There are three things that I'm trying to accomplish now, and today, I was able to spend a few hours on one of them. In fairness, I did spend several hours on CV distribution, &c., which I try to do every several days or so, in addition to the real-time alerts. And yet, I was always doing things.
At the state university, I learned how to plod, which can be a skill when you cover ground in the long run, but that also means that the course of the day fills up with the exercises, meditations, etc. that keep the candle going from day to day. The trick is to know when to draw from those energies to feed the projects, when there are projects that it would be good to spend as much time on as possble. I certainly wouldn't give up the daily routines, the running, the eavesdropped Mass (liturgy of the word only if on tape), the focused morning reading, etc. And yet, the thing carrying the mechanism through the day can fill up the day, and there's usually not much to show for it, though sometimes there's some useful things in the writing.
As Heid observed, the plodding is a form of existence that already knows its end and is working towards it. And that can have an effect on a life.
More mercurial, perhaps. To the extent that it's possible without destabilizing the covered wagon heading down the trail.