Mindfulness Monday ~ Favorite Moments

I know this is the week when we (we Americans anyway) are meant to express our thankfulness for the various blessings and bounties we enjoy*. And I know that keeping a gratitude journal or other record of the things we're thankful for is supposed to be good for mental health. I also know that I've mentioned on this blog more than once my superstitions about not only saying but writing down the things I'm grateful for being an invitation for all the little demons to come and snatch those very things from my grasp. So I don't do it. I can't.

But I can write about the good things that happened on a particular day; because those events are in the past, no gremils can take them away. My sister-in-law gave me this little "favorite moment a day" journal for Christmas last year (or the year before??), and I'm sorry to say I've been very lax in using it. But I've just started to put it into practice and intend to keep it going, even (especially) once I return to work.

Right now my days are pretty good (mostly because I rarely have to deal with people, other than my husband and kids, and it strikes me that difficult people are the prime ingredients in bad days). So the journal is almost superfluous—every moment is a contender for favorite. I'm going to have to work a lot harder to have good days when I'm selling 10 hours of them to other people. Laura Vanderkam writes in Off the Clock that doing things that stand out in our memory is a good way to make time feel less fleeting. It stands to reason that a practice of writing down the good things that happen each day is a good way to manifest good things happening. I'll let you know how it works out.

Time Management Tuesday ~ Tending the Garden

One of the recommendations in Laura Vanderkam's book, Off the Clock, is to "tend your garden"—that is, once you've tracked your time, spend some time analyzing it. The questions she suggests asking are:

• What do I like about my schedule? I like that I have summer/fall off work and mostly control my time in that interim.
• What would I like to spend more time doing? Writing (I really can't manage to prioritize this enough); making art; nature study; reading. 
• What would I like to spend less time doing? Driving around, running errands, shopping; reading, deleting, responding to emails; nagging kids.
• How can I make that happen? Continue to prioritize writing; improve my focus when doing the work I want to do; set aside specific blocks of time for each thing I want to do; unsubscribe from email lists; set a time for email and ignore it the rest of the time.

She also recommends envisioning a "realistic ideal day." (Note the key word "realistic. No sitting in a lavender field in Provence reading E.M. Forster, exploring the ruins of Petra in Jordan, or snorkeling a coral reef allowed). Sometimes my ideal day entails a hike with a friend, shopping with my mother-in-law, or lunch with a writing buddy. Most the time it means staying home (alone—enough of this early release, three-day-weekend, snow-day nonsense!), and it involves getting outside in nature, writing, reading, making (this includes knitting, sewing, painting, drawing, or other project—but not cooking, because that is a chore and not fun). I don't get all of these in every day, but as long as my week includes a litte of everything sprinkled around, I'm content.

The real question is how will I fit in the things I want when I'm back to working full time next month?

• Spend the 1/3 hour between dropping kids off at bus and work plus two 15-minute breaks for walking outside (no matter how bad the weather is; dress warmly).
• Spend lunch hour walking or writing.
• Listen to audio books on commute (reading is hard b/c of work-caused eye strain).
• Run errands one lunch break and one after-work per week and no more.
• Knit during evening family TV time.
• Go to bed early.
• Make art and spend time in nature and write more on weekends.

Well, that doesn't sound much different from how last year went. And it sounds pretty depressing. I'm not sure I'm fully on board with Vanderkam's cheerful assessment that every week has 168 hours! Sure that's empirically true, but subtract 56 for sleeping, 40 for work, 5 for commuting, 14 for eating, 14 for getting ready to go to work and to go to bed, 14 for quality time with your family, 10 for housework, 7 for cooking, and 4 for exercise, that leaves a little over half an hour per day for things you want to do.

Time Management Tuesday ~ When I Have More Time

I recently came across a journal entry from August 2005, when the twins were 3 months old and M was 4 years old. It was a list of things I wanted to when I again had more time in the future ("approx. 18 years from now," I added in parentheses). Now that I actually do have more time, in slightly less than 18 years, I figured it would be a good exercise to see which of these activities I've actually taken on, and what I might choose to do now, if I had even more time. Here's the list, with each item followed by its current status:

