Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Jan 3, 2007

Thinking Out Loud: Energy clusters

This morning I woke up with what felt like a panic attack. You see, the New Year always brings this tidal wave of good intentions and energy: energy to file last year’s junk. Energy to write, to want to write, to submit things to people and to work. And there is so much of it going through such a small conduit that it feels like it’s going to explode. I lay there not wanting to get up because if I got up it meant that I would have to deal with it, and that felt too overwhelming.

I took a few deep breaths and got up anyway.

Thing is, it won’t go away. And, overall, this raw material, this huge amount of energy, is something that I’m used to. My enthusiasm for stuff comes and goes in waves: sometimes even tidal waves. Learning to recognize how your energy patterns “go” is an important step towards being able to work within your own structure.

At this time of year, books and articles and who-knows-whats about organization abound. Get fit. Lose weight. Deny yourself chocolate oh go on I dare you not on your nelly. Fulfil your resolutions. Well, I don’t make resolutions. I do, however, set a few goals for the year and call then wishes. My primary ones this year include applying for American citizenship, making progress with my writing, being more gracious in my everyday life, and breaking even on a couple of projects. But when I woke up this morning all I could think of was annual letter ugh I hate surfing for contact names oh wait translate into German oh wow clean the litter box bunch of admin to do which led, very quickly, to Aaaaarghhhhh!

I cope by using lists. Last year I learned that making big to-do lists didn’t work for me. What I’d do was to write down everything, absolutely everything, that needed to be done, and then put that list away. In my little diary, each day I’d write down the must-do tasks and then, if it looked as though there might be time, another task or two from the “master list”. Anything that didn’t get done that day would be written in the next day’s list. Using this method, each day most of the things get crossed off, which is good for the soul, because it makes me feel as though I’m getting somewhere.

Right now, with the move and big life change looming, I have other things I need to do as well. So there’s a separate to-do list pertaining to the move and all the things that must be arranged (insurance, health insurance, etc.) Items from this get transferred over to my diary when there’s room. I have to be careful, because sometimes the to-do list becomes a monster and it’s disheartening when I can’t catch up. If it gets too long, I often postpone non-essential items to another week. I’ve learned to think in terms of “must do” (a remarkably short list); “It would be nice if this could get done”; and “Not right now, I’m busy”. Things progress up this hierarchy; for example it might be nice if I did a job that wasn’t due until February now, but if I don’t, it doesn’t hit the “must do” list until about the last week in January.

I breathe better that way.

Another problem I identified last year was not konwing where the heck my time went. So, since I received a 64-pack of crayons for Christmas, I’m using them. I divided my life into two chunks: Work and Home. Really, it should have been three: Work, Home, Personal. If you’re doing something like this, devise a system, work with it for a while, then revise it. Carving it in rock is a recipe for unfulfilled goals. If we cling to rigid guidelines withour realizing that the world has moved on, we never actually make any progress and our world becomes unstable anyway, because worlds are self-adjusting and thumb their noses at our rigid plans.

Here are the “work” categories, which as you can see immediately have next to no relevance for anyone but myself:

Book promotion.
Business administration: accounting, filing, making phone calls, correspondence and “etc.”
Learning: the tools of my trade, background information, etc. Improving my skills.
Markeroni upkeep: the day to day everythings that have to be done, like answering help requests, messing with the database, etc.
Markeroni promotion.
Programming/HTML: updating and tidying up my web pages.
Story research: finding out things about places so that I can write about them.
Writing: columns, blog posts, articles, even a book.
Writing admin: querying, filing, keeping records.

Then these are the “home” categories:

Errands.
Fitness.
Housework.
House admin: filing, making calls, paying bills, etc.
Recreation: by this I mean active recreation: physically getting out of the house to do something interesting, not sitting in front of the TV.
Spirit: praying, meditation, connectedness, sitting still and just “being”.

So, what now? I made a spreadsheet with the categories at the left and nice little boxes, 10 per week, spreading out to the right of them. Then I printed it. And I use a little program on my computer that pops up after an hour to say “you’ve done this for an hour”, and I color in the appropriate square with the crayon of the day. Yes, I do indeed select a crayon each morning. It is just silly enough to make it seem like fun. At the same time I grabbed four file folders and instant-cleared my desk: I have a to-do folder, a filing folder, a pending folder and an accounting folder. These folders are allowed to sit on my desk. Other loose papers are not. All I have to remember is to look at them once in a while before they get too chubby.

What I am already realizing is that while I envisaged doing five hours of every work activity a week, I’m doing tons of some activities, and very little of others. The little colored boxes are an instant visual reality check into how I am using my time. So I can say, “OK, I only did one hour of promotion last week. I obviously hate it, but I’ll do two this week.” And maybe, slowly, the habits will change.

Keeping the big picture in mind helps, too. For example, I’m not going to succeed at my goal to break even on Markeroni if I don’t spend any time promoting it.

The idea that I would do one hour of each “work” activity per day has vanished already. It just doesn’t happen that way. Averaging it out is better. But the “one hour” method works really well when dealing with activities that I don’t enjoy. I can make myself do almost anything for an hour.

For now, where an activity fulfils two roles — for example my coastal trip was both “recreation” and “story research” — I log the time in both areas. Splitting it 50-50 between the two doesn’t make sense. I figured that I had nine hours of recreation and included in those were about three or four hours of story research. So recreation got nine hours and story research got four. The time spent researching was still time spent recreating; it’s not an either-or. It also helps me to resist the temptation of saying “well, only five hours were recreational, so I get to use another work day to take another trip”. I might do that anyway, but this method reflects my way of looking at things better. What you devise for yourself is up to you.

With “home”, I can see instantly what “external” things I am spending my time on, and when I have a particularly crazy week, I can ease off on the other kinds of work. I have no intention of killing myself by working like a Silicon Valley tech.

So far, so good. I did consider whether to log the hours I sleep, as well, to get a real 24-hour sense of a given day, but I think there is a risk of this becoming too obsessive. (It’s already bordering on that, but I needed to get a handle on everything I was doing, if only to be sure that I really am working and not just kidding myself that I’m working.) As long as I get spirit time and outdoor recreation time, and some exercise, everything else can be “whatever”. The bits that get colored in tend to be the bits that matter.

So that is what I do, for now. Maybe next week I will have a better idea. But I know that sitting down and talking about it helps to anchor it in my mind as a positive habit, and by the time I have got this posted and edited I will have done my hour’s worth of writing for the day.