I assume I’ll get better with my titles as the month goes on, but in the spirit of ‘Done beats perfect every time’ I’m going to run with this one.
My word for 2010
REACTIVE
I’m reaching the end of 2010 kind of baffled and frazzled, I’m not sure how a whole year has passed and I can’t really point to any major new accomplishments** or say THERE, that’s what I’ve improved. The reason for all of this befuddlement and lack of progress is that I’ve been reactive all year. I’ve been on edge, waiting to be interrupted***, and just responding to everyone’s demands without a clear set of plans for myself. It has really left me at a loss and somewhat irritated with how I operate in my own life.
I know I need to learn to make myself a bigger factor in how I decide things, I need to learn to say no, to have clearer boundaries, but I haven’t figured out the mechanisms for that yet. I’ve just spent 9 years as a stay-at-home writer and freelance mombie so responding to requests from children,clients, family has become my stock in trade and I’m not sure where I want the lines to be yet.
Obviously, I want to have good boundaries around my work time, working at home tends to mean that work melts out into everything else.
I want my children to become more independent but I don’t want to cut them adrift either, the transition from responder-mom to independence-fostering mom might be a littler rough for them.
I want a little more planning, a little more scheduling, a little more…
My word for 2011
STRUCTURE
Now, I don’t mean intense, strict, no flexibility structure. I mean, something-to-hang-my-tasks-on structure.
I don’t want a bunch of hardsided containers in specially sized slots structure, I want a wall of funky hooks and shelves structure.
I need to have a place to put all my activities so I can get at them when I want to, and when they make sense. I want to see where they connect so I can save myself time and energy and use that time and energy to pour into fun things for myself and for my family.
Structure will let me choose how to spend my time, and let me be clear about my progress. And it will let me put things where they belong instead of having them decide when to drop and me to picking them up over and over like I did ‘reactively’ in 2010 .
To be clear, I don’t expect an orderly life. I don’t expect control. I just want to move more with the flow instead of standing still while debris in the river of my life smacks into me. I want to feel peaceful, not frazzled.
I want to be more fun – for myself, for my kids, and for my husband.
* Reverb 10, for those of you playing along at home is a month of posts reflecting on the past year and thinking about the next. Each day the organizers provide the participants with a prompt for a post and we think and write about that topic – and comment on other people’s posts on the same topic. You can do it too!
**Aside from my novel but that was a very concentrated effort in November – not at all what I could have accomplished with steady consistent effort over the year.
***My six year is home recovering from a fever and ironically he has interrupted me 5 times already by this point. Glerg.