Vampires and Task Manager Applications

When I was in high school, I took a psych class that covered the different theories of why humans dream. One of the ideas was that we dream to solve problems from our waking hours. Our subconscious keeps hacking away at the problem while we sleep, so our brains don’t explode when we wake up and are faced with the same issues.

The theory seemed a little pat to me at the time, but it’s true that if I’m concentrating on something intensely during the day, sometimes I’ll dream about it. And sometimes after this type of dream, I’ll wake up feeling more able to cope with the situation.

Last night, during a completely routine dream about purging a church of hordes of bloodsucking undead (there was holy water in Poland Springs bottles stashed all around the church), my dream shifted and suddenly I was faced with a more pressing problem: how to organize my tasks and projects for work.

I guess I’ve been more stressed than I thought about getting my work in good shape before maternity leave. You’d think 5 weeks would leave plenty of time, but I keep getting wrapped up in day to day work, and postponing getting organized for leave. Lately, I’ve started working from home at night to have some uninterrupted time to get things together.

I’ve been working with Things and Evernote lately, and I recently tried out Daylite. I won’t go into detail here, because I plan on reviewing each application separately in later posts, but basically they are task and project manager applications with varying interfaces and features. A combination of these applications made an appearance in my dream, while I frantically tried to categorize tasks in time for other people to use the information.

It’s bad when your dream of fighting vampires is interrupted with work responsibilities. It’s even worse when you don’t technically consider it to be a nightmare until that point.