Relationships, Part 3

You're right; I missed yesterday. I wanted to write, but had several other commitments as well, and when it came to choosing between blogging and catching up on my journal, my journal won out. I had fallen behind over the holidays and as of this morning am still only up to January 9th. Anyway, I feel we all need one day off a week and yesterday was it for me.

So, on to friendships. As someone who has no family locally (they're all a minimum of 45 minutes away, including in-laws), friends are important to me. I have a solid pool of people I'd call acquaintances, but not so many friends. And some of my actual friends are also an hour or more away. Whether they're long-distance or not, all of these relationships require a level of intentionality. Friendships deepen when people spend time together, learning about each other. What are your interests? Your pet peeves? Your goals and dreams? Your beliefs and values? Time has to be set aside for these conversations. But how and when when everyone's time seems to be at such a premium?

Like I said, intentionality is the key. I have one friend with whom I regularly go out for breakfast. Those "dates" are precious, but not really often enough for either of us. This friend is also one of my "Finishing School" partners, so soon we'll be resuming our once-a-week meetings, which will definitely help our friendship grow. 

I also have a book club that meets once a month and as with most such clubs, the discussions go beyond books and delve into our personal lives. Some of these relationships are going deeper as a result of getting to know one another in this group environment. 

Sometimes there's no option but to develop a relationship online and by text. It may not be ideal, but distance and geography are no barrier to true friendship. Some of the people I call my closest friends live very far away and the only ways we sustain our friendship are through Facebook, e-mail and the phone. 

Ugh. I'm not sure this has been a very helpful or enlightening post either for me or for you as a reader. My starting point for the subject of relationships was as a word for the year, expressing my desire to work on and strengthen relationships in 2019. Has anything in today's post been beneficial?

Let me recap and see if I can pull it together. 

• Friendships are important, whether friends are near or far away
• Intentionality is key, regularly making time for getting together, or making a point of consistently connecting via technology
• You can get to know people in group settings and identify like-minded individuals as those to connect with more deeply outside the group

I guess the next step for me is to discern how to best manage my life in order to invest in more face-to-face connection. I started tracking my use of time yesterday, but didn't set the hourly alarm on my phone as intended. I'm off to do that as soon as I publish this post. My goal this week is to see where time's a'wasting. I don't want to waste hours in pointless activities when they could be invested in people. It's people who make our lives richer through the gifts of themselves and their time.

Time

I was going to begin with the quote that talks about all of us having the same 24 hours in a day, so why are some people more productive than others; then I read this article. It makes a valid point: we don’t all have the same resources and experiences. That truth takes a lot of the pressure off. I shouldn’t compare myself to others and what they’re able to accomplish. I should focus on how to make my life work and make the best use of my time.

Why are we talking about time today anyway? I thought we were going to continue with relationships and particularly those I have with my mom and friends. I will get back to that in another post, but as I was reflecting on my “words for the year,” it occurred to me that organizing, finishing and relationships require a proper use of time, and I probably don’t use mine effectively.

“Show me how you spend your time and I’ll tell you what’s important to you,” says Kent Clothier. As I started to look at how I spend the hours in my day, I had to admit that there was room for improvement. In fact, I thought about tracking my activities for a week just to see where the time is actually going. Perhaps I will, starting Sunday. I know time is definitely being wasted and it would be interesting to see just how much and what activities are involved. I’m sure Facebook is one. Phone calls are another. I’m not prepared to give either of those up (though I did recently reduce my Facebook friends list by 66 people), but I will need to set better boundaries around them.

I think I work best with structure. Give me a routine to follow and some form of accountability (I’m an obliger, remember) and things go well. Give me days that are loosey-goosey and at the end of them I’m vexed that “nothing” got done.

The problem with part-time work and inconsistent shifts is that it makes for days that are also inconsistent. Add in extra shifts according to the needs of the employer and we’re all over the map. A few years ago I tried to schedule my days on a weekly calendar but when it was clear that I wasn’t following it there was no point in continuing. I apparently don’t hold myself accountable very well. What to do? What to do?

Julie Morgenstern’s book, Never Check E-Mail in the Morning, was written to address workplace problems, and I admit I haven’t read it (yet). But checking e-mail in the morning is one of the things I do. I don’t usually check my workplace e-mail at home; I just think that something important will come in in my personal e-mail and I wouldn’t want to miss it. That leads me into Facebook and we all know what a time-sucker that can be.

So, help me out, readers. Are you an effective time manager? What  strategies work for you? I’ll start with tracking my activities as noted above and see if that helps me eliminate wasted days and wasted nights. In the meantime, I’m thankful I no longer have to feel like a failure because I haven’t achieved as much as Mother Teresa or Michelangelo. That is a huge relief.

