I was going to do Laura Vanderkam's time-logging challenge this week, but the first thing I learned from it was that--
- I hate logging my time. It's not so much the record-keeping as the labeling. I do a million things in the hour after I wake up in the morning. I can list them all, but the itemizing is impossible. If I am tossing dinner in the crockpot while I talk to my 10yo about how cool it would be if my superpower was that I could lift the lids off cans without using a can-opener, is that food prep time or interacting-with-my-children time? If I scoop the baby up on one hip and dance around the living room with her while packing up my stuff for work, is that mothering, exercise, or getting myself out the door? Carla nailed it in her comment here. So I don't have much of a time log but I learned (or remembered) some useful things anyway, including the fact that--
- I thrive on goals and lists. I did well knocking things off my list for the week. I am very, very motivated by having a List-with-a-capital-L, but I need to find some middle ground: sometimes I make unreasonable lists and resolve to finish them or die trying; sometimes I don't make a list at all because I don't want to be its slave. You might think that making a list that included, say, prioritization or breaks for mandatory fun (is that an oxymoron?) would solve the problem, but it seems to be an ongoing issue. Once I write a list down, it feels like a law.
- If I am well-rested, that is. Sleep affects my outlook on everything. Everything.
- This computer, the one right here in my dining room, is a problem for me. It is most tractor-beam-ly in the afternoons when all the boys want to talk to me at once and I am supposed to be getting a meal on the table in time to get kids to soccer practice. This is also where my husband sits to veg in the evenings, so I can't just box it up and put it in the basement. But I'm thinking that might be a good idea, to get it out of the dining room. (I suppose I could just resolve to power it down between the end of naptime and the end of dinner clean-up. Or assign my oldest to write a little script that would make it whoop out a ferocious ah-ooooo-ga if I tried to sit down and goof off in that window. He'd like that.)
- And last: accountability makes a difference in my willingness to push myself. When I started this experiment I thought I'd set up the time log as a Google spreadsheet and make it public. It was SO motivating for me on Monday, this idea that anyone would be able to see how I had spent my time. Facebook or dinner prep? Dinner prep, obviously.
Posting my plans here is a great kick in the pants for me -- I did indeed finish a first draft of my early research project write-up by Wednesday, in large part because I had given myself that deadline in this space -- so maybe that's a way to keep myself moving forward. This week's #1 goal: go to bed at a reasonable hour every night. Eek.
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