There’s this advice that women seem to give each other, it’s “you can have it all, just not at once”. I hate it, because to me if you can’t have it all at once, you’re not really having it all. Rephrasing it, I would say, “You can’t have it all at once. So remember to prioritize the things you say you want at some point, or admit you don’t really want them”.
I’ve given up trying to say no. Instead, I say yes to something else. A pointless rephrasing, perhaps. But – we make choices all the time, I’m just trying to be honest with myself. Yes to the diet, no to the cupcake. Yes to the gym, no to a night curled up with a novel. Yes to the more stressful project, no to the long weekend away. This evening, I was torn between going to the gym, being productive on a project, and curling up with a novel. Since I went to the gym this morning (no to sleeping in) I’ve opted for a compromise – this blogpost, then my novel.
Last week I got two emails in a row from the same person. One saying no to something I’d asked them to do. The other confirming I was doing something that I’d tentatively-maybe-more-information-please suggested I might do.
I don’t think they realized or meant to do this, it was a case of being overwhelmed and going through inbox looking for quick wins.
But it wasn’t a great thing to come into on a Monday morning. As my boyfriend said, “that sums up exactly why you hate email”. And it stressed me out because I really felt that I couldn’t do both, but how to come back to someone and say that? I was worried it would come across as manipulative or petty. The thing they wanted me to do was a talk, and I don’t mind giving talks and I think it is a good thing to do. The thing I wanted done was organizing a meeting. I hate organizing meetings – it involves managing dates and email – neither of these is a strength of mine.
But, I’d agreed on a priority for this quarter. The meeting was definitely part of this priority. The talk, tangential, related, good thing, but not as much. And I really felt that I couldn’t do both. They are not the same commitment time-wise, but the stress of doing something I hate (organizing a meeting) was much higher and so to me they seem equivalent.
Anyway, I sought out some advice and explained to someone that I felt I couldn’t do both. She convinced me to do neither – someone else is organizing the meeting, and I don’t know what’s happening with the talk.
But – choices. Next month, Random Hacks of Kindness and a running/biking event are literally on the same day. Less concretely, my paper from January has been invited to be extended. As has the education paper. And there’s an awesome dataset that I’d like to work on. And my team is headed to MTV. And I want to spend more time doing cross fit and take that trip to a spa that my boyfriend and I have been talking about since December.
Some of these things will happen, not everything. It’s a problem, but it’s actually a pretty good problem to have. And so – I have to say yes to making choices. How about you?
I’ve been getting really stressed out on Mondays lately. I realized why when I called someone out on doing the exact same thing.
Monday mornings I do my “snippets” – I make a list of things I achieved the previous week. And I mentally plan what I want to achieve over the course of the coming week.
Towards the end of the day, I start stressing out and berate myself for not making a big enough dent in the list for the week.
I’ve got a number of things happening this week. I’m nervous about one of them in particular. But, I’m trying to reframe Monday as a day where I set myself up for a successful week, rather than day in which I complete a week’s worth of tasks.
Happy Monday! What can you do today to facilitate a productive week?
Women, especially, seem to talk about work-life-balance – and it’s synonym, work-life-integration (a la IBM) a lot. But what does it mean?
The cop out, d’uh, answer is, different things to everyone.
I’ve come to think that what it means is that the pieces that make up your life (work, family, friends, exercise, hobbies, etc etc) have an arrangement, and a quantity, such that if this is how your life is going to look like for the next 3 months – 6 months – a year – that would be okay. You wouldn’t feel that something large was missing, nor would you feel like curling up into a ball and crying at the prospect.
Of course, it isn’t static. Life changes, and there will be spikes – good and bad – any change is a spike. At some point, you’d seek out new challenge, and that would be a spike. A change in circumstances would be a spike. A holiday would be a spike, or three spikes, as you try to get stuff finished up before leaving, take a break, and come back to a pile of work. Hopefully the spike in the middle would be a pleasurable one.
But my point is, balance is not happening when you’re at capacity and you think, yes, I can do the next three months as long as nothing goes wrong. When has that ever happened? Mostly you make it work, but at what cost? You look back and think “I missed out on X” – and that’s a loss. Even if X is just spending an afternoon in a coffee shop with a book, or a couple of movie nights with your partner or best friend – because living like this long-term leads to greater losses, of creativity, of peace of mind, of relationships. Spikes are okay, expected – but they should be spikes, not normal.
I’m currently reading The Power of Now – rather fuzzy and spiritual for my taste, however the focus on being present is making me think. In a balanced life, by which I mean, a sustainable life, we are not thinking “I just need to survive X and things will be OK, I’ll be calmer and happier and have more time for Y then”.
