Picture Pages, Picture Pages
Oct. 23rd, 2023 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebeAnother week, another attempt to get things right.
I'm not sure what happened last week, but on Tuesday I stumbled out of bed and have been missing a step ever since. And writing that down, I realize just how false that narrative is.
I ended up smoking last week and basically fell off the wagon. I think the adjustment to regular work and a return to the gym has been a little harder than I thought, so to ease the anxiety and frustration around that I took to pot. I'm not proud of that, but I think it's better to be clear-eyed about what happened so I can figure out what to do about it moving forward.
My daily schedule has become something like this: wake up at 6:30, meditate, walk with K. at 7:00. The walk is over at 7:45 and I aim to start the day job at 8:30, which leaves me with 45 minutes of free time. Often, that's spent grabbing a coffee and danish from the store, but sometimes it's cleaning things up or going to the bathroom or showering or making coffee myself. Either way, I'm rarely ready to sit and get to work by then.
In my daily routine calendar, 8:00 is reserved for journaling but you can tell by the time stamps that almost never happens. Sometime before 9 AM I log in to work and try to wrap my head around the day/week, but depending on how scattered things are I might not be actually ready to go until 10 AM. By that point, I'm a bit anxious about how much of the morning has already disappeared and how...not ready for deep work I am.
The rest of the day is a protracted battle between working on the QC tasks I have, trying to figure out how everything works, and overwhelm driving me to procrastination through solitaire or YouTube. Somewhere in there, there's a lunch break that can be anything from actually eating lunch to cleaning the burrow to just...vegetating. Often, there's a walk to McDonald's.
R. or K. comes home by 4:00 - 4:30, and we're out the door to the gym before 5. The workout takes anywhere from 60-90 minutes, and we're home before 6:30 -- just in time for me to finish up the last 30 minutes or so of work before I pivot to one of our TTRPGs (Mondays, Wednesdays, some Tuesdays and Fridays), a movie or social engagement (Thursdays), or a tired haze of guilt about not working on my D&D game, writing, or some other self-improvement task. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of time to get important shit done.
But I think that might be all a matter of perspective. I have the same 24 hours as anyone, but I haven't put in the work to make it easy to fall into a virtuous cycle. It might be hard to get started in the mornings, for example, because I haven't prepared myself ahead of time for sitting down at the desk and knowing "what's next".
This week I'm going to try and lean on my Bullet Journal and digital calendar to get better about time management. I could take 30 minutes or so to work on my writing during work hours without guilt if I knew that I had scheduled most of the day for the day job. Knowing that I'm likely to run out of steam in the evenings, it would help to make sure I've got the most important stuff done before 6 PM so I'm not sinking my rest time with anxiety about what hasn't been done. And just keep track of my to-do list on a daily basis allows me the space to decide how to handle things when I fall behind.
For example, this week I'll be running an Unlicensed Adventures game on Friday evening, but I will have virtually no time to work on it. Tonight is a meeting of our writing group AND our A5E group; tomorrow is our first biweekly Kobold game since moving to Tuesday nights; Wednesday is K.'s Godswake game; Thursday is Fargo night. There will be four gym sessions tonight, tomorrow, Thursday and Friday. And we're behind on Blue Apron, enough that we have four dishes to make over the next four nights. The evenings are going to be PACKED.
Knowing this ahead of time gives me a chance to find time for game prep somewhere during the day and...allows me to brace for a pretty full week. I can carve out time to handle kitchen chores, for example, so that I can cook as quickly as possible in the limited time I've got after work. Since I know I won't be able to go back to work in the evenings I can send an email to my boss letting her know I'll plan to make up the missing time on Saturday morning. And so on.
We'll see how well this all works. Planning has never been a problem for me; it's the execution where I fall down. I'm hoping that taking the time to prepare future me for success now will make the execution easier when the time comes.
This week would be a pretty good one to at least taper my pot usage, too. There's so much going on, and it's all urgent, so I don't think there'll be too much trouble being bored. The most important thing is to give myself the time and space to...recharge my batteries alone. I'm sincerely hoping that having a more holistic view of my schedule will allow me to actually take the time to rest without guilt. Fingers crossed, anyway.
