Between being under the weather, the stress of the job and not to mention the endless bills that arrive in the mail, the past few weeks have gone by in pretty much of a blur and I have little to no site progress to show for it. I know that I need to keep marching forward, but the events of life in general seem to have a strangle hold on me.

If you don't already know, the job of an IT professional can be stressful, and that constant level of stress takes its tole on both my physical and mental health. More times than not these stress induced illnesses manifest themselves in the form of sinus congestion or the occasional ear ache that I just can't seem to shake. I can wake up one day feeling miserable, my head in a fog, and the next day the symptoms will be gone, giving me hope that I may actually get something done, until the stress of the JOB rears its ugly head again starting the vicious cycle all over again.

 I have grown tired of dealing with people who blindly follow procedure and don't think to ask questions, or dare I say even try to troubleshoot when they come across an issue whose solution has not been documented in said process. This is the main reason why I am so dead set against outsourcing because I have lived through this way too many time and had to pick up the pieces of an irate customer whose issue was either not solved or assigned incorrectly by the technician who blindly followed a process that didn't relate to the problem at hand. This is my daily stress, and it is the stress that I must make go away, followed not far behind by the stress of bills. But of course one stress requires the other to survive. 

So here I sit, trying to figure a way out of the situation I keep finding myself in. I know what needs to be done, but the stress induced fog in my head keeps me from moving forward. I have tried to use an online to do list, but without notification of the days tasks, it was like I hadn't created a to do list in the first place. I have tried writing stuff down manually, but with the mess on the table, the list almost always gets lost in the shuffle leaving me in the same situation that I started with.

With so many things bouncing around in my head my current SOP (standard operating procedure) is not helping me achieve my goals because I am unable to ignore the nagging thought in my head that keeps telling me I need to do X right now. If anyone has any suggestions on applications that will popup a notification of the days tasks when i start-up my computer please let me know because I now realize that if I am left to my own devices life will take over, preventing me from ever accomplishing the things that I really need to do.