• Take up meditation ~ Nope, haven't done it. I've tried here and there, but with not any real level of committment. I'm not against the idea of meditating; it just doesn't rise high on my priority list very often.
• Learn some foreign languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Russian should be a good start) ~ I'm afraid that ship has sailed; my brain has ossified to the extent that I'm lucky if I maintain my grasp on English.
• Make a sculpture ~ I'm trying to think whether I've done any sculpting in the last 14 years. Do needle-felted critters and a knitted gnome count?
• Learn to paint ~ This I've actually been working on in a semi-serious manner, working on learning to watercolor over the last couple of years and making some progress.
• Go to Egypt, Antarctica, Siberia & …. ~  Ha-ha nope. Unless Ireland falls under those elipses. Still would like to go to all those places and more!
• Plant a garden ~ Shhh, don't tell C I wrote this. Now that I theoretically have time to garden, I'd much rather go for a walk, looking at wild plants, or lie in the hammock, or do pretty much anything else. 
• Swim across the 10 or 20 biggest lakes in Maine ~ This definitely has not happend, and now it sounds kinda cold. Ask me again in July.
• Learn calligraphy ~ I've always wanted to learn calligraphy, and I make half-a**ed forays into the art every now and then, but like meditation, I lack the commitment and discipline. Maybe some day...
• Write amusing letters to all my friends ~ This is a quaint notion, now that no one writes letters anymore. I do send the occasional card, but I am truly the worst, most boring letter writer ever. Hopefully I never become a famous writer, or I pity whoever has to deal with my archives.
• Learn to read hieroglyphics ~ File that under brain ossification and lack of discipline.
• Go on moonlight hikes ~ Well, we did used to go on moon walks when the kids were little, so maybe that counts. Now I'm afraid my eyesight has gone to the extent that I'd hurt myself (maybe in the desert, where the moonlight would actually reach the ground…).
• Write 1000 words a day ~ I do this! I actually do this! Or at least I'm doing this right now (and more!) during NaSoWriMo, so hurrah for me!

Well, geez, I sure haven't taken advantage of my funemploment to the extent I once believed I was capable, and I seem to have gotten a lot more boring and less adventurous in my older age. What do I now envision myself doing in the future, when I have more time (and, of course, money)?

• Travel, still and always.
• Write, write, and keep on writing.
• Make more art—drawing and painting.
• Golly, I hate to write "read" here, but that's what I keep coming back to—so many books, so little time!
• Hike, kayak, and play outside more.
• Go whitewater rafting.
• Take another (solo?) long distance hike.
• Become a better naturalist.

Well, that's not much of a list, but I'll keep thinking on it and see what I can come up with for things to do with my time, that I can do right now and not wait 18 years.

Time Management Tuesday ~ Mindsets and Algorithms

I finished Laura Vanderkam's book, Off the Clock, over the weekend (just in time to return it to the library three days late; how's that for time management?), and I have to say I'm hovering somewhere between skeptical and intrigued. The book isn't so much about actually managing your time as it is about changing your perceptions about time. I'll write about some of the strategies she suggests (in addition to the time tracker, which I wrote about here and here) and my efforts to implement them over the coming weeks. It turns out that my strategy of prioritizing my own work that I wrote about last week is also one Vanderkam recommends, so that makes me feel like I'm both on the right track of figuring this out for myself and that some of her other recommendations might work for me.

I know that mindsets (even unconscious ones) affect how much time you experience because I get so much more done on weekends when I'm working full time than I do when I'm literally off the clock—because those two days are the only time I have all week to play outside, do housework, complete projects, and spend time with my family and friends, I make use of every second. When I have all week relatively free, I tend to goof around a lot more on the weekends. Which is totally fine. I love having lazy-ish weekends. But is it really possible to consciously shift the way you perceive time, and as a result feel like you have more of it? We'll find out.

As far as this week's mindset goes, it's only Tuesday and I already feel like my time's compressed into a smaller container than usual. I happen to have a lot of appointments this week—car repairs, a dentist appointment, a meeting about a class I'm teaching, as well as fun things like lunches with friends. None of these fit together neatly on the schedule, so there's a lot of driving involved and, because we live so far out of town, I'm compelled to take care of all my errands while I'm out and about. Z is also still running cross country, so picking him up in the afternoons adds another hour of driving. At the same time lot of tasks for both my nonprofit orgs are also coming to a head.

I'm cognizant that this is nothing compared to a 40+ hour job outside the home, and that all those errands would have to be squeezed into lunch hours if I were working right now, so I'm grateful that I do have the time I have. But I had to break my rule about putting my own work first today, because urgent tasks were screaming louder than the important but amorphous work of thinking about an essay. I'm back to thinking if I could just get everything else done, I'll have time for my own work, knowing full well there's no such thing as done.