It’s a conclusion that screams out to me, because I’m pretty sure I’ve been thinking “I just need to survive this month” since at least July. I feel like I missed out so much in grad school – because of time, money, commitments, that I created a project (Post Grad Rehab) to help redress that. January is, thankfully, the last month I need to “survive”. Hopefully in February I will go back to living. But, without spending some time thinking how I’ve spent 6 months straight feeling like I’m on the edge of what I can cope with, will I just end up repeating this again and again?
It’s been helpful to make three lists. The first – what needs to change? Second, what’s working? Third, what do I need to figure out?
The first list comprises the things that I just feel I cannot carry on with. I think this is the most important, because these are the big huge spikes that are just derailing and draining me completely. The second list is about taking stock of what is helping – it’s a reminder to keep at these things, and maybe I can find patterns and discover more ways to live more sustainably. The third list are things that may be drowned out by the big things in the first list, but may become big things themselves if left unchecked.
Credit: flickr / Rohan Reid
What Needs To Change?
Travel. I have been jittering about like Tigger on speed. Since April, I’ve made 5 trips to the US, 3 to Kitchener (from Ottawa), one to Winnipeg, and I’ll make my third trip to Europe at the end of this week. And I moved! First, I’m fed up of living out of suitcases. Second, it’s made it difficult to have a routine. Third, I’m an ambivert and travel uses up my extraversion and leaves me unsociable – not great when I’ve just moved to a new place and need to meet people! I just can’t continue living like this, it’s not fun anymore. It’s not – “ooh, new place”. It’s “another plane and another timezone change? Shoot me now”.
Rehab. This is actually my focus for February, fittingly as it will be a year since I injured my shoulder. I have been dosed up on codeine and/or in pain for a year because of lack of health-care, not taking time to heal, and taking (did I mention?) too many planes.
What’s Working?
Work Stays at Work. At the end of the day, I close my laptop and leave it at the office. I have my work calendar – (my only calendar, now) but not work-email on my iPhone. I love my job, but this distinction – shut the laptop, leave it there, is helpful for drawing a line and doing other things.
Gym in the Morning. When I don’t work out in the morning, I seem to have better hair, but my mood is not better, and I have less energy. 6am is a bit early for spinning (7am would be ideal) but going in the evening when I’m tired and hungry and have experienced the cold is actually much harder! I need to keep working at this – hopefully once I’m done travelling for a bit I will be able to get up at 530am for spinning – and not go to bed at 8pm.
What Do I Need to Figure Out?
Email. Don’t laugh – I’m actually working on mobile gMail. Between that and managing my work email, my personal email is a desolate wasteland of dashed expectations. I have emails starred as important from more than 6 months ago that I haven’t got to. I have emails deemed important by priority inbox from over a month ago that I haven’t even read. This is not okay, especially since I’m getting almost no emails from annoying people lately and so these are all from people that I like and think deserve a prompt response. So first – I’m sorry, email me again if it’s important until I respond, (perhaps with a subject line like “CATE YOU ARE A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING”). I think if I could get on top of it it would be OK, but I’ve thought that before. Mind you, that was some time ago…
Food. Because it’s a smaller office we don’t get dinner here. Yes, I realize, there are #firstworldproblems and there are #googlersproblems. But it is hard to get up and work out at 6am when I didn’t have dinner because there was nothing in the fridge and I decided it was too cold to pick up food. Maybe I could make some soup.
Social Life. This is really “hang out with people outside of work and make more friends”.
Projects. I’m transitioning out of my role with Awesome Ottawa because it’s hard to do remotely and it’s not as much fun when you’re not part of the debate over what to fund. I’ll miss it, but everything says – time to move on and the group is working out ways to organize so I’m optimistic about that. We’ve been lacking submissions on CompSci Woman and I think it’s because Maggie and I are not very good at chasing people to write for us (or getting hold of each other to talk about a new theme!) I need to talk to her to work out what to do about that. Then there are projects in KW that I want to take on, but it is a question of what I have capacity for. What do I spend time on? What do I opt out of?
Creating. I’m really lucky in that I get to work on software that people use every day and even with my dysfunctional relationship with email I do think it is genuinely something that is helpful to people (who haven’t discovered Twitter – I’m kidding. Mostly). That’s awesome. Create something useful, absolutely what I want to do. But I don’t want to stop creating things just because they are interesting, or fun, and I don’t want to stop writing here, either.
This time last year, I made a list of what I wanted to happen in 2010. The goals I set were helpful and I met (or nearly met) most of them but next year everything is changing – I don’t know what goals I should be setting. How do I set professional goals for a job I’ve yet to start? Do I need to set personal fitness goals – because that just seems to fall in to place when I have structure.
I think instead I’m going to have two different themes. The first is giving back – Girl Geek Dinners KW is on the agenda, as is an Awesome Foundation KW. As part of that, I’m planning something that I’m calling The Kiva Challenge. The second theme is about reclaiming my life after Grad School. I’m calling that Post Grad Rehab.
