Whenever I look at my lists of New Year's Resolutions (and just plain resolutions) from the past several years, there is a common theme. Be More Organised And Disciplined. And Relax More. The two are a bit contradictory.
I know from what friends have said that I come across as an organised and disciplined person. But inside I don't feel organised and disciplined. I feel like I never really have a handle on life, and my organisation is a way of keeping the inevitable chaos at bay. It's as if my life is a crowded cupboard where the contents are straining against the door, and the slightest touch of the handle will cause them to spring out. I feel like I have to struggle to stay in control of everything, all the time (which is possibly one reason why I have my door-and-appliance-checking compulsions).
I think this need I have for everything to be organised and under control stems in part from growing up in Zimbabwe. My mum has this too. We lived in such chaos there, and everything seemed to impermanent - I was aware that our 'normal' lives could crumble at any moment. There was craziness happening all around us. Everything was so unpredictable. I almost used to crave boredom. I envied people the luxury of being bored. I couldn't be bored, because I didn't feel safe enough to (if that makes sense). When you are painfully aware that 'anything can happen to anyone, at any time' (to quote Arundhati Roy), you can't be complacent.
We tried to combat this feeling by taking charge of the things we had some power over. Like cleaning the house. Performing our little rituals for safety at night (locking the doors and windows, bolting the doors and windows, locking the rape gate, setting the burglar alarm). Hoarding groceries that we might not have been able to get the following week, like sugar and bread. Hoarding petrol. It was an endless battle to keep on top of it all, as much as we could. We were piling up little sandbags of organisation and security against the flood that we knew was coming, sooner or later.
This has carried over into our lives in New Zealand. For a while, when we first arrived here, I felt nervous and jumpy all the time. It was leftover adrenaline from Zimbabwe, which had no concrete thing to focus on. Over time, this faded. But I still have a need to organise, file, hoard, obsessively prepare. I don't ever feel like I'm doing enough.
I don't think I'll ever shake some of my old habits, like: clutching my handbag tightly when I walk in public; locking the car doors while I'm driving; getting jumpy and nervous when my petrol tank is less than half-full; obsessively checking the house doors are locked; feeling nervous going out at night, even when it's to a friend's house in a safe neighbourhood.
I still want to be as organised and disciplined as I possibly can, but I don't want to feel guilty about it when I let things slide a little. I want to be content with some chaos in my life, because it's not possible to be completely in control of everything all the time, and trying to achieve the impossible is only going to make me feel discouraged.
And I still want to learn to relax.
Working on it.
Showing posts with label organisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organisation. Show all posts
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Home-work
I am in full-on organisation mode! After moping about for a while this afternoon thinking about the progress I'm making on the book, I decided that I need to set myself a stricter schedule, as I did when I was working on the first draft. So here's what I have worked out - two chapters a day. Finish by 3 August. Do a final read-through in the first week of August, making sure all the changes are ticked off. Send to my advisor on 10 August.
Self-motivation is hard. I'm getting better at it, but it's still hard.
Andrea's Tips on Working From Home, In No Particular Order, Which Aren't All That Revolutionary, But Are Fun to List:
1) Get dressed as if you were going to an actual workplace (well, pretty much - it can be a zany, creative imaginary workplace rather than a corporate, suity one. But dress so that if you were suddenly called out to a meeting, you could go with only minor adjustments). Psychologically, this gets you in work-mode.
2) Drink lots of coffee.
3) Set a daily timetable, with breaks scheduled in. I don't work an eight-hour day, because I find I get too drained creatively - instead, I work from 10am to 6pm, with an hour for lunch and two half-hour breaks. So I end up working a six-hour day.
4) Install a cat. They produce useful warmth and a pleasant working environment.
5) Get a housework schedule established and stick to it. It's so easy to get distracted from working by the sudden, urgent need to pair all your socks or clean the back of the toilet cistern with an old toothbrush or alphabetise the spices. This is known as procrastination, and is a Bad Thing.
6) Make sure family and friends know that, although you are working from home, you are still working and are not eternally available to run errands, meet them for coffee at the drop of a hat or have long phone conversations. Of course, sometimes you will want to do things. But you need to protect your time, or else it will become fair game and you will end up driving your mother's dog to the groomers' every week (speaking from personal experience).
7) Get out of the house regularly! Go for a walk. Get some fresh air. Otherwise you will go stir-crazy.
8) Stop working in the evenings and on weekends, just as you would in a more conventional workplace. It's easy to over-work when your 'office' is only one second's walk from your bedroom. And over-working plays havoc with your health, peace of mind and relationships. It also means you'll burn out at some point. I used to pull late-nighters when I was in the first throes of writing this book, but I soon figured out that it made me tired, cranky and creatively useless after a few days.
9) Eat properly and resist the urge to snack endlessly as a distraction or because the fridge is just so ... damn ... close.
10) Reward yourself when you reach your own milestones! It's fun, and gives you a sense of achievement and progress. And no one else will. (Although they should).
Self-motivation is hard. I'm getting better at it, but it's still hard.
Andrea's Tips on Working From Home, In No Particular Order, Which Aren't All That Revolutionary, But Are Fun to List:
1) Get dressed as if you were going to an actual workplace (well, pretty much - it can be a zany, creative imaginary workplace rather than a corporate, suity one. But dress so that if you were suddenly called out to a meeting, you could go with only minor adjustments). Psychologically, this gets you in work-mode.
2) Drink lots of coffee.
3) Set a daily timetable, with breaks scheduled in. I don't work an eight-hour day, because I find I get too drained creatively - instead, I work from 10am to 6pm, with an hour for lunch and two half-hour breaks. So I end up working a six-hour day.
4) Install a cat. They produce useful warmth and a pleasant working environment.
5) Get a housework schedule established and stick to it. It's so easy to get distracted from working by the sudden, urgent need to pair all your socks or clean the back of the toilet cistern with an old toothbrush or alphabetise the spices. This is known as procrastination, and is a Bad Thing.
6) Make sure family and friends know that, although you are working from home, you are still working and are not eternally available to run errands, meet them for coffee at the drop of a hat or have long phone conversations. Of course, sometimes you will want to do things. But you need to protect your time, or else it will become fair game and you will end up driving your mother's dog to the groomers' every week (speaking from personal experience).
7) Get out of the house regularly! Go for a walk. Get some fresh air. Otherwise you will go stir-crazy.
8) Stop working in the evenings and on weekends, just as you would in a more conventional workplace. It's easy to over-work when your 'office' is only one second's walk from your bedroom. And over-working plays havoc with your health, peace of mind and relationships. It also means you'll burn out at some point. I used to pull late-nighters when I was in the first throes of writing this book, but I soon figured out that it made me tired, cranky and creatively useless after a few days.
9) Eat properly and resist the urge to snack endlessly as a distraction or because the fridge is just so ... damn ... close.
10) Reward yourself when you reach your own milestones! It's fun, and gives you a sense of achievement and progress. And no one else will. (Although they should).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
