In my efforts to take things easy in December, I’m making a slight miscalculation.

In trying not to committed too much I have kind of missed out on setting a few fixed points for things, and that has left me with a lack of structure in my days, and I kind of feeling of things being unfinished.

Tomorrow, I’m going to sit down and decide what done looks like for any of the things I’ve been considering doing.

I think that will help a lot.

I have two work days left until I am taking the rest of the year off.

It’s really weird to think about taking that big long stretch of time but I’m really looking forward to it.

Most years I end up taking a big chunk of time off, but I take the time off with the idea that I should fit some work in there somewhere.

Not this year. This year I’m actually taking that time as full downtime and I am relaxing.

And frankly, I’m expecting the universe to throw some sort of complication into that, but if it does, I’ll deal with it.

One of the challenges with the way, I have approached, getting ready for the end of the year, not even getting ready for Christmas, just getting ready, is that there’s not as clear and endpoint.

If you’re working towards having something organized, having something tidied, or having something finished, the endpoint is clear.

If you are just trying to make things a little bit better and not take on too much it’s very hard to tell when you’re done.

I’ve been working bit by bit in our storage room trying to get things just a little bit better and I think I’m now on my fourth time just essentially moving stuff around. I’ve gotten rid of some things and I have compacted things and I’ve donated things but mostly I’ve just been shifting things around to make them make more sense in the space they’re in.

This process will make it easier in the new year when I get to a more fine-grained tidying but I didn’t want to have a sense of not being finished for now.

But since I didn’t have a clear endpoint, since I’m not going to be actually finished, I had to make a decision about what finished looked like.

And I decided that it looked like having things be on shelves in a relatively orderly fashion, having stacks of boxes or containers in the corner, and not having any piles of stuff on top of anything.

And with that in mind, I could do this end stage of the tidying process in the storage room today and have a feeling of accomplishment when I was done.

Since I often try to get way more done in a short period of time that is even possible, I am really working on scaling my tasks to the time I have available.

This morning I had a big plan for my day of all kinds of things I was going to get done, and when I looked at it, I realized I had a lot of errands on there. They were all over the place. And I was planning to do some in the morning and some after lunch.

That would mean my whole day would feel frazzled and hectic, and I don’t want to feel that way.

So instead, I crossed a few things off my list and then I looked at how much time I had in the afternoon and planned errands for that amount of time.

For some people, this might not be a big deal, it might be ordinary planning, but for me, this is huge.

My brain hasn’t often let me do this, it won’t do this kind of work in advance because it feels like a waste of time.

Today, though my brain felt cooperative, and I think it will be rewarded for its efforts.

I haven’t done a lot of thinking about the year ahead but one thing I know for sure is that I want prioritize creativity.

Now, in some ways, I always prioritize creativity – I add a few creative activities into each day and I try to make ordinary activities more fun whenever possible but my idea for 2024 is different.

I want to focus on creative projects.

Not for productivity, not for ‘having something to show at the end’ but I want to feel like I have fully explored some ideas

I want to see what I can do with some focused time on my various projects.

I want to see what it looks like to spend a lot of time on a few things instead of a little time on a lot of things.

I’ll have to give this some more thought and to consider what that will look like, what that means, but I am intrigued by the idea.