Dear Reader,
There's this mythical state of equilibrium between one's work and their life. I have yet to see anyone achieve it. I think it is something that happens only for the very wealthy, who live rather disconnected from reality on many levels to the point that they are entirely separate creatures in this world. For the rest of us, we have scheduling nightmares, sleepless nights, and early mornings where we're trying to squeeze in the time to do the Great Work of our lives. It is no wonder that many talented souls are laboring in anonymity when they barely have time to work.
The thing that works for me is a heavily regimented schedule. It starts in the morning with my attending household needs and breakfast. Then I jump into my journal work. After that I hit my blogging work. Following an hour of blogging work, I engage in what ever work I must do on my present manuscript in progress. (Book three of the side project has just finished the initial draft stage and I'm about to start revisions. Hopefully, I can get all three cleaned up and ready by my deadline which is the end of the month. Keep your fingers crossed for me. This is the first time I'm working on a deadline since college.)
One may ask, what about the afternoons? Well, during the afternoon, I have one blog that I make multiple posts to in an effort to draw attention to my tarot reading side gig. When I'm not typing up posts for that blog or reading cards for somebody, I am doing housework or crafting. I also am constantly thinking about what I am going to be writing next and making notes in my bullet journal. All of this, combined with some marathon writing sessions on the weekends when I am not doing tarot reading, serves to allow me to get my content up and out for people like you to read.
Sticking with this very strict schedule is hard for me. I have alternate versions of the schedule for different days when there are interruptions. There's my Monday to Friday ordinary day schedule that I described above. Then there is my Monday to Friday distance learning schedule that I spend more time in journal work as I am supervising my kids with their school work. And then I have my weekend schedule. It has been almost a month of working on this schedule and it's been somewhat successful.
Except for when a wrench gets thrown into the works and somebody has an appointment or there are errands to be run. In the event of something popping up to utterly throw my daily schedule into disarray, I give myself permission to step back away from the strict schedule and just do my best to try to get some of it done. Some days, like last Friday, I didn't get any blogging done because I was so busy running around doing other stuff. I don't try to separate my work and my life schedules.
I work to incorporate them into each other to allow for flexibility despite my need for regimentation in my day to be successful. If I have learned anything from 2020, it is that I need a real schedule to make real progress on anything. So, in 2021, I am organizing and pushing myself, even on my bad days, to stick with the schedule. The weekends are when I try to catch up on what I missed during the week and try to get the jump on what I need to do during the next week. It's a lot of work but doing things that way is getting results.
Because I have health conditions to monitor, a business I am running part-time, my writing work, and a household to manage, my day planner is the ultimate tool. I work for the redundancy department, so I also have bullet journals for my writing work and for my business reading tarot cards. I also note things up on the calendar hanging on the wall. It is about an hour worth of work at the end of the month to reconcile everything and get everything prepared for the next month. It used to be longer but Beloved printed off templates for me to use in my day planner. My bullet journals are very stripped down and Spartan in their organization. I thread topics and pages back to my day planner which is the center of this web of organization. It's like I have a murder wall in the form of a pile of notebooks.
Some people use digital tools to organize everything. I was using the calendar feature on my phone to monitor when bills had to get paid and such, but then I got a new phone and that information didn't port over. So, I'm back to putting it in my day planner and writing it on the wall calendar. My method of organizing everything is not going to work for every body. Not everyone has a pile of notebooks they can use. (I won a huge pile of notebooks a few years ago in a silent auction. I'm still working through it. And, of course, sometimes I see something cute that I pick up. I now own two llama themed notebooks that are adorable. I don't know what I'm going to use them for, but Beloved has called me a notebook addict.)
What ever method you use to organize and stay on top of your life's activities, careful organization and planning are they key to getting most of what you want to do done. Some people work better with regimented schedules and lists of what needs done. Other people work better with a free-form routine and a few notes about what's going on. In both cases, the common theme is they are taking charge of their time and making a point of using it as wisely as they can accomplish. As I stated in a previous post, if you plan things like they did for the storming of Normandy, you can get a world of things done with out it being in panic mode all the time. Make sure that you schedule time for breaks and time for when the schedule breaks down because of outside influences. Also, remember, life is for living. If your not taking time for things that give you pleasure, adjust your schedule so that you can do so. Because just grinding away with out any reward is going to wear down your soul.
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