At work, I know what I need to do and when I need to do it. All too often it is “All of it!” and “no later than yesterday!” but I know. There’s a lot to be said for knowing what you need to do, and having a timeline of when it needs to be done.
At home, though? Naw. Some things are easy. I know that as soon as the dishwasher is clean, I need to empty it. If I don’t, dirty dishes start stacking up everywhere, and it’s not gonna be pretty. I know when(ish) I’m going to make breakfast, and when I’m scrounging for lunch. Dinner, though? That’s harder. Am I using the slow cooker? Gotta start that in the morning, then. The Instant Pot? okay, we can start later. But what if I decide on the Instant Pot, and then later I don’t have the energy to invest in dumping food into a pot? (Sometimes it is Really Hard to find motivation for effort, okay?)
When I’m going to work? My choices are limited on when to shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, et cetera. When I’m not leaving the house today? “Later” is an excellent time for all of that.
Friday was my last day of work for the month, probably. I’m laid off until May 4th, give or take (we’ll just see how things go, HR lady said with a smile…)
Thankfully I don’t have kids I’m trying to homeschool while working from home. It’s just a month-long staycation for me. I can do things! I can be productive!
…I can laze around all day in my pjs and eat microwaved frozen food and not even read a book or watch a TV show, just wander the internet aimlessly for sixteen freakin’ hours and then go back to bed…
That right there? That’s the thing I don’t want. The thing I will do, if I let myself.
I’m not judging if that’s what you’re doing. All these “If you’re home for a month and don’t do the thing, you never lacked time, you lacked discipline” a$$holes can BITE ME. Life is hard right now. We’re all scared. We don’t need that freakin’ coping-strategy shaming. You take care of you! If you don’t, who will? If you don’t, how can you take care of anyone else?
I’m talking about me, here. I will not feel better if I do the 16-hours-on-the-internet thing. I won’t feel safer, more satisfied, more content, less freaked out–I will just feel like a slug. So I’m trying to do stuff. As we all too recently proved, though, I am not a marathoner in the Motivational Olympics. I’m lucky if I can get myself to do a couple sprints. So I need a plan–and that plan will not be the giant List of Doom 2: Revenge of the List.
That didn’t go so well (I mean, it started great…)
Anywhooo.
So I’m trying to come up with routines. Little things I’ll do every day, like hoe some weeds in the yard early in the morning. Work on getting the shed a wee bit more organized each time I go out there. Get ready for my container garden IF MY SEEDS EVER GET HERE HELLO??
Ahem. Big, difficult jobs will be broken down, so I’m doing a little each day. I’ll set a time for that, and a time for easier stuff like a one-day project (put together exercise bike I got for cough Christmas cough, get the sewing machine set up and fix some stuff, update my blog (hi!) poke at some formatting issues in some published stuff…all that crud I never have time to do!)
Of course, I want to write. Always want to write, but how much writing I actually do… I also want to watch some TV, read some books. That’s the hard part–my best writing time is invariably at night, but if I watch a couple episodes of, say, Babylon 5 (which I happen to have bought myself for my birthday!) I’m not going to want to stop watching to go work on my own stuff. That’s why I usually do that stuff last thing before bed, but then I often don’t do it at all because I don’t admit I’m not going to get any more writing done, so by the time I’m crawling into bed I’m already way too tired to read or watch TV (and also I’ve decided I’m gonna watch Supernatural and I really don’t want to be watching it right before bed.)
Hmm, maybe dinner in between, as a transition…? I don’t usually get much of anything done in the afternoons anyway…
Yeah. Will ponder. And hopefully, I’ll keep reporting back. Accountability is good!
But honestly, so is that slug life…