Timeboxes, Peer-pressure, People pleasing, Snap!

 OK, I've got 3 minutes for this post.

Why? Timeboxing. What's timeboxing? You know how, if you have a week, your essay will take a week, but if you only have two hours, your essay only takes 2 hours? That's timeboxing. Set an artificial deadline for things, so that you work more efficiently. In actuality, if you only have 2 hours for your essay, it will probably still take 4 hours, and you'll have to pull a late night, but it's still significantly less than the week of work you'd put in if you gave yourself that much time.

There is my 3 minutes. 

Giving myself 5 more.

Jumping around a bit: the weather is nice now. It's sunny and "warm" which means gets up to 40 during the day here. Apparently the deep freeze didn't kill the bugs because the ground was covered in snow which insulated it, so now a bunch of bugs are hatching.

I mentioned a health emergency in the last post, but I don't want to go into great detail about that in a semi-public forum, since it's not my private info to give. The emergency was not huge, and was resolved. But there are some ongoing issues that are continuing to take time and energy. I think I have to leave it at that.

One more thing that takes time.

So back to that: I got kind of fed up with being constantly behind and felt like I 'snapped.' Not that I'm crazy now, just that I feel kind of done with always rushing and being behind, and am ready to take more drastic measures.

I think this is a little tied into my addictions class homework. The assignment is to give up a substance (I chose sugar) for 6 weeks. What I noticed was that, as long as it was out of sight, that wasn't a big deal for me. However, what made it really difficult, was the social pressure. This is not "hey man, wanna smoke?" kind of overt social pressure, my friends don't do that. It's more the very subtle, or situational pressure. you're over at a guests house, and they've made some beautiful homemade sweets. They're on the table, everyone else is eating and enjoying them. That's social pressure (plus visual cues.)

I guess I realized I needed to be ok, going against that social pressure. I think Suzannah would laugh if she read this, but I am in some ways, at some times, a people pleaser. I want people to be happy. I don't want to leave the party early to go to bed, because I think that will make other people leave, and I'll be the one to break up the party.

So, it's kind of me, being ok subtly disappointing people. I don't like it, but I don't see another way to my goal. To this end (having more time, getting more done more efficiently) I've been trying a number of things: tracking my time obsessively for a day, to see where there is wasted time I can cut out. trying to move faster (without moving so fast I hurt myself or break something) so I can get manual tasks done faster. Timeboxing my work. Prioritizing my tasks. Getting up earlier. Timeboxing. conceivably, I may try scheduling out my week in full, to see just how many actual work hours I have available, so I can stop overscheduling myself. This is important because what the time-tracking showed me was, when I was hustling, there was only about an hour of time I could reclaim easily. The rest of it was well allocated. That means, to get more done,... well, I couldn't, basically. Not without, I don't know, being constantly sleep deprived or something.

Therefore, I needed to prioritize what I did better. That would be the purpose of scheduling out my week: I'd have a realistic vision of how many hours I had to give, which I could then allot to things. There wouldn't be enough hours for everything. That would then force me to confront that fact, and make some hard decisions about what I chose to actually do.

I did this in a more simple way, with my papers. I've got some weeks coming up where I've got three or four big papers due on the same week. That's impossible, so instead I've got to do some of them now, when I've only got one paper per week due.

In addition to all of that, I've got numerous other approaches I'm using. Just one more I'll mention, is the balance for this hard work. I acknowledge that if I'm going to go hard, I need to rest deeply. That's important for my happiness, and for my sustainability, and for my efficiency. one mnemonic I'm using for this, physically, is the idea of a leopard. The way, like a house cat, they are so relaxed and loose, but can spring into action like coiled steel. That mixture of loose/relaxed and strong, is what I'm thinking about.

Alright, as I think I said, in the true tradition of timeboxing, though I set myself a half hour, it ended up taking 50 minutes, but it didn't take an 80 minutes. Perhaps I'll get better at timeboxing as well, and get closer to the actual time I set for myself. Or perhaps I'll just get better at estimating how long something will take me.

