge relief to have spent it that way, after the fact. I even spent some time in the recliner, reading, in between periods of deciding not to do anything and actually doing it. That’s the way it works sometimes, when no one is in charge.