I do, however, have recommendations for spending less time goofing around on the internet, for anyone out there who feels like they want to cut back in that area. I took the Facebook app off my phone last January, so now going on that site requires the laborious work of logging on or turning on my computer, and as a result I don't spend much time there. To minimize the time I spend scrolling when I do go on Facebook or Instagram, which I like much better, I've instituted an algorithm of my own—I shut it off after seeing two of pictures of any of the following: dogs, cats, foamed milk on a latte. It only takes about 30 seconds, max, and then I'm free to go do something else.

Mindfulness Monday ~ Self-Care

I made this dumb statement in my Time Management Tuesday post of two weeks ago: "I don't even know what else self-care would entail at this point." The me of 10 years ago, with a full-time job and three little kids, would wanted to have strangled the person who wrote that sentence. The me of 14 years ago, with two five-month-old infants and a four year, old would really have wanted to strangle her. Even the me of next January, working 10-hour days in the dark of winter, would want to strangle her.



I tend to think of "self-care" as things that would take place at a spa—massages, mud baths, face masks with cucumbers on the eye lids and soothing music—pampering the body, in other words, and, since I never even took the time to polish my toenails all summer, I don't allow myself much pampering.

But in addition to nurturing the body, self-care can encompass anything that feeds the spirit, as my long-time blog reader and cyber friend Rachel commented: "I'll just toss out what I consider as [self-care] (though I know you're not asking) ... tea, chocolate, walks in nature, conversation with friends, concerts and readings that fire me up creatively, foot rubs that I give myself, road trips."

I'd already gone for a walk that afternoon and figured out that walking outside on a beautiful fall afternoon is self-care, even if I made myself go out for exercise (walking outside on the ice in January, however, might be a different story). And though my cup of Sleepytime tea at bedtime is more than self-care, it's pampering, since C usually makes it for me, I'm hesitant to add chocolate to my list, because from there it would be an easy slide to a daily trip out for a cinnamon role in the service of treating myself. My ten-to-fifteen minutes of yoga every morning is self-care, even if I have to drag myself out of bed to do it. Going on a hike with a friend on a Monday is self-care. Watercolor painting and nature journaling is self-care. Reading in bed at night is self-care. Knitting is self-care (a friend recently posted on Instagram about all the health benefits, mental and physical, of knitting, and though I don't feel compelled to look it up myself to verify her facts, I'm convinced). Even watching television with one of my kids can be self-care, if we're relaxing and enjoying ourselves.

The fact is that for much of the year under my current work situation, most of my time is self-care. Writing is how I want to spend my time, even if it's a struggle sometimes. And though there are often niggling little tasks that I don't always feel like doing involved in the volunteer work I do for my nonprofits, I believe in their missions and derive a lot of personal satisfaction from giving them my time. I get to sleep in later than if I had to go into an office, I get to go outside when I want or take a long lunch with a friend. I've been known to blow off a whole day of writing and read an entire book.

So forget what I said about not knowing what self-care is. I'm living it, for now. And when I go back to work, I'll be sure to up the bubble bath frequency, and maybe paint my toenails one time before sock season fully sets in.

Time Management Tuesday ~ Prioritizing Myself

There was a question on last week's time management post about how I tracked my time. This is what I did: I made a spreadsheet with half-hour increments down one side, 12 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. and days of the week across the top. I kept the file open on my computer, and throughout the day, as I switched from one task to another, I filled in how I spent that time, trying to stick to broad categories. It got harder in the evenings and on weekends, when I don't usually use my computer. I'd try to hold in my head how I spent those hours and pop into the spreadsheet and fill it out as best I could at bedtime on weeknights and a few times throughout the day on weekends.

After one week, I really didn't think I'd want to carry on with the tracking. It felt way too neurotic, and I also felt like someone was looking over my shoulder, making sure I didn't waste any time. But I also saw the value of knowing how much time I spend writing, and how quickly I write. It was also helpful to know how much time I spend editing, so that I'd be better able to estimate how much to charge if anyone were ever to offer to pay for my services. It's also good to know how much time I put into my volunteer activities, so that in the future, I'll know where to draw the line. So for now I'm carrying on with the tracking, but only during "workday" hours and anytime I do work outside 8-5.



