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
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