Falling off and Getting back on Track

Now that I am healing a little more each day (not that I want to jinx it), I wanted to share a little bit about what I did with my schedule when things got a bit crazy and how I am recovering.

I’ve written about my notebooks and my schedule before and while both of them get tweaked and updated regularly, I still stick to most of what’s outlined there. I still use my notebooks and have daily, weekly, monthly plans that I follow regularly.

Before the chaos at work began, I was doing these:

• daily exercise (2.5 miles a day for March)
• daily journaling
• daily sketching
• daily reading to David
• daily art/craft blogging
• 5days/week strength exercises
• 5days/week 5-minute meditation
• 5days/week thoughts blogging
• 2 art journal pages a week
• 1 collage page a week
• weekly savor project
• weekly family shots
• week-long photos of my kids and then weekend blog update with all of them
• monthly assignments for OLW and MMEW
• plus reading, scrappy assignments, manufacturer blog posts, etc.

I know this looks like a lot but I was able to manage it relatively well on my regular schedule. Each of these tasks takes a small amount of time and you can see on my schedule that I work on them early morning and late nights. And then catch up on the weekends.

But then I got the problem at work and started working pretty much around the clock. At first, I was still at home and tried to continue doing some of these (like sketching and strength exercises) but then things got harder. I started going in to work and coming home late enough to go right to sleep so I could wake up, make the lunches, get the kids off to school and go back into work. And I didn’t sleep or eat much during that time. So I made an executive decision to stop doing everything on my list except a few. Here are the exceptions and why I chose them:

I continued to run each morning. That’s my non-negotiable and I haven’t gone a day without it since October 2, 2010 and pretty much nothing is going to stand in my way. After about a week, I was feeling really weak and I was having a really hard time running the whole distance. At first, I lowered it to 2 miles but another week in, I decided I would run one mile each morning. This meant my exercise was done in 10 minutes and I had no excuse not to do it and I could still keep up the habit of doing it daily. Once I started working at home again, I went back up to 2.5 miles and now that we’re in April, I’m running 2.6 miles every morning.

We still took weekly family photos. Those photos make me happy and it’s one of the few things I couldn’t make up for later. Time passes and I wanted to make sure I got the photos. We generally do these on Friday afternoon but for the weeks where I was at work, we did them Saturday morning and I am very grateful I didn’t skip this tradition. I also did the weekend updates on the blog because I have family who comes to look at them and I didn’t want to have to miss it and then have to make up for it by going through 3-weeks’ worth of photos.

I also continued The Savor Project. I took it super-simple but I still did it. This is the kind of project that builds on itself and I didn’t want to skip if I didn’t have to. Since Jake and I were still taking photos, I had stories to tell. I just picked my stories, printed the photos and kept things really simple. I spent about 1-2 hours on the weekend on this project.

One of the things I gave up really reluctantly was sketching. I have come to truly cherish my sketching time and hadn’t missed a day since January 2 so I felt bad but once I was going in to work, I knew it had to go. But I did continue doing them during the weekend and whenever else I could. As soon as I was back at home, I picked it right back up. I really enjoy this project so much.

I continued the art/craft posts in the blog because most of them were already scheduled and I just had to add a few that I was already doing. It also meant that there were things to read each day for the people who’ve been kind enough to visit me regularly. I did give up the thoughts posts just cause I didn’t want to wing them and they take time to put together. Time I didn’t have.

Everything else was put on hold.

I don’t remember if I did any art during this time (besides the occasional sketching) but certainly nothing noteworthy. I stopped doing the strength exercises, meditation, journaling, reading to david, and all other odds and ends I spent my free time on. I didn’t surf at all. I replied to almost no emails and no comments. I canceled all appointments that were on my calendar. Whenever I did choose to take some downtime, I snuggled with family or read a book.

So there you go. I thought it might help to explain some of my thinking so that you can see examples of how to adjust your own schedule as a specific deadline puts pressure on your time. I basically held on to three categories of items: nonnegotiable, overwhelming joy and compounding.

Looking back, I think it would have been good to take the time to journal or meditate (or both) but I didn’t feel capable of either at the time. In fact, it took me another week after I was home to begin journaling again.

Once I was home, I still took it a bit easy. I gave myself three days to continue on the lighter schedule and then slowly added things back in. At this point, I am almost back to my full, regular schedule. Some days are still a struggle but I am much more forgiving on myself than I was before.

I hope this helps for any of you live relatively structured like I do and who struggle with occasional time crunches.

I also have two more notes:

1. Thank you so much for all your kind words over the last few weeks. I am touched beyond words. I appreciate every single word, advice, hug, sentiment more than you will ever know. Thank you for continuing to come visit and still leave comments. I promise I will start responding again and if you’ve left me a comment with a question that went unanswered, please please ask again so I can see it and reply.

2. I am putting together a little FAQ on sketching and one on art journaling. Do you have any questions you’d like me to answer?