I don't always sit down and work on either writing, editing, or volunteering during working hours. Sometimes I go hiking. Sometimes I have appointments or errands to family things to deal with. But, when I do spend the day on my laptop, I try to follow a rule I put into place earlier this summer: do my own work first. For a long time, I'd clean out emails and approve essays and write things for other people and try to make sure everything I had to get done got done before I started working on my own, personal writing. The trouble with this technique is all that stuff is never, ever done. New emails pop into the inbox every second. There's always a backup of deferred tasks. I could very easily give all of myself to others, my family, my nonprofit organizations, my rare paying clients, and never get anything done that I want to get done.

I've read in several places about being clear about what's important versus what's urgent. There are always urgent things that want to command our attention—other people's needs and priorities—and it's very easy to continually triage so that the urgent tasks always slip ahead in line in front of the important things. The trouble is, there will always be more urgent things to take up your time and space and attention, and if you let them, they will completely crowd out the important work of writing that memoir or starting that novel.

So now I try to give myself an hour and half to two hours every morning to work on my own stuff, and even if it doesn't look much like work, as I page through old journals in search of material, and a full inbox is calling out for my attention, I stick to it. And do you know what? All those urgent matters are still there when I'm done, and they get taken care of in a reasonable amount of time.

Time Management Tuesday ~ Week 1 Time Tracker

After one week of tracking how I spend time each day, a picture is starting to emerge of my days and what I prioritize, or what takes up my time at any rate. Over the week of Monday October 7 through Sunday October 13, this is how I spent my time each day, on average:

Sleeping: 7.5 hours
Family time: 4.6 hours
Crafting: 2.7 hours
Cooking and eating: 2.25 hours
Driving (or riding in the car): 1.9 hours
Entertainment (television and movies): 1.8 hours
Reading: 1.7 hours
Exercising: 1.4 hours
Writing: 1.5 hours
Time with Friends: 1.4 hours
Volunteering: 1.1 hours
Cleaning and organizing: 0.8 hours
Client Work: 0.6 hours
Shopping/Errands: 0.6 hours
Self-care: 0.3 hours
Email: 0.3 hours
Art 0.2 hours

I know it adds up to more than 24 hours. That's because I can do two things at once: knit while watching TV, spend time with friends while eating, spend time with family while driving them home from cross-country practice. This week was a little unusual, in that we went on a long drive to take a long hike, which upped driving, exercise, and family time. I also had an exciting knitting project going, so crafting and TV time were both on the high side. Crafting was up, along with friend time, also due to a stitch night with a few friends and a soap-making class I took with a friend. Cooking/eating was also high because one day I made an elaborate meal, which I hardly ever do anymore. But I suppose every week is unusual in some way.

I'm happy with my sleep score. It's the number from my fitbit, so it doesn't include time spent in bed tossing and turning. I'm also pleasantly surprised by family time, though it's a little skewed by parent-teacher conferences and that really long drive and really long hike. But it also includes just sitting around chatting with M who came home for the weekend.

I'm surprised by the writing number, which includes work on a couple of creative nonfiction projects  as well as blogging and writing my newsletter. Last week felt really productive, writing-wise, but I only averaged 1.5 hours per day. I suppose the takeaway is either that I don't need to spend a ton of time writing to feel productive or that my perception of productive is pathetically low.

I had thought that things like shopping and errands, housework, volunteer work, and email took up a lot more time than they appear to. I think maybe I either forgot to put a grocery shopping trip in the tracker or I didn't go grocery shopping last week (the state of the refrigerator supports the second possibility, but with three hungry boys in the house it's a challenge to keep the cupboards stocked no matter how often you shop). The housework disconnect may be due to the fact that I've consciously neglected housework ever since the blitz of cleaning and organizing I did in August. If I'd tracked my time then, the cleaning/organizing category would have been a much higher number. And after a four-day weekend of not dealing with email, I spent 3 hours yesterday reading, responding to, filing, and deleting email. A lot of that could fall under the category of "volunteering," since most of the emails that actually needed attention related to one of the two nonprofits I'm actively involved in.

Finally, the self-care and art categories are dismally small. Self-care for me literally means showering or taking a bath. I don't even know what else self-care would entail at this point. And the art number is probably a little bit higher in actuality than it appears, because I've been working on watercolor exercises that I drop in on for a few minutes at a time throughout the day, so usually it doesn't even rate a mention on the spreadsheet.

What does all this mean for how I should manage my time going forward? It definitely shows that there are a limited number of hours in the day, and time spent doing one thing (writing, say) equals time spent NOT doing something else (housework), and that I don't really waste much time each day (unless you count reading the news). There's not much on my list I wish I didn't have to do—other than those unavoidables like cooking, cleaning, driving. When E and Z's cross-country season ends, the driving number will go down, but so too will the amount of time I have to myself each day. I definitely want to lower the time I spend on email and plan to do this by unsubscribing from all the junk, limiting my email replies to three lines (five if it's really important), and deleting unnecessary items as soon as I see them instead of letting them pile up. Finally, I have to think of some ways to pamper myself other than the occasional bubble bath.

