Life Gets In the Way of THE WORK.

Hi there,

Nothing is quite so frustrating as when LIFE gets in the way of working on what you want to. When
your scheduled writing time gets eaten by morning chores or dawdling children trying to get out of going to school, you may get a little irate. When your ready to sit down and do some serious plot work but you have a ton of dishes and a dirty kitchen to deal with, it makes you want to take a flame thrower to it all and live off of paper plates and take out for the rest of all time. Or when you can't sit down because there are piles of laundry needing folding all over the place, you may seriously contemplate becoming a nudist despite the fact that the temperatures run into the negative digits where you live.

It is as though you have been wished a death of a thousand paper cuts. With the paper cuts replaced with annoyances. And it is very hard to DO THE WORK when you have to do the (house)work. Add on top of this any other things that suck the life and energy out of you, like that soul crushing job you have so that you can afford those paper plate, and some days you just want to give up. The question is on what? If you give up on THE WORK, it will never get finished. If you give up on the dishes and laundry, you're going to find yourself cold and trying to eat soup with a plastic fork off of a paper plate when the temperatures dip back into negative sanity territory. And we won't talk about how ugly it would get if you didn't have the soul crushing job to allow you to have those blessed paper plates.

So, what do you give up when you feel like that is the only way to move forward? Thus far, the best answer that I have found it high expectations. You can't fold all the laundry, wash the whole kitchen, and keep that job on top of writing the greatest novel ever and keeping a half dozen blogs. There simply is not enough time. Drop that expectation down a few notches. Maybe you break that kitchen job up into a 3 day affair. Day one, spend 20 minutes on getting all those dishes done. Day two is your day for spending time chipping the gunk off of the inside of the microwave and wiping down the stove top. And day three is the time to clean out the unknown science experiments growing in the fridge and freezer. 

Turn that living room full of laundry into a multi day affair. Maybe your goal is one load of laundry a day. Or perhaps you're an eager beaver and you can get to two. If you hit three loads in one day, you are officially my hero. The thing is you need to spend your time wisely. Try not to spend it in a panic. Try to spend some of it planning your attack on the mundane elements of your life like you may plan epic fight scenes. My bullet journal helps with some of the planning. So does FLYLady. But the biggest help is setting myself up with reasonable expectations.

Now, if you excuse me, I have to fold a load of laundry between blog posts and then get the kids off the bus. Who knows, maybe one of the boys will help me wash some dishes.