Tag: priorities

All The Things [en]

I’m writing this blog post thanks to Jeffrey. Because I kind of said I’d be able to blog today, and it’s just a bit past 8.30pm, the dishes are done, the cat has had his meds and insulin (so have I – the meds, not the insulin), even the clean laundry is in the cupboard. So instead of clumsily playing through practice deals on Funbridge or hanging out on the socials, I’m here writing.

I’ve been sick most of the last week. Two days down under a post-vaccine ton of bricks (I’d kind of wilfully forgotten how nasty my 2nd and 3rd Covid boosters had been when I decided to start getting the shots again), but a sore throat before that, and after that, and a lost voice because I talked too much on said sore throat, some lingering fever, and now a nasty cough. Anyway. It’s getting better but my friend codeine and I have had to start hanging out again.

I’ve been back to work, three half-days a week, since mid-October. It’s going pretty much as expected, meaning OK, but tiring. Work, but also “just life”. Even before my accident, I struggled with the fact that I had too many wants for the time life gives us. Having less energy all these last months has put this issue on the front of the scene – in addition to the fact it is tightly linked to the complications I developed after my accident. And now that most of the symptoms have abated, and that I’m feeling more “back to normal” each month, my expectations of what I should be able to do are rising fast beyond where they should be remaining.

So, I’m trying to tackle the issue. A few things are becoming clear. One is that everybody seems to be struggling to stay on top of their lives, not only us hyperactives. There is something about the world we live in that drags us along: so many opportunities and temptations, the incentive to be happy, live a meaningful life, take care of oneself but also of others, pursue success but also slow down. But there is also the increasing administrative complexity of our lives. Technology has made it easier for me to pay my bills (in Switzerland at least: open letter, whip out phone, scan QR code, confirm, done), but it has also contributed (hand in hand with runaway capitalism applied to everything, from private companies to public services) to irrevocably breaking the processes that make things happen in our organisations. Any interaction becomes a bureaucratic nightmare. And it’s not just because the person on the phone (if there is one) is a script-fed robot (they aren’t always, by far, at least here), but because the systems are broken, tasks get lost, not mentioning bugs in the software, and nobody knows how the whole machine is supposed to work anymore so it can be fixed.

So when I want to move my insurance 3rd pillar into a normal one, it takes me 4 phone calls and e-mails over 3 months to make it happen. And each time the person on the end of the line is listening well, taking the issue seriously, looking for traces of my last contact (gone), asking for some information again, promising me that they are on it and that this time, the order is underway and will be dealt with.

This is just one example. You have yours, too, I’m sure. I remember a time when I could call customer service, wait on hold for a bit, and have my problem solved. Now I call customer service with a question, they actually create an additional problem on top of the one I was trying to solve, I spend an hour on the phone with them first in disbelief trying to clarify that they actually did do the stupid thing I feared they would do but they assured me they wouldn’t, getting them to admit it was a mistake, escalate me to somebody who actually can’t do anything for me that I couldn’t do myself.

This, of course, is a separate problem from the fact I want to Do All The Things, but it doesn’t help. Because on top of working to earn a living, we need to spend hours managing the Admin of Life. Those hours are not available for other stuff.

You should listen to the podcast episode Your Call Is Important to Us by 99% Invisible. Years ago I tried launching the World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day. And I can totally see myself doing Admin Nights at my coworking space (listen to the podcast). Amongst all the other things I want to organise there: board game afternoons, puzzle days, drop-in tea parties…

All The Things, see.

I realised, recently, that my expectation that I should be able to find a way to manage my life and feel reasonably on top of things was most certainly an illusion. It’s not me who is failing, it’s the objective that’s out of touch with reality. You know, just like we realised at one point that it wasn’t fair to make women believe they could have a full-time work life (“like men”), be great invested parents, manage the household and have hobbies and take care of themselves, oh yeah, and social life. So, I’m trying to accept that there will always be something falling through the cracks. Instead of building a system without any cracks, I need to shift into building a system that allows for them.

Maybe I can officially decide that I’m not checking that the reimbursements from the insurance for the cats‘ medical bills are correct. I don’t do it, but it’s always on my to-do list, because one should check this kind of thing to run personal finances well, right? So, a type of management that is less airtight, but with safety nets. Which takes into account that of all the balls we are juggling, some are glass and cannot be dropped, whilst others are rubber and will bounce back up if we let them escape.

