Anything worth doing isn’t supposed to be easy, but I’m not sure if my making it difficult actually makes something worth doing.

Even though today is a national holiday here in Japan, I spent the bulk of the day working. If I do the work today, then I don’t have to do much work tomorrow. (Although, officially, I’ll totally be working hard.) Because the company I work for has decided to trap me at home during the days when I’m not assigned to the school where I work, I have to show some evidence of work tomorrow.

However, because I have other plans, I went ahead and did this week’s work in advance, sort of like someone preparing their meals for the week on Sunday so that all they have to do is unwrap and reheat for the next seven days.

The first part was easy: make a couple worksheets, make a badge graphic for a worksheet I won’t even need until almost a year from now and find a way to update the spreadsheets I’ve been using for over a decade and make the data they produce more robust and more easily accessible whilst making sure it’s usable on my tablet.

That’s where the difficulties began. My master plan was to create a system where I could simultaneously record speech scores and have the data linked to individual forms I could print and give the students. I also wanted to be able to change the formatting and fonts on a whim without having to change each individually.

A few hours later, I finally figured out the best way (thus far) to produce the forms for the students. There were a lot of web searches, a lot of experimentation and no small amount of swearing. In general, with things like this, I tend to learn as I go. I’ll struggle with one way of doing something and then finally figure out what I should have been doing.

Tomorrow, or the day after, I’ll sit down and probably figure out what I’ve been doing wrong. By then, though, I’ll have probably abandoned the project in favor of a different idea.