where does the time go?

"Life is just a bowl of cherries"

Can I just vent for a moment?  I promise I'll try to make this short.

I had some great ideas for posts this week.  And I was almost all set to publish, until I went into perfectionist mode and said to myself, "Nope.  Can't publish this.  It's not good enough yet".  And that's frustrating.  Especially when you've dedicated so much time to thinking and writing about it.

But in the end, something about it was off.  The photos.  They weren't to the standard that I know I can reach.  I'm not a professional photographer by any means, but I just knew I could do better than this.  So I made the decision to hold off until I had a chance to re-shoot. 

I blame this on time.  There is just not enough hours in a day to do all I want to do.  Between working, commuting, blogging, friends, errands, me time and whatever else, I'm having trouble distributing my time evenly.  Parts of my life are overlapping--I'm worrying about work at home and I'm thinking about blog ideas at work!  Everything is rushed and has tight time constraints (that I never seem to make).  In fact, I'm breaking one of my rules about not blogging past 9pm on a weekday, which is exactly what I'm doing right now.

So I ask you, how do you do it?  For those of you who have a lot on your plate, whether it be school, work, kids, pets...how do you fit everything into your schedule without losing your mind?  Or are you just like me in that you haven't figured out your groove yet? 

-jillian m.

backing it up

Let's discuss bloggy stuff, shall we?

After last week's Blogger Blackout, I lost Thursday's post (along with its comments) and it had me thinking about saving copies of posts.  In a way, I'm glad that Blogger timed out because I learned a valuable lesson.  If I  ever lost most or all of my posts, I'd be devastated!  Months and months down the drain.  Imagine?!

So now, I'm going to start "backing up".  I'm going to start pdf'ing my entries and saving them as files in my computer.

And this leads me to the subject of backing up computer files.  A few years ago, I got a computer virus and it pretty much wiped out every piece of information stored.  My boyfriend's computer genius of a friend was able to retrieve some of my school papers and a few songs from my iTunes library, but that's it.  My resumes, writing samples and program files were gone--in a matter of minutes.

I have virus protection now, but that doesn't mean that I'm immune from getting another and I still don't back up.  Now that I'm actively looking to do so, I'm having trouble figuring out what would be the quickest, most efficient way of doing this.

There's online storage websites like Mozy and Carbonite that automatically back up on a given time every day.  This may be the easiest (albeit priciest) option, since little to no work goes in this.

There are also external drives.  A cheaper choice, but it requires regular manual back-ups, which can be tedious and time-consuming, especially if you blog regularly (or type papers, download music, update your resumes and cover letters, etc.).

So my question is: do you have a safety net for your files?  What do you do?  Do you find your way to be efficient, easy, convenient?

Please share your thoughts below.  I'm dying to know how you guys go about this (if you do at all)!

-jillian m.