Finishing

Yesterday I talked about my first word of the year: organizing. I’ll get back to that in future posts, but today I want to talk about finishing.

What do I mean by that? It sounds simple, but it isn’t necessarily so. Finishing equals completing, getting things done, bringing them to an end.

What do I want to finish? Well, getting my house organized, for one thing. Writing my novel, for another. I started it over fifteen years ago, continued consistently until I hit a block, then let it sit two or three years before picking it up again. Last year, I lost it all. Something weird happened with my flash drive and my back-up wasn’t backed up. Aaaaaargh! If you’ve ever lost anything important, you know how this felt.

Once I got over my upset and quieted my mind, I decided: I am not re-writing this. I am moving on. It’s okay; it’s not the end of the world. But then…I had the first 10 or so chapters in another file (work I’d been sharing with a critique partner), older versions of other chapters on a different USB stick, two writers in my writers’ group had saved copies of my submissions, and I had print copies up to a certain point. I managed to piece together a version that gave me something to start with anew and created a Dropbox file to avoid the risk of losing it again.

At the end of 2017 I had read Finishing School by Cary Tennis and Danelle Morton, which I’d heard about here. I thought its approach sounded solid, especially for an “obliger” like me. Accordingly, I found Finishing School partners (one in-person, one online) and it worked well until the loss noted above. I still believe the program works and plan to give it another go this year. I’ve already contacted both of my previous partners to reset our weekly meetings, and both are on board. Now to get going with the writing and revisions.

What else do I want to finish? I want to complete a couple of other stories I began years ago, and I want to start and end new pieces, work that has deadlines like those provided by anthology publishers and contest promoters.

The Bible talks about finishing well. It’s talking spiritually, and I do want to finish well in that way, but I also want to complete and do a good job on every task that lies before me, Writing, my work at the library, the volunteer work I do, leading my book club, personal studies, home management – I need to give them all my very best.

One thing that gets in the way, I’ve decided, is multi-tasking. I’ve always considered myself effective at doing several things at once, but the truth is, I’ve been deceiving myself. You can’t fully attend to anything when you’re trying to attend to many. And studies apparently show that people who multi-task are less productive. Check out this article. Yikes! Multi-tasking inhibits creativity! That’s not how I want to roll.

Final thought: at the end of the day it’s not how you start it’s how you finish.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, readers! While I've done an abysmal job so far of blogging consistently on my website (and have deleted the old posts), once again I am going to try to do better. Today I'm starting Jeff Goins' 30-day 500-words-a-day writing challenge. Stick with me, and you might find daily posts for at least the next thirty days.

I have a few "words of the year" for 2019: organizing, finishing and relationships. If you haven't heard of having an overarching word for the year, I first heard about it through author Gretchen Rubin, and you can read some of her thoughts here.

Neat and tidy

So, why organizing? It seems obvious, doesn't it? I have a pretty disorganized home, especially when it comes to books and papers, and I need to get it under control - once. and. for. all. Years ago Julie Morgenstern's book Organizing from the Inside Out was very helpful in guiding our filing system plan, but we need to go through and pull out papers that no longer have value and file away the ones that are lying around. We also need to go through our bookshelves and sell or donate any books we no longer want. I know this may aghast my reading-loving friends who cannot part with books, and I hear you since I'm an author and librarian, but just like physical libraries, our bungalow has limited space, for books and everything else. 

It's not just papers, of course. Somehow we've inherited or acquired lots of other things that need to move along - clothes, ornaments, tools we no longer use, etc. I admit that I've kept things for my children for far too long (kids' clothes and toys, for example) when they should have been passed along and enjoyed by other children. Mine are now young adults in their early 20s and while they both hope to get married and settle down some day, short of a surprising change in their circumstances, it looks like that is still several years out. In the meantime, I could be using my cedar chest for my own out-of-season clothing (instead of baby and toddler wear for future grandchildren), and the room that houses our freezer and filing cabinet could be cleared of so many unused things from times passed.

I own four books on the subject of organizing, including Morgenstern’s and Sandra Felton’s TheMessies Manual. Anna Shepard’s Express Housekeeping and Donna Smallin Kuper’s Cleaning Plain & Simple focus more on cleaning, but do have chapters on decluttering. I’ve also recently borrowed two additional books from the library: Dana K. White’s How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind, which has a whole section on decluttering and another on making changes that last, and Erin Boyle’s Simple Matters, which tells you how to live with less and end up with more, starting with decluttering, simplifying and organizing. Clearly, there’s more to it than book acquisition and book knowledge. As with everything else, it’s going to be the application of principles that brings about the desired transformation. But I am determined. This is the year!

This brings me to the end of today's 500 words. What are your thoughts on organizing and decluttering? Do you have a word for the year?