This is the third installment of a three part series on, time…
It’s a funny thing when you get off track. Since December, when I began feeling a bit better, I started writing out a daily schedule for myself. It has kept me focused and has helped me to better evaluate what I am doing with my time.
For the last month or so I have been a little off kilter and haven’t been able to figure out why. I have been in a daze wandering around with no real direction. Things are getting accomplished but there has been no rhyme or reason to anything that I have achieved. It dawned on me the other day that I haven’t been writing out a daily schedule lately and I traced it back to a few weeks ago when we got some hard news and had to make some big decisions and adjustments. Fortunately the news was not health related but it was a big blow none the less.
For those of you that know me this will come as no surprize but for those of you that don’t I need to inform you that I am a bit of an emoter. You cry, I cry, you laugh, I laugh… I feel stuff. Well since cancer, the subsequent menopause and the whole no estrogen thing, well, let’s just say that when things go awry I can become a bit of a mess. When the afore mentioned situation settled a bit I thought I was ok. I got going again and kept moving forward… or so I thought.
The truth is that although I am in motion, I haven’t had any real direction and even though things are getting accomplished it has been quite a struggle to keep my mind focused on where I need to go next. It dawned on me the other day that I hadn’t written out a daily schedule for myself in weeks. Writing down what I needed to get done for the day and having something tangible to look at that reminded me where I needed to be at certain times and kept me focused, on track and gave me something to check off when I was done.
Without the schedule I have no frame of reference, no box to check to show myself what I have accomplished and no answer for how I spent my time on any given day. My brain either due to age or chemo is not firing on all cylinders. I have spent the last several months sorting photos, scanning negatives and cleaning out almost all the crevices in our home, but if you ask me what I did on any given day I had no answer. I just can’t seem to recall details like I used to. I don’t know about you but when you begin to think about how you are spending your time and you can’t come up with any answers, it’s kind of depressing. I was feeling kind of worthless and unuseful and lame.
I don’t recall ever feeling this way before, the need to validate my actions or inactions. All I know is that these days I like keeping a schedule and I know now that I need to be on the lookout for when life gets in the way I need to stick to what I know is good for me and keeps me sane so that I can step back, evaluate my situation and then get back to what helps me process life better.
I like knowing what I am doing and I like having a list that I can visibly see and check off and know for sure what I have done for today and what I will get done for tomorrow. I’m not so tied to the schedule that I beat myself up when things come up and something gets left undone, I just add whatever got missed to my schedule for the next day and keep moving forward.
What about you? What methods do you use to keep yourself on track?
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