I made a couple of quiet resolutions for 2018. If I have to be honest, I didn’t even really define or quantify them very specifically, mostly because I did just that last year, and that was just a way to set myself up for failure. Instead, I gently resolved to steer myself toward more contentment, and identified some ways in which that could happen.
One of those ways was to set clear limits on how much work I work. That is because I realised at some point last year that I am addicted to working, and that I will work for the sake of working. Unfortunately, and worse, I also realised that I am an incredibly inefficient worker. That’s probably because I had given myself access to all these extra hours of potential labour. Which meant that I faffed around a lot, created unnecessary work for myself, and spent a big part of my life feeling guilty or anxious that I did not get to that One.Very.Important.Thing (which, I now realise, was never that important to start with). And I didn’t delegate and outsource nearly as much as I should have.
But I’m much smarter in 2018, and I now know that the world will keep on turning even if I don’t work all the flipping time. So far, it has been remarkably easy to adjust. For example, at the end of last year one of the goals for the holiday was to get through enough strategy co-ordination to hit the ground running on January 8. Which hardly sounds like a holiday at all! Luckily for me, as soon as I felt that sand in between my toes, all motivation for work evaporated, and I just relaxed as much as I could. I did have a couple of meetings and sessions last week, but that was still on the back-end of work done last year. And I have done very, very little work to prepare for 2018. And you know what? I am ok with that.
Now, the old me would have spent this weekend working flat-out to prepare for a full week of work starting tomorrow. The new me said “Nope!”. Instead, I am taking the full week next week to prepare the groundwork for the next 12 months, and I will only start implementing that the week after. So I am a week behind schedule. Tough cookies.
And as it stands, I thus had a great weekend! Every time I reflexively reached for my computer to work, I gave myself a mental slap. Instead, I cooked (!), played board games with my kids, did mosaics with them, watched a couple of shows, read a LOT, and …lots of fun, this…spent some time figuring out what I want to do with this blog and how (and no, that is definitely not work!). That took me down the rabbit hole of other bloggers (there is so much good stuff out there, but also so much crap!), as well as endless clicks through Pinterest (that site is dangerous!).
Now it is Sunday night. My kids are in bed, I’m ready for the week and I am finding great joy in writing this post without worrying that I should be doing work-work instead. If I keep up this attitude, and force myself to work efficiently and smartly during normal working hours, I am going to have a really fun 2018 indeed!
(May 2020 update: TL;DR…It was not a fun 2018 after all. Gerald, Craig’s dad passed away shortly after this post, I was diagnosed with Waldenstrom a couple of months later, and things just kind of went downhill from there. In fact…they never went uphill again. I’d probably be saying that I am only now making a full recovery from all that followed this post, but now we are in the middle of a global pandemic and a lockdown. So things are not perfect, they are weird, and apparently have been for over two years. Bleh)
