Lately my computer has become a black hole, and all too often exercise falls into it. I love my work as a photographer, writer & graphic designer. I also love corresponding with friends and family. I brought boxes of interesting family history documents home from my parents’ house that need to be scanned and preserved. All of this activity involves a great deal of computer time.

I start the day with a plan: take care of morning correspondence, spend a couple of hours on my business, exercise before lunch. After lunch spend another couple of hours on professional business, then spend an hour or two taking care of the house or working on family business. Then it would be time to fix dinner.

It’s a great plan…but. Sometimes I get bogged down in correspondence. Sometimes I get so involved restoring pictures that I lose track of time. It is as if I fall through a black hole when I am in front of the computer. I look at the clock, and it’s time for lunch. No exercise.

I adjust the afternoon plan. If I work really hard, I can exercise before dinner. That black hole opens up again, and suddenly it is dinner time. All too often I end up squeezing in an exercise video before bed time.

Of course this doesn’t happen every day, and I have some excellent exercise videos. Some are aerobic. Others build muscle. But the exercise I like best is to get outside and run or bicycle or haul rocks around the yard. I also feel intuitively that exercise does me more good when it comes earlier in the day.

I feel like I am sitting too much. I need to make some adjustments in my schedule, and I need to side step that black hole.