A Slight Cold

I’ve got a slight cold, and it’s such a relief. I’d spent the weekend coming up with a new schema to through into my system, and yesterday was when the rubber was to really hit the road, and I just couldn’t. I didn’t feel like doing anything. And that’s not to say that I didn’t do anything; I did a lot. Once I got into the clear, though, I didn’t feel up to doing much, and then started to feel bad that I wasn’t interested in working on my own stuff when I had the time.

The problem has been unstructured time. I can be pretty productive when I’m working on things for work, where I have a definite time and place to work on them. But once I get work done, once I’m into “my” time, I tend to drift, rudderless, until I fall into a game, and waste my time that way. It doesn’t feel like wasting time, it feels like having fun, and it becomes something that I enjoy doing, but then I look at all of the ideas that I’ve jotted down, the list of things that I want to do sometime when I “have the time,” and get frustrated with myself. I have the time, I just don’t seem to have the wherewithal to actually do it.

I decided to put in some structure. I created a general list of what I would like to do with my unstructured time: Reading; Writing; Drawing; and Gaming. Gaming, as noted above, was taking care of itself, so really I needed to figure out how to work in the other three. I decided to try to devote an hour a day to those three areas, and dutifully started making blocks for them on the calendar.

But I knew I’d have to go a little deeper than that. I needed concrete actions to work on during those blocks, else I’d just start to drift again once I reached them. I thought a little more carefully about what I wanted to do in each area. Thinking of what I want to do or need to do in terms of areas was something I picked up from my time working with Things, and is something I’m trying to incorporate into OmniFocus, but haven’t quite done yet.

With Reading, I really wanted to get back in the habit of reading more books. The Books app now has a reading goal, which defaults to 20 minutes a day, so I decided that 20 minutes of my reading hour would be spent reading a book. I devoted the remaining forty minutes to checking my RSS feeds, my Read Later queue, and then Reddit, WordPress, and Tumblr. I’m trying to get away from checking social media as a default downtime activity. I’d rather I was writing or drawing when we hit a lull. By giving social media its own designated time, then maybe I could teach myself to do something else when I get bored.

To be clear, boredom is the enemy. It always has been the enemy. I was lucky as a kid, in that I could entertain myself pretty well, but even then, I’d go through phases of not knowing what to do, what I wanted to do. Maybe that’s an autistic trait, wanting do something but not knowing what that might be. Anyway, hitting those patches is always hard, feeling like life is slipping by and you’re just sitting there, staring off into space.

I built similar actions for writing and drawing, doing some doodling or free writing to get started, then working on processing notes or a drawing exercise, and then working on a larger project. I feel like these are still vague, but I’m hoping that once we get into them, we’ll start seeing how to flesh things out. I think the pump needs to be primed a little bit before it really starts working.

A big stumbling block was how to incorporate this into the system. Originally, I was thinking large top level blocks on the calendar to mark off the time, and then individual actions in OmniFocus. The problem is that OmniFocus is pretty rigid, whereas the calendar is much more fluid. It’s easy to move a block on the Calendar, and harder to continually move actions around in OmniFocus. I ended up breaking down the larger blocks on the calendar into smaller blocks, one for each action. This way I can get the flow of working with the calendar, and the actions I need to push against to get traction in OmniFocus.

It was disappointing yesterday to finally get a chance to try the new system out, and have it not work quite right. I did the reading just fine, but when I got to the writing and the drawing, I was sorta “meh” about the whole thing, and ended up going grocery shopping instead. I spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out what was wrong, why it wasn’t working, and honestly, getting a little down on myself for not having whatever I was lacking to actually work on stuff. It was a relief that evening to realize that I had a slight cold, that I wasn’t falling down mentally, but physically, and in a way that was beyond my control.

Today I feel really sick. A slight cold sick. I’m already done with work, and I’m getting ready to tuck into my reading. Reading is a good thing to do when you’re not feeling well. We’ll see how I feel once I get to the writing and drawing parts. They are really the important parts, the real things that I’m trying to accomplish within the scope of the day. I’ve already written this, which is more than I’ve writing in one sitting in a long time. I just need to give myself a little grace, take it easy, and keep moving forward, one step at a time.