The Puttering Basket

The latest installment in an occasional series: how I unplugged over the weekend.

Wow. I haven’t been here for a month. And I kinda left everyone hanging in that last post about me and my unraveling sweater. What have I been up to? Well, knitting that new sweater. Which really means I’ve been doing lots and lots of thinking and planning and organizing about the coming year. And myohmy am I excited about what I’m cooking up (more to be revealed very soon).

My inspiration showed up in an urgent and compelling form. You know, when it’s almost like you aren’t choosing to work so hard to get it all down on paper, but that drive is coming from someplace else?

I’m deeply grateful for the inspiration, but making it real has been a lot of work – satisfying but exhausting (and apparently blogging-prohibitive) work. And by last Friday I was pooped. Pooped I tell you. I didn’t even bother to complete my what-do-I-need-to-finish-to-feel-good-about-this-week list. It felt better to just stop.

And I was so glad I gave myself permission to do so – then committed to doing absolutely nothing related to work for two whole days.

Basically, the past weekend was made up of lazy mornings and domestic chores and falling asleep watching movies like Young Frankenstein on TV. There’s nothing remarkable to report about it except the very experimental pear-grape crisp actually turned out to be pretty tasty – the grapes are like little plums. Oh, and we only had two trick-or-treaters, but they were the cutest little ninja and pirate you ever saw.

And what made it easier to not default to work-related tasks and keep my commitment was my growing Puttering Basket.

One of the trickiest things about unplugging is being so rusty at it. We are so much more practiced at doing our jobs. So, even when we give ourselves time to play and refill our professional wells, we don’t always know what to do with that time. And in the absence of something else compelling, we can find ourselves drifting back to work. Because it’s familiar and comfortable. Because this being-not-doing thing is awkward and weird. Which doesn’t make sense considering how much we crave it – which makes it that much more weird. Better just to go back to work where we know what we’re doing.

Except that’s hardly satisfying or sustainable.

So, in the spirit of creating a flotation device for myself that would support me in those awkward moments of not knowing what to do besides work, I made myself a Puttering Basket. Basically, my weekend rule is this: in a transitional moment when I’m not sure what I want to do next and I’m tempted to turn on the computer (which is off-limits), I have to go to the basket. I can do anything I like, so long as it’s in the basket. (Maybe that sounds confining and counter-intuitive, but having endless options is overwhelming and not helpful.)

So, obviously, it matters what’s in the basket. For the most part, it’s a toy box filled with fun stuff to do. So far, it holds:

• magazines, crosswords, playing cards and coloring books
• books to be read solely for pleasure and books for my soul
• the latest knitting project (or other crafty goodness)
• an iPod loaded with favorite music and podcasts (pairs nicely with the knitting), plus Leonie’s Dreaming Meditation in case a nap is what’s called for
• cards and stationery for sending notes to people I love
• blank paper for capturing random ideas

And here’s the most important thing I’ve learned: the puttering basket has to be stocked before the weekend. You can’t go looking for this stuff in that awkward moment of transition. You’ll just end up at your computer working. Or watching Very Bad TV. Trust me. You’re rusty, remember?

So part of my Friday closing-the-week ritual is stocking my Puttering Basket with all the fun little things I didn’t have time for during the week. The stuff I want to do, but never seem to get to.

In the end, my Puttering Basket is a good example of two of the basic organizing principles I live by:

• everything is easier if you start with a container
• everything needs two containers: storage + space on your calendar

Many of the fun little things that allow me to relax and refill my well now have a place to belong – in the basket and in my weekend. Which makes them much, much more likely to happen – and happen with ease.

What would you put in your Puttering Basket?

• • • • •

Pulling loose threads.

It’s Friday. Time for a round-up of the week’s Lessons Learned.

Except I am looking back on a murky week. There’s not much I can share with clarity. If there are lessons here, they are not learned – rather still very much in progress. But they center on this:

I let go of something this week. And it turns out that releasing something that represents an identity can bring up all sorts of unexpected weirdness. Or at least an unexpected level and quantity of weirdness. Totally did not see that coming and the space I would need to make for it.

I pulled on a what I thought was a loose thread and ended up unraveling half my sweater.

Which was mostly good. The whole point of the release was to untangle myself from certain threads connecting me to my past.

But as I kept pulling free, I found myself wanting to keep going. To unravel the ill-fitting parts of the sweater knit much more recently. Still good – ultimately – but again: did not anticipate needing to make space for that. It crowded out other planned activities in a way that was discombobulating. And left me feeling naked and vulnerable.

• • • • •

Funny how you can do your best to follow the instructions yet still end up with something not-quite-right.

Bummer. But it happens. So you figure out where you miscounted or dropped a stitch, and go back to that point and begin again.

That’s really all these Lessons Learned are about: finding those places and beginning again, now knowing what you didn’t know then.

