Tag: to-do lists

Overextended

A happy life, I’ve learned, is all about balance.

A happy life usually has equal parts of joy and stress and in manageable measures.

There will always be challenges in the tasks of daily life.

We take care of ourselves. We create and check items off our “to-do” list. We pay our bills. Send congratulatory birthday messages. Take the garbage out. Eat.

But then there are those other times. The times when stress is greater than joy. When the tasks that need to be done match the complexity of Santa’s gift list. (How DOES he do it?)

Lately, I find myself in Santa’s shoes – metaphorically.

I’m setting up house and the process seems to have gone on ad infinitum. That is an exaggeration but you may relate to the feeling.

When the budget report is due at work. The term paper is due tomorrow. The school bake sale is on the weekend and you haven’t even picked up baking supplies yet.

The end of the month means all the bills have to be paid on time or face penalties and interest charges if they aren’t. Is there enough in the account to cover everything?

It is cyclical. I think that is god’s trick to keep us all moving forward. I mean, if everything were taken care of for us and we had nothing to do or plan for, what could we possibly do with all of our free time?

Part of being busy for me is personality and character based. I love being busy. It is something of a creative exercise for me to plot and plan and devise what new projects I can take on.

Whether those projects are focussed on my hubby or in the kitchen, the garden, the house, or the world at large, I am always happier when I have tasks to accomplish.

And happier still, when I have the means to accomplish those tasks. That means the health and energy to tackle them. The money to acquire the necessary components for the task(s).

If I’m honest, overextended for me is a way of being. I say I don’t like it when stress is out of control and I am wildly out of balance between happy time and fretting. But who created this imbalance, I am compelled to ask?

Er, me? Okay. Yes. Guilty as charged. It may be that overextension has become a habit of mine. I raised two children as a single parent. Those were days of fairly nonstop overwhelm.

Speaking personally, no one advises you exactly how much time, attention and hard labor (well beyond the initial birth pushing to get them here) that babies and children require.

That is likely an unspoken agreement on the part of humanity to ensure the population keeps replenishing itself. Because if everyone knew at the outset exactly what the whole child-rearing/parenting gambit was going to entail, it might discourage people from having them.

In this current slice of overwhelm I am living through, I am quietly seeking solutions. Prioritize to start. What has to be done? (And what are the consequences if it isn’t?) What do I want to do? (And why? Personal satisfaction or to please someone I love?)

Or, frankly, the third block on my priority list is that it doesn’t matter. If I ever get around to doing this thing, it likely won’t matter but I’ve always wanted to try it and wouldn’t it be neat if I could? (Rock tumbling and polishing comes to mind. Don’t ask. A childhood hangover.)

So time to make a new priority list. Time to carve up those tasks according to my little chart of need/want/maybe. Time to engage the help of others (when and as possible). Time to give myself a break.

And while I’m at it, I’m going to give myself a hand and an “attagirl” for what months of attacking “to-do” lists has already helped me achieve. I don’t normally promote looking backwards as it usually accomplishes little to ruminate about the past.

But occasionally, when you need to take a breath and a breather to reorient yourself to what you need to do, it is good to remind yourself of what you have accomplished.

Likely at a time when you were in a place very much like the place of overwhelm you are trying to dig yourself out of today. Remind yourself of what’s been done to date and how far you’ve come.

Sip and savor that cappuccino. Read a little from a best-selling new novel between tasks. Sit in the sun and appreciate the garden you planted that wasn’t there before you came along.

It’s an important strategy boost to reenergize yourself for the tasks ahead.

I believe it is called balance.

You Move Too Fast

In my oft-used marketing spiel to executives about building awareness campaigns, I often used the potter’s wheel analogy. Executives as a type are eager to demonstrate and push to get quick results. But quick doesn’t always translate to “best” or even to “better.”

Every bowl that is thrown starts with the proverbial pound of clay thrown onto the wheel. As the wheel begins to turn, the potter engages with the clay in a mutually creative endeavor. The wheel starts to spin, slowly at first, and the water is thrown on the clay. The potter gets into the slurry with his/her hands.

It is a common mistake for newbie potters to have difficulty controlling the shape and speed of the bowl or vessel they want to make. Therein lies the craft. The slow, steady coaching of that amorphous lump of clay into an object of beauty and utility is not easy. I learned that in a pottery class.

My New Brunswick potter friend, Tom Smith, who make beautiful raku mugs and sold them by the hundreds, chuckled when I told him that, and said: “We love pottery courses. It’s the quickest way people really find out how hard it is to do what we do.”

New potters let the clay get away from them. The clay can flop over precariously in one direction or another. Hold the clay too long or too firmly and the undisciplined form rushes upwards through your fingers. Speaking personally, flailing about with your hands and fingers trying to tame and pull the wayward clay back into submission is a fool’s errand.

The emerging product on the wheel looks more like an ostrich in need of a chiropractor than anything remotely resembling a serving dish. Once the clay has reached a certain height, there is little option but to scrap the whole project and start over from scratch.

The potter may have learned valuable lessons in this botched attempt. Still, it may have cost considerable time and effort. The corporate world doesn’t graciously allow, or forgive, much botching. Ergo my caution to eager executives to build a campaign slowly and methodically for the best outcome to their marketing/sales/communication plans.

It feels like we have lost our trust in process and investing the necessary time, often years, to perfect our craft. What used to be called apprenticeship seems to have gone extinct along with the late lamented dodo bird.

Writers bandy about a story about meeting a brain surgeon at a cocktail party who declares to the author: “After retirement, I am going to write a book.” To which the author replies: “Isn’t that funny? I was thinking that after I leave my writing career behind, I am going to take up brain surgery.”

Point made but likely lost on the surgeon who could likely never equate the intricacies of his craft with what writers do. Everyone can write, they reason. Which is true, I guess, if qualitatively variant. Writers are used to insensitivity about the actual skill and rigor required to practice their practice.

As Ringo Starr would put it: “You know it don’t come easy.”

Lately I have been having two key thoughts. Some empathy and concern about young people lulled into believing they are “ready for prime time” long before they know what “prime time” even is.

It used to take years to become an overnight success. Today any cute kid with a shtick can publish, perform and profit from an online presence. My question always is, “But for how long?” I wonder how long their audience will continue to be enthralled by make-up application videos once they have aged out into the real work world, had babies and are trying to snag a mortgage.

I am as guilty of techno-distraction as the next person. But I am trying to find a way out of that dependence. I want to revel in the joy that comes from sitting at a potter’s wheel for hours creating pot after pot with well-behaved lumps of clay. (Full confession, I don’t ever expect to get there. But I can dream, can’t I?)

I want to lose myself in amazing books that transport me. Almost anywhere. I’m selective, of course. I prefer to traipse through the mysteries of the heart, mind and soul. Some authors manage to take me on that journey. I often opt for trusted experts who have taught me more in a week with their book than I might otherwise have learned in years.

All to say, I feel an urge to slow down. Not as a surrender to the vagaries of age but to the value and quality of time. Satisfying as completing tasks may be, I don’t see countless hours knocking items off my to-do list as the memories I wish to savor on my deathbed.

I want to spend more time with family, friends and loved ones. I want to spend more time with myself. I want to spend more time in my garden. Yesterday, the HASS avocado tree we ordered arrived. I am beyond excited to see how it grows.

Note to self: Slow down long enough and frequently enough to make sure you can enjoy the process. Big work for a Type A personality like me, but necessary.