I'm not sure what happened last week, but on Tuesday I stumbled out of bed and have been missing a step ever since. And writing that down, I realize just how false that narrative is.
I ended up smoking last week and basically fell off the wagon. I think the adjustment to regular work and a return to the gym has been a little harder than I thought, so to ease the anxiety and frustration around that I took to pot. I'm not proud of that, but I think it's better to be clear-eyed about what happened so I can figure out what to do about it moving forward.
My daily schedule has become something like this: wake up at 6:30, meditate, walk with K. at 7:00. The walk is over at 7:45 and I aim to start the day job at 8:30, which leaves me with 45 minutes of free time. Often, that's spent grabbing a coffee and danish from the store, but sometimes it's cleaning things up or going to the bathroom or showering or making coffee myself. Either way, I'm rarely ready to sit and get to work by then.
In my daily routine calendar, 8:00 is reserved for journaling but you can tell by the time stamps that almost never happens. Sometime before 9 AM I log in to work and try to wrap my head around the day/week, but depending on how scattered things are I might not be actually ready to go until 10 AM. By that point, I'm a bit anxious about how much of the morning has already disappeared and how...not ready for deep work I am.
The rest of the day is a protracted battle between working on the QC tasks I have, trying to figure out how everything works, and overwhelm driving me to procrastination through solitaire or YouTube. Somewhere in there, there's a lunch break that can be anything from actually eating lunch to cleaning the burrow to just...vegetating. Often, there's a walk to McDonald's.
R. or K. comes home by 4:00 - 4:30, and we're out the door to the gym before 5. The workout takes anywhere from 60-90 minutes, and we're home before 6:30 -- just in time for me to finish up the last 30 minutes or so of work before I pivot to one of our TTRPGs (Mondays, Wednesdays, some Tuesdays and Fridays), a movie or social engagement (Thursdays), or a tired haze of guilt about not working on my D&D game, writing, or some other self-improvement task. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of time to get important shit done.
But I think that might be all a matter of perspective. I have the same 24 hours as anyone, but I haven't put in the work to make it easy to fall into a virtuous cycle. It might be hard to get started in the mornings, for example, because I haven't prepared myself ahead of time for sitting down at the desk and knowing "what's next".
This week I'm going to try and lean on my Bullet Journal and digital calendar to get better about time management. I could take 30 minutes or so to work on my writing during work hours without guilt if I knew that I had scheduled most of the day for the day job. Knowing that I'm likely to run out of steam in the evenings, it would help to make sure I've got the most important stuff done before 6 PM so I'm not sinking my rest time with anxiety about what hasn't been done. And just keep track of my to-do list on a daily basis allows me the space to decide how to handle things when I fall behind.
For example, this week I'll be running an Unlicensed Adventures game on Friday evening, but I will have virtually no time to work on it. Tonight is a meeting of our writing group AND our A5E group; tomorrow is our first biweekly Kobold game since moving to Tuesday nights; Wednesday is K.'s Godswake game; Thursday is Fargo night. There will be four gym sessions tonight, tomorrow, Thursday and Friday. And we're behind on Blue Apron, enough that we have four dishes to make over the next four nights. The evenings are going to be PACKED.
Knowing this ahead of time gives me a chance to find time for game prep somewhere during the day and...allows me to brace for a pretty full week. I can carve out time to handle kitchen chores, for example, so that I can cook as quickly as possible in the limited time I've got after work. Since I know I won't be able to go back to work in the evenings I can send an email to my boss letting her know I'll plan to make up the missing time on Saturday morning. And so on.
We'll see how well this all works. Planning has never been a problem for me; it's the execution where I fall down. I'm hoping that taking the time to prepare future me for success now will make the execution easier when the time comes.
This week would be a pretty good one to at least taper my pot usage, too. There's so much going on, and it's all urgent, so I don't think there'll be too much trouble being bored. The most important thing is to give myself the time and space to...recharge my batteries alone. I'm sincerely hoping that having a more holistic view of my schedule will allow me to actually take the time to rest without guilt. Fingers crossed, anyway.