One of the ways I’ve tried to tackle my “activity overload” issue is by readjusting my expectations. How many hikes in a year? How many times can I actually manage to go to judo per month? How many stays at the chalet? How many blog posts a month? Using historical data seemed a good place to start. My calendar is not very reliable for that, because I sometimes make plans I don’t follow, and they stay in the calendar – or go off on a hike with a friend on the week-end and hadn’t written it down. But my Google Timeline know where I was, and when. I exported it, chopped it up so I had just the couple of years I was interested in in a file (the whole thing is massive), and fed it to Gemini along with an export of my calendar. I usually use ChatGPT, but I had the hope that Gemini might be able to plug into my Google Photos and get some extra data from there – but no luck, not for me. I stuck with Gemini because it clearly did a way better job than ChatGPT analysing my data. Of course, as usual with LLMs, what seemed like a straightforward missing turned into a long series of prompts and reprompts, but I’m happy to say I did get somewhere, with less anguish and more fun (if not less time) than if I had painstakingly done it by hand.

All the while I had the nagging feeling that maybe I was tackling this wrong. A feeling that I was hovering around the entrance of a rabbit-hole signposted “over-engineering”. I confess, I’m no stranger to this flaw.

I know I need to set priorities. Priorities is the issue on a daily basis. Do I take time to write, or rest? Do I spend time with the cat outside or do a puzzle? Do I see a friend or write a blog post? Do I deal with my taxes next week-end or pick up the future of blogging/socials ball and write about that? Or spend some time volunteering in the diabetic cat community? Or…? Or…? And so on.

So far it’s become clear to me that as long as my life priorities are not sorted, it’s going to make choosing between writing a blog post, sorting through my boxes of stuff, hiking or seeing a friend pretty tricky. People keep telling me that I have too much on my plate and I need to drop something, but there is nothing there I feel like I can drop. I’m not going to stop judo. I’m not going to shut down the diabetic cat community. I’m not going to stop writing, or skiing, or hiking, or sailing. I’m not going to stop having friends. And so on… again.

Priorities. What is most important? What is less important? What is more meaningful to me? It hit me today that beyond the pervasive Life Overwhelm of our times, the way this difficulty to choose and prioritise expresses itself in my life is that I am interested in too many things. It may sound trivial said like this, but it’s not. I suffer from too much “want”, too much “oh, how exciting”, “love this”. It’s as if my threshold for something to be interesting was very very low. It doesn’t take much to get me interested! Just like I’m an easy customer when it comes to food, I’m an easy customer for many things. This feels like it must be related to the “ADHD weak filter” which makes it difficult to distinguish between signal and noise amongst the available information. Maybe I’m stretching things a bit, but for me, it’s as if my “filter” for what is something I want to do or am interested in is letting pretty much everything through, resulting in this deluge of “wants”, projects, interests, etc. (The “weak filter” has advantages when it comes to thinking outside the box or being creative, but that’s another story). So, maybe in addition to setting some guidelines and realistic expectations for the operational management of my time (e.g. max n social activities in a given week), it would make sense to work on that filter a bit, and make it a little more discriminating.

I can’t make my ADHD go away. However, what I can do is identify which core needs these various activities satisfy, or not, for example. Maybe, when I then look at my overall activity schedule (hi Gemini), I will notice that it is lopsided, in terms of which needs are met or underrepresented. This would be a way of tightening my filter a bit. Another angle that is important is if a given activity or interest requires regularity to be feasible. This is easy, with physical activities: if I’m doing judo, I need to train regularly enough. I can’t just “go and do judo” twice a year – my body won’t let me. Same with hiking and skiing, they require a certain level of fitness that comes from regular practice. Blogging, however, can be neglected for months or years and then come back to. Not surprisingly, activities that don’t require regular practice might be more likely to be deprioritised, although they might actually be important.

I’m a firm believer in tracking things. Get that feedback loop going first, rather than just set objectives and despair trying to reach them. How things are now is a great starting point for introducing incremental changes in the desired direction. So, for example, this last week or so I’ve been thinking I should track my hours of intense interaction (because although I enjoy it, it exhausts me) and also, how much time I write, when I do write. I know I already blogged (more than once probably) about the problem of monster blog posts like this one, versus shorter writing. See, I’ve been writing for two hours now. Crazy, right, when you think it took you about 10 minutes or so to get down to here if you’re reading everything. I’m hungry (yes I had dinner, I’m hungry again/already) and tired.

So, although I would have many more things to say (see, another filter thing: each day brings at least 2-3 blog post ideas – keeping up is just not possible unless I spend all my time writing…), I will wrap up this blog post, pick a title for it, publish, and go to bed.

With a bit of luck I’ll blog again soon.

