Sep 15, 2010

Emotional Furniture


Well, hello darlings. It's nice that a few of you are there so I'm not just having cawfee and talking to myself.

So, back to the tawpic at hand: can I use this blog to help me with my mental/emotional/ organizational furniture rearrangement?

I was thinking about the way things get done in my life. I like to make lists and I can definitely see categories amongst the items -- long-term goals, short-term goals, tedious maintenance, etc. But what causes me to wake up in the morning and choose a particular item to attack? Happenstance.

I'm just like anyone else in that I tend to put off things that are either difficult, scary, or seem like they're going to be long and involved processes. If something seems like a really epic time commitment, I'm inclined to put it aside until some future date when "I have time to sit down and really think about it" or "I've finished all these other maintenance tasks" like clearing off my desk, hanging up these framed pictures, sorted through all this junk, or reorganized my underwear drawer.

If I keep going like this, it's going to take a long time to get to the items on my list that involve any adventure requiring more than one day to complete, i.e. the website making and the crafting of some business schemes.

Also, I do have a focus problem. Not the kind that steals my attention to detail; as y'all know, I have Attention Surplus Disorder and will spend six hours pushing six pixels around the page until I am satisfied. I mean more that I'm such a dilettante and that I enjoy so many things that I can't seem to pick one to go deeper into. For example, right now I want to take this guitar-making class and the calligraphy class and the screen-printing class. If I could just focus all my energies on one thing, like developing my photography website, I could really get somewhere with that.

All that said, I do enjoy being me -- a multi-armed Deity of Dabbling. It's who I am. So the real challenge will be to find a balance between doing a bit of everything and achieving satisfaction out of going deeper into at least one or two things.

And that's a challenge that will require a more concentrated attempt to organize my time instead of doing the least complex items first and saving the rest for never. What about the idea of putting things into some of the aforementioned categories and then doing one of each each day? Like one small task, one household maintenance thing, one short-term goal related task, and one piece of a long-term puzzle? Each day, hell, how about one of each per week?

Or putting all my items into a literal hat and picking one each morning to accomplish?

Thoughts? Or are you all shaking your heads, like, "Dubin, chillax. Life is about the journey..."

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous opined...

I, too, have found that there are enough small, maintenance-y tasks in life to use up all of one's time. Two things I do to try and free up time to do the things I really care about without my life disintegrating:

1) Every day, I spend a little bit of time on activities the forestall the collapse of my existence into entropy or. I do keep a list of things that need doing in case I can't find something easily, but it's usually obvious - the floor needs swiffing, the mail is piling up, whatever. Doing a little each day makes it more manageable - but, then, I'm not responsible for the care of small children.

2) Other than the one list of items (which is all in the description slot of one item in my planner, so it looks small), I try to keep this sort of task out of my calendar. If it's not really important or highly time-sensitive, I try not to clutter my electronic head-space with it. This means that when I look at what I have to do in a given day / week / month, the interesting stuff isn't totally overwhelmed by the mundane. And, will I really look back on my life and feel sad that I didn't spend more time cleaning?
-Erica

8:12 PM  

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