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.
The thing about knowing more about what you’re doing, is that more people want to talk to you about it, and you have less and less time to actually… do it.
And so people block their calendars with “Do not Schedule” and “Make Time!” and presumably try to be diligent about actually enforcing this. But it’s hard. And when my schedule gets crazy and I contemplate doing this, the thing I come back to is – I want the make time to be the default, that other things eat in to. I want the assumption to be that all my “open” time is make time, and when I have time here or there I work on that not on… email.
(I still hate email)
I had a very engineer meeting recently. The guy didn’t block off my calendar, and didn’t book a meeting room, but sent a note saying “I can’t change this event so we’ll just do this”. I’d rushed from thing to thing most of the day, so nearly forgot, and was a couple of minutes late. But it was refreshing, and reminded me I used to be like that. Where a meeting was really just a chat with another engineer, and there was no need to schedule it because my calendar was open enough to remember it, and who needs a meeting room anyway? We’ll find somewhere to get together. Whatevs.
For a year now I’ve been refusing meetings which could be done over lunch (e.g with people wanting to pick my brain on diversity stuff although moving made it easy to cut back on that kind of stuff), but it’s not the solution to my current problem. I absolutely refuse to put “make time” on my calendar. I refuse to get to the point that it’s not the default – all time is make time, unless something specifies otherwise.
But what about going the other way? Blocking off time to handle non-making, whether it’s meetings, or writing design docs, or planning.
I’ve been working on that instead, and it’s sometimes challenging – there can be non-technical emergencies that pull me back. But I’ve found it’s a helpful way to stop the constant pull of “oh I’ll just do X and my head will be clear to code”. I can proxy it by writing it down, and saying, “I’m dealing with this on Tuesday when I’ve blocked out time for a bunch of such tasks”. Working across timezones actually helps, so meetings get blocked into overlapping work time.
The downside, is I’m back to needing a todo list – which I’d pretty much eliminated previously (notes in bug trackers and CLs sufficed).
Anyway, so far my semi-promising strategy for keeping on top of non-technical things, whilst retaining make time as the default. How do you balance?
There is something I’m working on that I’m really excited about, that if we have hung out in person I may well have talked about, but it has been going nowhere.
So “I’m working on X” has really only been true if “work” is defined as “not getting around to and feeling really guilty about”.
This was a project that I didn’t have the nerve to apply for, I thought about it, decided my ideas weren’t good enough, but someone reached out to me, and I was like YES! Here are my ideas. And they were positive and so it was all agreed and then I just… made no progress.
(And that, by the way, is an example of why it’s worth asking women to do things and rather than complaining that they didn’t put themselves forward).
I procrastinate productively. So whilst I was not doing this one project, I submitted talks for two conferences. And my blog was scheduled two months out and all I had created for this, my most important side project was… an outline.
To make this seem even more stupid, not only is this something I really want to do (directly related to my secret “What I would do if I wasn’t afraid” plan), I’ve already done at least 50% of it, and this is in many ways just a restructure and repackage of that work, with some extra bits and pieces.
After weeks of this, I finally made some progress. Not on the full day that I set aside for it, which I spent filling up my buffer of blogposts (rationale: “maybe when I have blog content done for all of this month I’ll feel like I can focus”, and then when that was done, “maybe if I just get these finished they’ll be out of my head and I can focus”). But when I set myself a goal of working for an hour on it, with a limit of 90 minutes I could work on it, because I needed to leave (checkout, eat, go to airport). And I went back to the outline, which I had forced myself to write a month earlier, and just started following it.
Turns out it was a pretty good outline. It should be, I guess. I thought about it for a month before I wrote it down.
And voila. Two out of 5 sections were done.
I don’t know that I have anything to add here than hasn’t been covered again and again elsewhere. But whilst my excuses were good and genuinely, I had been moving/without internet/sick/travelling/insanely busy at work it was only on a Sunday morning – having shut myself away since Friday night citing need to make progress on this – that I finally took a hard look at myself and admitted that I was afraid to fail at this. Better to keep it as a possibility rather than try and fail.
Which is obviously stupid, so I sat down and got working.
Some observations:
An outline really helps. Creating an outline is such a low bar, if I’ve been thinking about something (which if wracked with guilt over not doing it, I have) it shouldn’t take too long to write one.
