I used to believe
that what would make me happy was something splashy like falling in love or
traveling to someplace exotic. I must
still believe that on some level, because otherwise why would I be so shocked
to learn that one of the things that has made me the happiest in my life has
been managing my time more efficiently, performing simple, constructive acts
and noticing them – getting credit for them and giving myself credit -- in a
daily reliable consistent way.
On the other hand,
as a writer, I’ve always known that how I use my time is strongly linked to
what kind of mood I’m in on any given day.
On days when I write I feel good about myself and on days when I don’t,
no matter how over-joyed I was when I made the decision not to, I end up
feeling significantly worse about
myself at the end of the day.
I’ve also learned
that the key to getting anything done is planning when I’m going to do it during the day, making little boundaries
around chunks of time. Almost every
Monday through Friday for over twenty-five years, I’ve looked at my day,
thought about what I had to do, and then figured out roughly when, in the midst
of all that, I could do my writing. On days when I didn’t look at my schedule and
figure out where I was going to fit my writing in, I often didn’t get any
writing done at all. And on those days I had an uneasy, out-of-control
feeling. I felt like a person adrift on
the ocean instead of a person in a little boat with her hand on the tiller –
when you’ve got your hand on the tiller there are no guarantees the boat won’t
get swamped by some small or big wave, but at least there’s a chance that you
can make it go where you want. The
feeling of uneasiness, of aimlessness and adrift-ness, is subtle but
unpleasant, and for me it leads to depression.
For years I managed to ward it off, for the most part, by planning when
I’d write on any given day and writing then.
But over the last
seven years I’ve taken on many new time commitments, and it took me a while to
figure out how to get in all those new things as well as get in my
writing. For a while, until I figured
out how to juggle it all, I found myself not writing on more days than I liked
or that I’d care to mention. And I also
noticed my stress level rising. There
was no end to the fretting and general sense of uneasiness because there was no
end to the stream of little things I needed to get done along with my own
writing and meeting and working with other writers in my new job as a writing
coach. On many days I made lists of things I needed to accomplish and as I did
each thing I crossed it off the list and that helped with the sense that there
was something I was forgetting to do.
But I still had a basic underlying feeling of anxiety that there was too
much to do and that I was failing
because I wasn’t getting everything done.
I couldn’t get everything done
-- there simply wasn’t enough time for it all.
The very thought
that there wasn’t enough time made me anxious.
It was a kind of low-level scarcity consciousness that affected me all
the time although I barely noticed it, the way you don’t hear the muzak in a
grocery store after you’ve been there for a long time. It made me physically tense and used up lots
of mental energy. It affected how
efficient I was too. When I was doing
one thing I fretted about not doing another, or I flitted from one thing to
another and then back to the first as if I had to do everything at once. I
rushed through all of my tasks without really noticing what I was doing -- the
way you might gulp down food without noticing what you’re eating, let alone
tasting or enjoying it -- and I didn’t take much pleasure in my day.
It wasn’t until I
started putting boundaries around little chunks of time – planning what I was
going to do over the course of any given day and when I was going to do it
(more about my planning system in future blogs) -- that I started to feel
better. It was the knowing what I was
going to do when – and the knowing what I was not going to do then -- that was
and still is bringing me relief and relaxation.
If I don’t plan and everything is just vague and open-ended, I may get
things done, I may even get everything I need to do done, but somehow I’m not
totally, consciously aware of what I’m accomplishing. I feel anxious the whole time about whether
I’m doing what I need to, whether there are things that I’m forgetting, and
about all the things I should be doing that I’m not. And often I don’t accomplish very much. I try to do everything at once and end up
doing nothing, or I can’t decide what to do and end up doing nothing. Or I may go from one task to another,
touching on each one but not completing it, like a butterfly lighting on one
flower and then flitting to the next flower it notices.
When I do that I
feel scattered and discombobulated; I keep rehearsing all the tasks “on my
plate” (I hate that expression, as if work was food that you have to eat
whether you want to or not) and worrying about whether I can get them all
finished when I have to. Whereas, when I
know what I’m going to do and when, when there are boundaries around the tasks
in my day and the time they’re going to take, I feel in control of my day, I
feel like I’m making choices about what I do instead of having those choices
made for me by default or not made at all.
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