Finding a Balance in Office Work: Long-Term Projects [en]

[fr] Quelques réflexions sur comment je m'organise pour mon travail "de bureau", et la difficulté que j'ai à avancer sur les projets "long terme, pas urgents".

Here is an umpteenth post about my journey figuring out how to “be the boss of me” — getting work done and still having a life as a freelancer.

Honestly, I have not been doing too badly this year. It’s even been pretty good. 🙂

The other day, when I was catching up with Suw, I told her that I was now pretty competent at managing my days, but not that good at looking beyond that. What I mean is that I have a system to keep track of the next things I need to do, and I’m much better than I used to be at evaluating what can get done in a given day. I still tend to be a bit ambitious, but overall my “day plans” are pretty realistic.

Proof of that, in my opinion:

  • I now very rarely have a day where I’m “running” or “scrambling”
  • I rarely have to work during the week-end or the evening to do stuff that “absolutely needs to get done and I haven’t managed to squeeze it in yet”.

So, the next step is the week. I’m still using maker days and manager days (it’s not perfect, sometimes I give in and sacrifice a maker day, but overall I’m getting increasingly better at sticking to my plan). What I’d like to think about here (you read me right, I’m writing this post to think something over) is what I do (or try to do) during my office “maker” days.

Here’s what I’ve identified so far:

  1. daily business: checking e-mails, taking phone calls, hanging out on Twitter/IM, responding to prospective clients, journalists, people who want to pick my brains, dealing with little emergencies, reading stuff online
  2. “regular” paid work: these are gigs that are long-term and require a little work every day or every week at least, and therefore fall in the “daily business” category too, but are for a client who is paying
  3. my projects: taking care of eclau, Bloggy Fridays
  4. my “promotional” stuff: blogging, keeping my websites up-to-date (technically and content-wise — ahem), writing, planning ebooks but not writing them, preparing general documentation to promote what I do to prospective clients, research
  5. accounting and administrivia: personal and professional, including writing to the gérance to ask them to change the windows so we can save on heating
  6. support network: I have a bunch of friends I’m in regular contact with to talk things over (their things, my things)

OK, the list is a bit messy, but it’s a start. I know that one thing that can usually “kill” an office day is when I’m asked to do a one-off, time-limited gig by a client: for example, a 2-4 hour WordPress training/coaching session. The reason for that is that this kind of gig pays immediately: shortest path to money. So usually, when I make exceptions and kill a maker day, it’s because there is immediate money at stake (as long as it doesn’t compromise the work I need to do for my “regular” paying clients, of course).

Items 1, 2, 3 and 6 of the list above are not really a source of trouble right now. I mean, that’s what I spend my time doing.

Items 4 and 5, on the other hand, are problematic: I keep falling behind. In the case of accounting and administrivia, as they are something I get in trouble about if I don’t do them for long enough, every now and again I go “gosh, am behind, gotta spend a day on it” and I get it done. But I have trouble with regularity (less and less though, to be fair with myself).

The big painful one is what I call “my promotional stuff”. It’s long-term. If I don’t do it, there are no direct consequences. It does not involve other people. Summary:

  • it’s for me, so it tends to end up less high priority than all the rest that is “for others”;
  • no time constraints, so it is less high priority than emergencies and deadlines;
  • some of it is actually difficult for me (preparing promotional copy for example).

So, here are some of the items that are on this long-suffering list of things I want to do but never get around to doing because there is always more urgent stuff to take care of:

  • upgrade WordPress and plugins on a bunch of my sites
  • do something about the horribly out-of-date content on my professional site (organize another WPD?)
  • get a proper lifestream up and running (as Nathalie aptly put it earlier this morning, “FriendFeed is nice and all, but I never go there”)
  • start writing the blasted ebook 😉
  • write more fiction
  • write up shiny material explaining what I do (including “terms and conditions”) that I can send or give out to my clients and prospects (including sending stuff to schools saying “I give talks” and “looking for somebody to teach a few hours on social media over the next academic year?”)
  • catch up with my photo uploading on Flickr (in a way, yes, this also ends up being a “promotional” activity)
  • blog more (you’re getting tired of hearing it, but look, it’s working).

I’ve tried a few times to state (to myself, that is) “Friday afternoon is for administrivia and accounting” but weeks are so short that my resolve usually falls down the drain. I’m thinking that I should firewall time to work on these “longer-term” projects each week — but again, I look at my calendar and think “ugh”. A day a week? Sounds like a minimum when I look at the list right above, but quite impossible when I think of what my usual weeks are like. On the other hand, I do have (what feels to me like) quite a relaxed workstyle, so maybe if I did firewall a day off I’d discover I’m perfectly capable of dealing with the rest of my work on the other four days.