I suppose my sense of murkiness or confusion this week is just me trying to locate that starting point.

And wondering what to wear while I rework this thing – because I need something much more cozy and comforting than half a sweater.

Luckily, I have multiple identities and roles in my life – which means I have other sweaters to choose from. I just have to remember to go to my closet and put a different one on instead of needlessly sitting here shivering, feeling all exposed to the drafts of change, in this half-knit mess.

• • • • •

The Cost of Overtime

It occurred to me at some point last week that if an employer had asked me to work several weekends in a row, I would have insisted on some sort of compensation or acknowledgment.

Time and a half. Comp time. Kudos when annual reviews/raises/promotions came around. Something.

And whatever we were working on, it better have been something truly important and urgent.

So as my own boss, I’m wondering…

Was it important and urgent? Yes.

Will I be financially compensated for my extra effort? Short term/directly, no. Long term/indirectly, yes. I believe it will prove to be a good investment.

How can my inner boss acknowledge the extra efforts of my inner worker bee?

Comp time is appealing right now, but neither my inner boss nor my inner worker bee is comfortable just… leaving things be while we take a breather for a day or two. There would be consequences we are not so excited about. Or, to avoid those consequences, we’d have to do more organizing and managing than we’re up for.

But we can agree on a paring down to basics. No extras, just the essentials for the next week or two.

And a commitment to not running another marathon again any time soon.

At least not without asking these important questions beforehand.

In the frenzy of the moment, I don’t usually ask myself if the extra effort will be worth it – if what I’m pushing through is truly important and urgent, if what I will earn from it will be proportionate to the energy expended (not to mention if there will be space to replenish afterwards).

And I should.

As big a fan as I am of pacing myself and honoring my capacity, I know there will still be occasions when more than the usual effort will be required. But it’s still my responsibility to be choosy about when and how that takes place.

And it’s not just an energy question. It’s a money question. “Overtime” costs my business something one way or another. And even though it’s just me, myself and I here, I still need to make sure I’m spending it wisely.

• • • • •

How do you approach those “extra hours” you put into your business? Unavoidable? A worthwhile long-term investment? A jackpot of immediate returns? How do you view the cost of overtime?

• • • • •

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fond

Another installment in what is apparently an occasional series: how I unplugged over the weekend.

Occasional because I worked some portion of every day from September 7 to September 26. That’s 20 days in a row. That’s 20 days of me not being in alignment with my commitment to unplug on a regular basis. Which left me with nothing to report in the way of unplugging except that I wasn’t doing it.

At least I didn’t see it as normal. I recognized it as a choice. I made sure it was a temporary anomaly. But that didn’t really do much to make it less exhausting.

However, it did make yesterday’s play seem that much sweeter. A little time in the fresh air of the mountains with my sweetheart and my poochaloo. A little time to garden while the weather is still pleasant. Ahh. Was it all that I wanted? No. But it was really good.

And it was good without guilt or worry because I had hung on to a few new practices for the duration: I did my morning meditation, I got outside for walks with the dog, I closed the week on Fridays even though I wasn’t “finished” – and while I worked daily, I didn’t work crazy long hours each day. I put some things on hold, but I didn’t go to that panicked, driven place where I would have put everything on hold. I did little things to ground and pace myself along the way. Were they enough? No. But did they prevent disaster? Yes.

None of that would have happened six months ago. So, call it a lapse if you want, but I call it progress.

Lessons from a tired mind.

It’s Friday. Time for a round-up of the week’s Lessons Learned.

I think I should preface this whole post with an excerpt from the transcript of my mind chatter this week:

Hamster-wheel mind: “Wow! I’m so tired. I wonder why I’m so tired? I shouldn’t be this tired. But, wow, am I tired!”

Compassionate aware mind: “Um, honey? You’re tired because this is your sixteenth day of working in a row. So please let’s just take a nap already.”

So, while I can look back with satisfaction on the accomplishments of my week, they came at a price. And I am reminded for the umteenth time why I have rules about unplugging regularly.

Under these circumstances, it’s unrealistic to expect to be able to sustain the kind of learning I did last week. And to prove it – here’s the one lesson I am able to glean from my week.

Working in this intense way is a roller coaster ride of highs and lows. Highs from the cool, exciting stuff. Lows from crashing from that stuff.

And being on a roller coaster makes it nearly impossible to engage in the maintenance activities that I find to be so stabilizing.  For me, maintenance activities – cleaning and laundry and cooking and dog walking and filing and whatnot – are the complex carbohydrates that keep me from crashing after the sugar highs. Maintenance normalizes things.

It wasn’t so much having such significant tasks on my to-do list that was so exhausting. It was how they squeezed out the seemingly less significant routine stuff that robbed me of small opportunities to recharge.

So, for the umteenth time, I am reminded to not set myself up for this. Way more lead time, honey, way more lead time…