Okay so, blabbly blabbly life is balance between TLC and GTD, still working on that, will always be working on that. On the TLC side it's about mise-en-place, everything in its place and that's how it gets done, and on the GTD side it's also about mise-en-place but differently. TLC is the same things in the same places, rinse and repeat. GTD is the first step of a journey of a thousand miles here, then see you next week for the second step, same bat time, same bat channel, week after week in the general direction of the thousand miles. I suppose what I have going in these monthly reviews are roughly four thousand-mile journeys going at the same time, each thousand-mile journey in its place. Where clearly it's about the journey and not the destination. Clearly. It's like the sloths at the DMV in here. The destination just gives a little gravity to the journey, gives it something to orbit ...er, around. I just blew my own mind: we're going in circles, we're not going anywhere! It's allllll rinse and repeat, maaan. You know what, that's fine. Circles is somewhere. Circles is good enough for Mother Earth. Circles it is.
A big piece of what I've been doing in January, GTD-wise, is setting my four thousand-mile journeys in their orbits. Settling on which four thousand-mile journeys to send ...into space, since I seem to be going with a space metaphor. I love space. Because there were way more than four journeys to choose from, let me tell you. I sort of have a feeling that I was supposed to choose ONE journey but that is so fundamentally not how I do. Sorting it down to four is serious personal development for me.
What I had to choose from
I have, have had, my life divided into four areas: WORK, HOME, PLAY, PASTIME. One from each area was a good place to start:
0 - Work
I was turning over in my head picking up an extra day at work, but I think I'm going to close the door on that and see how I can do with just MWF. I can work an hour late on M and F if need be, because no derby. I love how being retired from derby means that working late is a fun concept, not even kidding. WORK vis-a-vis this blog is generally behind closed doors, what happens at work stays at work. I generally like my work and would like to keep it that way.So ha, that still leaves me with four to choose.
1 - Home: cleaning and decorating
HOME actually is broken down thusly, imagine what I'm about to tell you as Russian nesting dolls: the largest doll is home, which contains my body, which contains my systems. Maybe home is like the hardware, body is the firmware, and systems is the software. Whatever. All of it has to be in a certain working order to produce whatever the software is supposed to produce, Stephen Covey calls this "sharpening the saw" so now we're talking Russian nesting saws. Really this is uber-TLC, but at the end of the day it's all TLC (see above).Anyway I choose home as my first journey, which fundamentally says so much about me I can't even. I dimly remember a time, back when I was married, when the Thing to Do with Your Life seemed to be remodeling or at least redecorating your home. Which I was, by the way, really crap at. Which I may still be pretty crap at, but I think the problem before was that I had no... life, you know, to put in the home. Where form follows function? I have a new-to-me theory that the software you want to run will inform how your hardware needs to be set up, I have no idea if actual software and hardware are like that. Pretend that it is, I have more of a sense of my software now; so, maybe I will do better with my hardware.
As you know between then and now there was a long six-year period when I was doing derby and derby is pretty all-consuming, so I really consciously shut down all those thoughts of homemaking. Which is a totally valid thing you can do, I highly recommend it when there are priorities afoot. Now though, I'm going for a little more balance. I don't want to be that Suzy Homemaker where all of me goes into making my home, just a little bit of me.
HOME for me actually has three areas: Cooking, Cleaning, and Clothing. Cooking under the aegis of Nutrition has always gotten the long shrift. Is that a thing, the long shrift? So I'm talking about Cleaning, I made a decent cut at it last year with a little turn down for depression. 2016 is going be the the year of cleaning and decorating, I made a Pinterest board, so it's official. We... shall... see. Said the sloths at the DMV. I actually made a big cut at Clothing a few years back and that's been running itself... into the ground, by now. A lot of the clothes that I've been wearing straight up have holes in them. So I might borrow a little time for my clothes here and there.
2 - Body: healing my body - and a little Systems
I choose Body as my second journey, the current journey I'm on being bodywork with Maul. I may have a lot more to say about this TK.
But also I need to keep checking in with my PCP, still in the tail of that stroke. I feel bad about saying this because I'm sooo much better recovered than probably anybody's image of having had a stroke is. I'm not incontinent. I haven't had to relearn to walk or talk. Those are things that could have happened but didn't, knock wood or whatever you do when you thank God. But just to name what is: I'm jumpy about falling depressed again. I have this globus that is supposedly an anxiety output and certainly an anxiety input, though I'm mostly over being anxious about having throat cancer and mostly just anxious about having anxiety. That's all, it's not much. You know what they say about God only giving you as much as you can handle, sooo... thanks God, this is a good amount! Portion sizes are getting out of control, amirite? That root canal was a nice touch. Just to round things out, I need new glasses like woah and Biggie is helping me grow out my hair. Oh and, Biggie and I have a few more lipstick dates planned.
Oh and one more thing, I need to renew my passport. I had that on my list of things to do last year. I will squish that in here. And, taxes; it is that time of year.
3 - Play: second pass at studying muscles and movement
So I started the beginning of the year with 1) having to cancel a week of appointments because I had a cold, 2) losing a client, and 3) wrestling with availability of the squat rack at my gym. I had just gotten my remaining clients settled down in their new bat times and was planning to calm my tits for a while, then literally the next day I ran into Nina at Maul's and now I have six clients again. And I actually have room for a seventh client, but I would actually like to calm my tits now.
While my tits were in an uproar and I was thinking that my cute little personal training phase was going end with a whimper, I had a lot of thoughts about why I want to do what I do. TK, maybe. The upshot for now, I want to take a second pass at studying muscles and movement layered on top of now four years of experience working with actual bodies and, bonus, getting my body worked on.
4 - Pastime: writing for my two blogs
Last but not least, I always wobble back and forth on whether my blogging is a thing that is done as an end in itself that is an end in itself (PASTIME) OR a thing that is done as an end in itself that is a means to an end (PLAY). I went so far as signing up as allapoppy on Instagram and changing my Facebook URL to allapoppy, now I have an empire lol. I actually think I have an allapoppy Twitter, but I stay away from Twitter because of the comprehensive doctrines. But I still think that, in general, that way lies madness. Something changes in my head when I think about writing to draw people in. The blog has always worked best for me as a mental health mechanism, a sort of pensieve. When it's internally motivated by my needing to organize my teeming thoughts. Not so much externally motivated, looking out at the teeming masses and what do they want.
A man, a plan, a canal, a chart!
| SUN | MON | TUE | WED | THU | FRI | SAT |
| SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP |
| HOME Cooking | WORK | PLAY GTD 3 | WORK | BODY GTD 2 | WORK | HOME GTD 1 |
| PASTIME GTD 4 | WORK | PASTIME rest | WORK | PASTIME rest | WORK | SYSTEMS appts/bills |
| PASTIME | PLAY Train | PLAY Train | PLAY Train | PLAY Train | PASTIME | PASTIME |
| SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP | SLEEP |
So you can see, that leaves three blocks that I can use for Netflix and chill (no really, Netflix and chill) or "going out" and "seeing people" o.O
