plans

Sticking with a plan?

I often have trouble sticking with plans I made for getting my work done.

Either I underestimate the work involved, I forget about travel time, or I make some similar error and get on my own nerves.

Oh, and sometimes I plan for a regular day just when I have a bunch of unusual days coming up in a row.

Yesterday, I made a place for an ordinary day today but I had to pick up my car, go to the supermarket, and head to an appointment by 9:30.

That’s not an ordinary day so I couldn’t use my plan for an ordinary start.

Luckily, I have gotten past the point where I think that means I have failed. And I have stopped abandoning the whole plan when one thing goes wrong.

I still have a little trouble deciding how to change the original plan to match my reality though.

I guess these things just take time. 😉

Monday Braining

Last week, I had added all kinds of details into my Todoist lists about when I was going to do stuff and it caused me a lot of stress.

Since I add everything from walking the dog to answering an email to my to do list, I have a lot of items on a given day.

Normally, that’s not stressful since I know that the number on my list does not mean I have umpteen urgent items to do.

However, once I put those items on my calendar with a fixed time, I felt very stressed.

I had that sense of ‘too much to do’ overwhelm – even though it was the same number of things.

It was saying that I had to do this specific thing at this specific time that was causing the stress.

That’s kind of weird considering that assigning a time to a task usually brings me some relief. (Once a time is assigned, then I don’t have to keep asking myself subconsciously when I am going to do the thing.)

I think it was having so many ‘appointments’ on one day that felt so overwhelming.

And by putting them on the calendar, I lost the sense of flexibility that makes Todoist work for me.

So now I am trying to think in terms of time blocking, scheduling certain types of tasks for specific times and then doing them in whichever order makes sense to me in that timeframe.

Hopefully that will be less stressful.

Trying to do one thing at a time

In my efforts to get things done ‘before I forget’ and/or not to hyper-fixate on one task and ignore everything else on my list, I often end up treating my day as a series of things to check off.

I end up feeling like the important thing is get things done rather than to enjoy the process of doing them.

I just set a timer so I could relax into reading my book and drinking my tea for 20 mins before getting started on my day’s work.

After a few sips of tea, I suddenly found my mind wandering to my to do list, because I had mentally checked off ‘drink tea.’

That’s not good for me and it’s a waste of a good cup of tea.

I have to find a middle ground between ‘drink tea and read all day’ and ‘take two sips and check it off.’

I end up feeling rushed far too often to do it to myself unnecessarily.

A photo of tea in an octopus cup.
This morning’s cup of tea in the cup that my dear friend Mary gave me – it features a cranky blue octopus holding an ice cream cone in one tentacle. My ebook is propped up in the background and my cup is on a multicoloured patterned mug rug.

A work time experiment

Tomorrow, I’m going to assign a time to each group of tasks and see if it helps my brain focus,

I really want my work days to feel more orderly and solid.

And I want it to be clear when I’m done for the day.

If it works, great!

If it doesn’t, I want to commit to tweaking the process instead of tossing it out and starting over.

Let’s see how it goes.