The Kiva Challenge
I’ve been making loans on Kiva for a while, and it’s got to the point where I’ve been making 1-3 loans a month just out of repaid funds, which is pretty cool. Now I have a real job, I want to do more. That’s what the Kiva challenge is about – it’s a X number of new loans every month. I’m choosing 4, so $100 new dollars a month loaned on Kiva so I’ll then be making 5-7 loans a month. Over the year, that will be $1200 more in the system.
Join me!
Post Grad Rehab
Last week, I read The Happiness Project (Amazon). I was skeptical, because what does a wealthy white New York woman with her 2.4 children have to say about finding happiness? I still don’t know about that – but I did enjoy the book. What I am getting from it, though, is that if you want to change, you have to start now. The idea that in the future we’ll be skinnier, or happier, or more successful, is nothing unless we start working on it today.
Credit: flickr / erin is a star
Because graduation is close, I’ve been thinking – when I graduate, I’ll do this. I’ll be able to afford to do this. I’ll have time to do this. It’s clear how much of living I’ve put on hold for the sake of grad school. Well, grad school is done. It’s time for real life. I don’t know if this is my own happiness project, I see it more as taking time to reclaim my life. My themes are different. So far, I have:
Work – what are my professional goals, and how do I achieve them? How do I maximize my effectiveness? How do I navigate the company?
Relax – do things just because. Read novels. Watch TV. Just be.
Feel beautiful – go shopping and buy nice clothes. Have a mudwrap and a facial because I want to, not because I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.
Explore my local area – weekend mini-breaks! Hiking!
Create – set time aside to work on those artsy projects that I’ve been wanting to do.
Write – set time aside for ebook projects. Work on writing better, more concisely.
Culture – go to the theatre, the museum. Watch “classic” movies and read “classic” books.
Try the unexpected – take a cookery class. Drink coffee. Learn to make a mean martini.
Be ridiculous – dress more Harajuku. Experiment with color. Watch children’s movies.
Physical challenge – maybe running?
Any suggestions? The first three probably map to January/February/March but thereafter I’m undecided. I might combine, replace, and I’ll need at least two more themes. But at the end of it hopefully I’ll feel like I’m back to living, not putting my life on hold.
Credit: James Wm. Dawson / http://jamesdawson.blogspot.com/2010/05/im-older-now-and-still-runnin-against.html
I originally posted Making Ideas Happen: The Dreamer, the Doer, and the Incrementalist as a not-so-subtle hint to one of the dreamers in my life, and a reminder to myself to be aware of the downsides of being an incrementalist. And then Meggin left this great comment (emphasis added):
I’m an incrementalist, through and through. Urgghhh. I was on a leadership course awhile back and we had our work personality types tested and I came out in extremes an innovator and a finisher (exactly equal). And I totally agree with the above – one would think that being an incrementalist is the ideal position, but it isn’t, it’s just another position. I constantly have this feeling that my creative ideas are not getting the time they deserve to see them through and the projects I need to finish are not getting the creative energy they deserve.
The real kicker of being an incrementalist is that people expect you to be both creative and to finish things, and that at any point the unexpected happens, so you don’t have the time you thought you did (which is very common in all our lives), you are inevitably letting someone down in not meeting creative or deadline expectations (as you have to usually sacrifice one for the other in times of crunch). I’m in release mode – so that might explain why I am venting. Thanks for post.
I headed back to Europe to see the doctor, get a new passport, and focus. I need to be in hardcore doer mode in order to finish my thesis. I thought part of the problem was that I was bored of it and fighting to go back to being in a dreamer phase. And then I finished the IBM publication (no more patents to read – yay!) and the education paper my TA and I were working on, made some good progress on my thesis, and did the bulk (I hope) of the editing for my accepted paper.
And then I faced this new problem. Other projects. CompSci Woman is not being updated lately because neither Maggie nor I have capacity to hustle for submissions. I’m letting myself off feeling guilty about that – there’s a limit to what I can do (but if you’ve been thinking about contributing, but haven’t – please do). Then there’s some half-an-hour task that is just weighing on me because it involves writing up something and I just have this feeling of can’t. Can’t be creative with that. Can’t rearrange that into a coherent story. Can’t take that on as my problem and I really, really wish someone else would just step up and do it.
But why would they? Normally I’m fine being an incrementalist. Normally I’d say, “it’s just half an hour, just do it and it’s gone”. Normally it falls under that class of delegation where it’s less work to just do it myself. My inner control freak just loves that – getting comfortable delegating has been tough for me and so I give it these small pleasures. Honestly, being an incrementalist comes so naturally to me that I don’t think people notice what I do, how much I’m taking care of. Just get on with it. Just check it off. Oh, no it wasn’t a big deal. Because usually – it isn’t.
This whole doer thing means one project. One. That project is my thesis. Everything else is for someone else to take care of, or on ice.
So – deep breath – I handed off that nagging task. And the person I spoke to was totally understanding. What was I worrying about?