Once I have a good outline, it’s easy to just follow it and fill in the blanks.
I procrastinate more on coding (for personal projects, not at work), it’s like I’m more afraid to be bad at it (who cares if I suck as a writer? I’m an engineer, there’s a pretty low bar for me there) or just feel like I have less to add.
Shutting myself away and just working through my excuses until I run out works. It does take a while though.
At least I procrastinate productively. I achieved a lot whilst not achieving this.
I have, and have had for years (I’ve written about it again and again from either side of thinking I’m going mad), this on-going delusion that I should be super-human. That I should be killing it at work, on my side projects, working out like a crazy person, having an active social life and a functional relationship that is actually going somewhere, whilst living in a beautiful spotless apartment and dressing fabulously!
I’m not sure that I’m doing great at any of these things right now. In fact about a month ago I decided to just give up dating for 6 months. This has freed up a bunch of time and emotional energy – it’s a good decision for me right now. I’m focusing on Cate.
So I’m talking to one of my friends about how hard it is to figure out habits, and how thrown my habits are by this latest move. And how I feel pulled in all these directions, there is a show I really want to see and tonight is the last night, and there’s a piece of work I need to finish, and I need to weight train more and there is a class I could take but I’m not sure I can do that either and meanwhile my shoulder is really sore from the yoga class I did yesterday and just how do I possibly fit it all in. And commute. And deadlines. And job more emotionally demanding because I’m more optimistic and engaged in what I’m doing and I hadn’t quite thought of that.
Meanwhile I moved back thinking I could spend more time with my family, but had a completely serious conversation with my parents about whether it was feasible for me to meet them in Dubai in a couple of weeks. Because otherwise I’m unlikely to see them until April.
Really, I’m just not good at the day to day logistics of life. I am late filing my taxes. I don’t book my own travel anymore, and there are plenty of reasonable reasons for that, like when I do crazy trips with multiple stops you basically have to have a travel agent, but the real reason is that booking travel can be viewed as an optimisation problem… but you can never really solve it. Because that flight can be delayed, or cancelled, or something horrible can happen, and voila, no amount of advance thinking helped at all. So it’s better just not to worry about it too much, lay out my parameters, have someone else deal with it, and then just live with whatever they come up with.
And I’m too prone to seeing life as an optimisation problem. And there are these aspects to maximise, and then these constraints. Like, the best way to get a good workout in is to do it in the morning. But, getting in early to work makes me so much more productive. Pick one. I can work on side projects and do a long workout at the weekend, but if I workout first I’m sometimes to be too tired to do any. Only one can be the top priority. The way to get up early is just to do it, be tired and deal, but I spend all day staring at a screen and too little sleep isn’t just being tired, it’s also spending the afternoon with a horrible headache. Not today, please.
And so I create these arbitrary rules. Like, only eat sandwiches at the weekend. Only watch TV at the gym. Do something cultural every week. 5 positive things around the house for every 5 chapters of a book.
These rules, ingrained, work really well. Only I got the flu, and then I took a trip. And voila, everything fell apart. I started watching TV at home, and overwhelmed by the grocery store self-medicated with bread. And I got into work later, having not worked out, because I was so exhausted. And the more I felt like I was failing at every aspect of my life, the more I wondered why I was trying with anything at all.
The thing about habits, is they can disintegrate so quickly. Even a short trip can throw me right off, if I have terrible jetlag and I’m exhausted everything feels like a catastrophe (talking to my friend, I realised that my messed up sleep schedule is the root problem for at least two things I’m failing at). Meanwhile, I pack out my schedule – as I write this, the following week I have plans Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, an 8pm meeting on Thursday, and on Friday I’m supposed to be in Manchester.
(Not that I’ve figured out a hotel or a train to Manchester at this point. Logistics are hard.)
Even when all habits fall apart at once, you have to build habits up bit by bit. So last week, I got a reasonable amount of cardio and one yoga class in, and I was mindful about what I ate in the evenings, despite feeling exhausted (always harder). I dealt with a bunch of personal email, and made a significant amount of progress on The Project. This has to be a win.
Next week, I’ll focus on fixing my sleep schedule, and finishing up this section of The Project. If these are under control by next Sunday, I’ll view that as a win.
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