
January and February was for me a quiet period of focused productivity. I moved the needle on a bunch of projects, and I’m excited to push them out into the world.
I love these periods, but I start to worry that my life – and therefore me – is boring. I crave adventure, excitement. And so I schedule – for efficiency – a bunch of things back to back.
March is that kind of month. I am in my fourth country, and I just gave my second talk, I also gave a workshop. I am wrecked. The last two weeks have been a real struggle, emotionally. The shock of leaving Berlin, the terror or the workshop, the stress of the talk, frantically trying to book my flight out of the UK before I arrived in the UK, and then the horror of another talk. I feel like I haven’t been alone, not properly, since sometime late February. On Saturday I’ll head back to Berlin for a few days, and on April 1 I will head to South America.
Adventure. Just what I wanted.
Most of the stress is over now, well, until I’m packing my life into a small suitcase on March 31.
But I think I have learned – probably again – some things.
- One of the things that stresses me out is feeling like I’m not moving the needle. I need to let that go. Often the stuff I do in these frantic periods lays the groundwork for moving the needle, later.
- Related, sometimes I just need to be emergency driven. The next thing that needs to happen, is the next priority. If something doesn’t need to happen immediately, let it go.
- But, things that weigh on my mind are sometimes better achieved in a focused hour one morning. If they can’t be dealt with in that time, better to stop obsessing about them.
- Take Cate-time when I can get it. I got a few hours of good gym time in at the weekend, and it made a huge difference.
- I could stand to be kinder to myself. I find myself berating myself for not being more on top of things, for not having a backlog of blogposts for example, or for not feeling prepared enough. I’m always just doing the best I can, and making the decisions that make sense at the time. In many ways not being “organised” was because I was consciously prioritising deep work.
Anyway. March is a whirlwind. But soon I’ll be in Columbia, all alone, with few demands on my time. And no doubt, I’ll miss the excitement.
One reply on “March is a Whirlwind”
[…] March is a Whirlwind […]
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The comment’s server IP (69.163.242.185) doesn’t match the comment’s URL host IP (69.163.242.203) and so is spam.