So, the questions for me remain:

  • how many office days vs. meeting days in a week? (right now I try to have three office days, but don’t always manage)
  • what’s the best way to build in time for long-term projects which tend to stagnate at the bottom of the priority list? (firewall a day or half a day off each week, or every two weeks, or something else…)

Dear readers: your insight is much appreciated. How do you do this? Do you do it? What have you tried? How did you fail? How did you succeed?

Getting Things Done: It's Just About Stress [en]

[fr] Getting Things Done: non pas un moyen d'accomplir plus de choses, mais un moyen de passer moins de temps sur ce qu'on a décidé qu'on devait accomplir. Moins de stress. Plus de liberté. Plus de temps à soi.

Anne seems to have struck a chord with thing #8 she hates about web 2.0:

Getting Things Done. The productivity virus so many of us have been infected with in 2006 and 2007. Let’s move on. Getting lots of stuff done is not the way to achieve something important. You could be so busy planning next actions that you miss out on what your real contribution should be.

Stowe, Shelley and Ken approve.

It’s funny, but reading their posts makes GTD sound like “a way to do an even more insane number of things.”

Huh?

That’s not at all the impression I got when I read and started using GTD. To me, GTD is “a solution to finally be able to enjoy free time without feeling bogged down by a constant feeling of guilt over everything I should already have done.”

Maybe not everyone has issues doing things. If you don’t have trouble getting stuff out of the way, then throw GTD out of the window and continue enjoying life. You don’t need it.

But for many people, procrastination, administrivia piling up, not-enough-time-for-stuff-I-enjoy-doing and commitments you know you’re not going to be able to honour are a reality, and a reality that is a source of stress. I, for one, can totally relate to:

Most people have been in some version of this mental stress state so consistently, for so long, that they don’t even know they’re in it. Like gravity, it’s ever-present–so much so that those who experience it usually aren’t even aware of the pressure. The only time most of them will realize how much tension they’ve been under is when they get rid of it and notice how different it feels.

David Allen, Getting Things Done

GTD, as I understand it, isn’t about cramming more on your plate. It’s about freeing yourself of what’s already on it, doing the dishes straight after the meal and spending your whole afternoon walking by the lake with a friend without this nagging feeling that you should rather be at home dealing with the paperwork, but you just don’t want to face it.

Here are the very few sentences of “Welcome to Getting Things Done“, the forward to GTD (and yeah, there’s a bit of an upbeat, magical-recipe tone to it, but bear with me):

Welcome to a gold mine of insights into strategies for how to have more energy, be more relaxed, and get a lot more accomplished with much less effort. If you’re like me, you like getting things done and doing them well, and yet you also want to savor life in ways that seem increasingly elusive if not downright impossible if you’re working too hard.

David Allen, Getting Things Done

And a bit further down the page:

And whatever you’re doing, you’d probably like to be more relaxed, confident that whatever you’re doing at the moment is just what you need to be doing–that having a beer with your staff after hours, gazing at your sleeping child in his or her crib at midnight, answering the e-mail in front of you, or spending a few informal minutes with the potential new client after the meeting is exactly what you ought to be doing, as you’re doing it.

David Allen, Getting Things Done

I don’t hear anything in there about “doing more things is better” or “you should be doing things all the time”. The whole point of GTD is to get rid of stuff so that it’s done and you can then go off to follow your heart’s desire. It’s about deciding not to do stuff way before you reach the point where it’s been on your to-do list stressing you for six months, and you finally decide to write that e-mail and say “sorry, can’t”.

That frees your mind and your calendar for what is really important in your life (be it twittering your long-distance friends, taking photographs of cats, spending time with people you love or working on your change-the-world project).

You’ll notice that I didn’t use the word “productivity” in this post a single time. “Productivity” is a word businesses like. If people are “productive”, it means you get to squeeze more out of them for the same price. That isn’t an idea I like. But being “productive” can also simply be understood to mean that it takes you less time to do the things that you’ve decided you needed to do. In that way, yes, GTD is a productivity method. But I think that calling it that does it disservice, because people hear “squeezing more out of ya for the same $$$” and go “eek, more stress”.

Bottom line? (I like ending posts with bottom lines.) If you see GTD as something that takes away your freedom and free time, turns you into an even worse workaholic, and encourages you to become indiscriminate about interests you pursue and tasks you take on because you “can do everything”, think again — and re-read the book. If you spend your whole time fiddling with your GTD system, shopping around for another cool app to keep your next action lists in, and worrying about how to make it even more efficient, you’re missing the point. But you knew that already, didn’t you?