I am happy to announce that I made it through February without any major crashes, or even minor ones, as a result of working on projects! This means that I can increase my time on projects every day from 20 minutes to 25 for the month of March. I still can’t really handle more than 15 minutes at a time, so it will be split up into a 10 minute block and a 15 minute block, but I am super excited because the split has worked out pretty well. I am more often than not getting a chance to work on two things a day, which is pretty great for me. I don’t have to choose!

The Trilogy

This has been going slower than usual, but that makes sense. I’m still in the brand new part of the book where I am actually trying to do the world building. There’s been a lot of doubling back and rewriting things I just wrote, which is not something I usually do but feels right for this one.

Chronic Fatigue Activity Tracker

I finished this! To be fair, I did create this spreadsheet a couple years ago and have been refining it as I used it over the last couple years. I thought there was a lot more to do, but ultimately I realized I didn’t use a lot of it and stripped it down to just the bits I used. Most of my time was spent on writing a guide for it.

And despite the last post, I do still want to talk about it more. Specifically, I want to talk about how it works so people can better customize it. I don’t know if people even want to use it, but you know. Just in case.

Needless to say, there’s a reason I’ve spent the last several years either bed or housebound.

Knowing that I didn’t have a good way to feel when I was going overboard, ¹ I ended up figuring out a way to externalize things. Back when I first got into my first Long Covid Clinic, a nurse send me a handout of activities with point values assigned to them and told me to only spend 20 points a day. This handout formed the base of the spreadsheet that I have used to get myself to a place where I am now stable.

I’ve spent some time over the years refining the formulae and figuring out how to make it work best for me. And now I’ve cleaned it up a bit so that it can now also be used by anyone else who needs something to help them figure out how to manage their activity when dealing with chronic fatigue, myalgic encephalomyelitis, or long covid.

How long have you been using this?

Around 2 and a half years.

How did you use it?

At the start of the day I used it to determine how many points I had to spend for the day, then I planned my day based on how many points I had. This didn’t always work as things would come up ² but it definitely helped keep me in my energy envelope.

Did this activity tracker cure you?

No. I am now stable, which is a lot different from being cured. What it did was ensure that I did not push myself into a crash and, when I did, I kept my activity low enough during recovery so that I was not back in bed due to feeling better and increasing activity when I still needed rest.

Are you still using it?

Not at the moment. Thanks to using it, I’ve managed to rest myself into increasing the threshold to hit PEM enough that I am able to stay within my energy limits. Unfortunately, I’ve also developed a few other health complications that also ensure I don’t hit the threshold.

Are you charging for this?

Absolutely not. I’ve been in this community for long enough to see how many people are out of work as a result of this illness and I will not be adding to the financial stress by charging for a tool which may not work for everyone. If you want to give me money, I have a Kofi link and plenty of other things like books available that you can purchase from me.

Are you asking for anything in exchange for this?

Nope! Not even an email address. This is not the top of a sales funnel. I have no course or coaching services to offer you. I am just a person who still has long covid and would like to help out other people.

Can I offer this to others?

Provided you are not charging for it or putting it behind a paywall and give me credit, go for it! If you’re part of a clinic dealing with a patient population that could find this useful, please do send it out.

Because I made it through January without crashing ¹ I get an extra five minutes a day to work on things! Up from 15 minutes to 20! I am, unfortunately, not able to do that consecutively yet, so I’m doing two chunks of 10 minutes a day.

Also I guess we’re down to every two weeks? Whoops.

The trilogy

You know what I didn’t do the first pass on this? Explain literally anything about how this world worked or established anything other than what directly applied to what was happening in the story at the time. So now I’m adding four new chapters that are mostly being used to set up the world and give some more foundational characterizations for these people.

Which, well, lets hope that the pacing isn’t too much of an issue. I’m trying to make sure there’s still stuff happening, but also I’ve been reading more lately and I’m realizing how little I allow myself to go on tangents compared to some other authors. I really need to let myself have some fun tangents more often.

Fantasy RPG

I have made notes for a puzzle/level. I’m still not sure what engine I’m building this in or a lot of the details about the story or a lot of stuff really, but I do now have notes for a scenario where a party gets trapped in a school and has to escape. Technically I could use this in a couple places, but for right now it’s sitting in the Fantasy RPG idea.

The spreadsheet

In case you weren’t aware, I’ve had Long Covid for a while now. Since 2022, in fact! One of the things that comes with that for me was chronic fatigue, which has been very hard to manage. For the past couple years I’ve been living my life off of a spreadsheet and I’ve finally started working on a version of it that other people can use. It’s not done yet and it needs some adjustments ² but I’m hoping that it won’t take too long to get it ready.