A number of things have happened recently to remind me of the time passing. Obviously one of them was my birthday yesterday, an always curious reminder of my actual age and the progression of time. Others have been the passing of Steve Jobs, which I’ve written about at The Classy Geek and Dennis Ritchie in recent weeks. Still more was the half-asleep realization that a year ago I was wistfully wishing that someday I’d be able to make my passion a full-time job. More specifically, I thought to myself: “Man, I wish I could get paid to read my favorite blogs on the internet and then write about the cool stuff that I find.”

Yeah. How about that? Pretty incredible how that turned out.

That said, it’s not like it’s easy work – I have to keep reminding myself that sometimes doing the things that you love is often very difficult work to do: it’s hard, but if I had to trade it for getting up in the morning and putting on business casual clothes and heading off in my car for a long drive to an office I didn’t want to go to every day, I don’t think I could. I’m pretty happy doing what I do now, and frankly, I’d like to keep it up as long as possible.

That said, my birthday itself was lovely, as was the weekend prior, and hopefully as will be this week and the weekend coming up. At the same time, I do have a tendency to get a little melancholy on my birthday, and wonder whether or not I’m spending the time as well as I possibly can. Every year, my birthday winds up making me wonder whether I am where I want to be, whether I’m spending my time the way I want to be. In fact, as I was drifting off to sleep, I asked Raevyn whether or not she thought I was making the best use of my limited time: reaching for my dreams and living the life I want to live in my head.

After all, I’ve come a long way in a short period of time. I’m living in the city like I’ve always wanted to, I’m writing about technology and lifestyle like I’ve always wanted to, I’m pretty much exactly the person I’ve always wanted to be, with some caveats, of course.

And of course, as with any caveat, I summarily obsess over whether or not I’m making enough rapid progress towards addressing those caveats. Am I working out fast enough? Am I eating right? I need to make more time to exercise, and get out of the house and try new restaurants. I need to clean up my budget and tweak my finances. I need to unpack the apartment. It goes on and on and on. Part of me knows full well that list will never expire, I’ll never be able to exhaust it, but that knowledge doesn’t minimize my need to try. It’s a strength and a weakness, I suppose.

To that point though, I’m desperately on the lookout for a new and better productivity system. I love ReQall, but it’s often too difficult to get tasks in and out of the tool, and I get the distinct feeling that the service is on life support because the developers and support staff have been impressively quiet with regard to new features, updates and improvements, and even questions from users on their own support forums. It might be time to move on, and I’m definitely the kind of person who can benefit from a good task management system – I remember when I started using ReQall; I started being more productive just so I could use it. If you have suggestions, send them my way.

Heck, if you have any suggestions for getting out of a rut and getting in gear, send them my way. I’d hesitate to say I’m in a rut, specifically, but I definitely need to find a way to harness a little more energy and fire on a few more cylinders than I am. That may be saying a lot, since saying I’m busy is an understatement. Still: smarter, not harder – more rewarding, not just more – is my goal.