Love and light,

-I Out

Hole in the Shed. Time mania. Trip to Des Moines.

 Hello.

We are two weeks behind.

Why?

Well, to be honest, it's been kind of a blur, so I don't know exactly how or why I've been so busy. There was frozen pipes, a tree fell on our shed, I drove up to Des Moines and back to listen to a presentation for my social cultural diversity class that was actually pretty awesome (we'll see if I get time to describe it).

The snow melted and it got warm, I discovered the tree only mostly missed the shed, I cleaned up the dirt and water that got into the rather large hole that a rather large branch has punched through the roof, Suzannah and I spent most of a day trying to figure out how to keep a tarp on the roof during an intensely windy day. We had a health emergency with a relative. And amidst that all, I've been trying to keep up with classwork. And more recently I've gotten fed up with always being behind and have been going a bit crazy trying to figure out how to be more efficient and balanced with my time and responsibilities. Getting done everything that needs to be done, for school, for life admin, for the house, for the relationship.

So it's been pretty busy.

As is, I still have a lot to do, so I've set a 30 minute timer (one of the things I'm trying to do to give myself more time: timeboxing. Perhaps I'll talk about that a bit) for these two blog posts so I don't spend too much time on them.

Alright, that's why this is two and a half weeks late. Let's talk about some of the details I mentioned.

The tree hit the shed:

Yup, when I was finally able to get up to the shed, I saw a branch had punched clean through the roof. Looking more closely and further, there were several dents and a few smaller holes as well. Thankfully it hadn't rained, and not too much of the snowmelt. had gotten in, and where it had dripped wasn't anything important. Looks like it's going to be fine, and more recently Suzannah put in the insurance claim and so we're going to get reimbursed for it, we just have to get someone to actually come out and do the work. Which is hard in general in Fairfield (our gutters people took...5 months? to come out? And then did a poor job, because it was still leaking, and then said they were charging us more to fix the leak, and then never showed up (despite weekly calls) to fix it. I'm contemplating leaving a scathing review about them, but a) it's a small town and b) I seem to always decide it was a bad idea to leave scathing reviews, after I do it, as of late. On the other hand, people should be warned, if someone is unreliable. I wish we had known. Maybe a neutral but accurate review, which is damming enough. On the third hand, ain't nobody got time for that.

Let's see, what else did I mention. Ah, the Des Moines trip. For my social cultural diversity class, we each have to choose a marginalized group to learn more about and do some advocacy action related to. I chose Blacks in Iowa. I grew up and lived in a fairly monocultural background, and don't have a lot of experience with that culture. And I suspect they are underserved in Iowa, as there are very few on them. I could imagine feeling pretty isolated being from that culture, or even just having that skin color, in Iowa.

In any case, I was supposed to do some cultural immersion activities for part of the assignment, and found out the African American Museaum of Iowa was hosting a presentation on the Black Panther's of Des Moines, and doing it in Des Moines. I thought that was cool and would hopefully give me an opportunity to meet some people from that community. Well, the presenter was nice, but white, as were most of the people there. The info was interesting and useful, but then what was really cool was that one of the actual original members of that group (the Black Panthers of Des Moines) was in the audience, and filled in some of the missing or incorrect information from the presentation, as well as told some pretty great first hand stories. They seemed really nice and grounded, and it was pretty awesome to get some history from someone who was a part of that history. 

By the way, I know one of the few things I thought I knew about the Black Panthers was they they were more agressive than MLK's approach. I think that is kind of inaccurate and reductionist, from what I now know. They were advocating for using violence only in self-defense, when they were being subjected to police brutality. And it does seem like there was some gnarly, unfair violence going on against them.

I'm not saying I agree with their specific approach, I definitely fall more on the Gandhi non-violence side of things, but I do think people have a right to defend themselves when being attacked. And I think most people's perceptions about them come from very limited information filtered through a negative media spin. I'm always a fan of truth, even when it's more nuanced and harder to fit into a media sound bite, so just FYI.

Anyhoo, I'm just about at the end of my 30 minutes, which was supposed to be for both posts, so I'm going to end this one now and post the next.