Time Management Tuesday: Tracking Time

I checked out a copy of Laura Vanderkam's book Off the Clock last week because who could resist the subtitle: Fell Less Busy While Getting More Done? While it's true that there have been times over the years that I've gotten a lot done, I don't feel like I have any kind of system for it, other than powering through, and I rarely feel not busy, even though I've (mostly) banished the word from my vocabulary and stopped treating business like a virtue. I'm hoping this book will help me take control of my time in a more organized fashion.



The first thing Vanderkam recommends is tracking your time, which makes sense. If you don't know how you spend your time, how will you know how to spend it better?

Coincidentally (or perhaps not coincidentally, since figuring out how to best use my time before I go back to work has been on my mind), I had been kind of half-assedly trying to track my time over the last couple of weeks by writing down my daily activities in a ratty old notebook. The trouble was, I'd get going on a project, rush out of the house to pick up the kids, hurry home to make dinner, and lose all track of where those hours went. With a spreadsheet, I feel obligated to fill in all those gaping boxes. This is how day one looked:

Monday

12:00 a.m. - 7:00 a.m.: Sleep 

7:30 Exercise (yoga, walk)

8:00 - 8:45: Cook/ Eat (breakfast) /Read (news)

8:45 - 10:00: Writing 

10:00: Clean/Organize (tidy kitchen)/ Shower/ Dress

10:30 - 11:30: Blog

11:30 - 12:00: Email

12:00 - 1:00: Cook/Eat (lunch)/Read (Orion)

1:00 - 3:00: Volunteer (Literary Mama; finalize Nov. essay)

3:00 - 3:30: Exercise (balance board)

3:30 - 4:30: Clean/Organize (tidy kitchen; organize desk drawer)

4:30 - 4:45: Volunteer (MMNP; prep for conf. call)

4:45 - 6:00: Cook / Eat (dinner)

6:00 - 7:15: Volunteer (MMNP; conf call)

7:15 - 7:45: Clean/Organize (sort & fold laundry)

7:45 - 8:00: Art (watercolor)/ Social Media (Instagram)

8:00 - 9:00: Entertainment (TV)/ Craft (knitting)

9:00 - 10:00: Read (fiction)

10:00 -12:00 Sleep

For a total in each category of:

Sleep	9
Exercise	1
Read	2
Write	2.5
Volunteer	3.5
Cook/Eat	2.25
Clean/Organize	2
Entertainment	1
Art	0.5
Craft	1
Self-care	0.25
Total	25

Yesterday was a little unusual in that it rained all day, so I didn't go outside except for that one short walk in the morning. E and Z also didn't have cross-country practice, so I didn't have to pick them up. That freed up an hour, which I might otherwise have spent reading or knitting (or going outside, if it weren't raining), but which I put to use cleaning up the kitchen and my desk drawer, in part because I'd yanked the drawer out in frustration and put it in the middle of the floor earlier in the day, and in part because C was home early, and it's difficult to sit and relax when other people are around, potentially judging you. I also listened to writing podcasts while I exercised and cleaned, which I could count as professional development. Also, because I knit while I was watching TV, there's an extra hour in there. I realize there's a bit of the observer effect going on here—that is the act of observing my behavior is affecting that behavior, but since this is a project in figuring out how to better spend my time, not a research study, that's all to the good.

If I think about my realistic ideal day (another Vanderkam concept), I see that a lot of the elements I'd want it to contain are here: writing, reading, art-making, crafting. I'd like to take more time for going outside and spending time in nature (maybe I should have grabbed my umbrella and rain boots and walked in the rain) and for self-care, which I'm terrible at (I can't even think of anything good other than a bubble bath). I'd also wish for more positive, active family engagement, but that's tough with two teenagers who have a lot of homework and who want to spend their non-homework time doint their own thing. But the first step is awareness. I'll be back next Tuesday with the results of week one.

This is all pretty borning compared to the Daily Schedule I posted ten years ago on this blog, an amusing, and slightly terrifying, glimpse into life with small children. Looking at it now, I wonder how I survived one day let alone years of it. It makes any time management challenges I might face now (even when I get back to working 10 or more hours per day) seem downright quaint.