Maintain and Improve

Since the beginning of this process of downshifting I have been looking for a sane, healthy way to get done all of the myriad things that need doing while still having time to explore and create, and without feeling rushed or stressed out about it. I know, why not just ask for the sky to be green, right?

Well, after many unsuccessful attempts to organize or schedule my day in various ways, I came to the realization that what I am attempting to do here, the way I am attempting to organize my life, is so different from traditional ideas of work and recreation that the traditional tools and concepts that I was attempting to use to do so were not going to work. What I needed was an entirely new way to approach my day, and all of the things that I wished it to contain.

In discussion with Jen we hit on the idea that really there were only two categories for all of the things that I wanted to do. Either an action falls under the heading of maintaining what we already have and how we already live, or it in some way improves our situation or ourselves. Armed with this new insight, I roughed out all the things that I worried about or tried to get done in a day, and they neatly fell into these two types.

Looking back from there, it was easy to see that the majority of the stress I was feeling in getting or not getting some thing or things done was mostly based on not understanding the difference between these two types of activity. There was a specific group of things that needed to get done in order for our lives to run smoothly, and if they didn’t get done, then I got stressed out, since making them run smoothly is a large part of what I should be doing right now.

Of course, not everything that needs to be done needs to be done every day. things like cutting the grass, watering houseplants, etc. are more demand driven, only needing to be done once or twice a week, but attention must be paid to them to at least know when to do them. So I further divided the maintainance tasks as such:

I also discovered that there was something of a hierarchy within the tasks that I had labelled as Maintainance. This hierarchy is, basically, a measure of the amount of stress a thing causes me when left undone. So now I could rank these Maintainance tasks in order of most to least stressful if skipped, and address them in that order, guaranteeing myself a lower stress level than before.

Of course, a big problem of depression is amotivation, so I knew that the hardest part of accomplishing any of these tasks would be simply to start on them, instead of sitting around all day playing flash games. Through the help of the Fly Lady, I was able to append a few actions to the beginning of my list that help to motivate me and keep me thinking about the things I need to do. Once I added in these things, my final list looks something like this:

So now, armed with a paper version of this table, I can work down a checklist every day, getting done everything I need to and always leaving most of the afternoon open to work on whatever is in the Improvements column. I think I may have finally found a nice middle way between absolute chaos and totalitarian organization. So far it is allowing me to get everything done with less stress and without scheduling my whole day.