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After the sunshine of Barcelona yesterday, today I return to The Barrow Bunker for the first of many days of working “on” the business, before business travel begins again a week today.

Over the months leading up to Christmas, I began to compile a list of tasks that I could never get around to, due to almost constant travel.

From the mundane: “tidy up The Bunker and take a few trips to the municipal dump”…

To the more serious: “create the 2014 personal cash flow spreadsheet and make sure all vacation weeks are booked in the calendar.”

As in all things – the first steps are to make and prioritise the list.

An important second step for me personally is to make sure that I complete my least popular tasks first – so that the week becomes more pleasurable as I get the nasty prickly stuff out of the way – gliding into the warm fuzzy stuff as the weekend approaches.

Today, therefore, began with that darned cash flow forecast – not because there is anything wrong with it – its just that “doing” money doesn’t feed my soul.

It was done before 11:00 this morning and I’ve been ticking a few more dastardly tasks off as the day has progressed and winter storms have lashed against the Bunker skylight.

I do my best work before lunch – its a time when I’m “in the zone” and then find that the afternoons become patchy as my attention and energies diminish.

We have New Years Eve in the way, of course, (which is also Annie B’s birthday) but the two of us have agreed that we had all the fun last week and this will be a working week for both of us.

Its 15:00 here in The Bunker – time for a brew and in a half-hour we will don waterproofs, muck boots and hats – off down The Bollin river valley with the two dogs to blow some cobwebs off.

Then I’m going to pile into 90 minutes of therapeutic ironing over Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome (downloaded from iTunes) before Annie cooks and we settle down to a TV night in (with, thank God, the central heating fixed).

A far cry from beer, calamari and spinach salad yesterday afternoon and the sun warming my back as Rachel and I eat, drank and people watched.

But its the focused work times that pay for the good fun times.

I have a mind to keep you posted this next week as to my progress (it will make me accountable) and also report on the start of my dryathlon and de-tox on 1st January.