Productivity in Isolation: What My 7-Year-Old Taught Me About Getting Things Done
I got my bullet journal out again yesterday.
I have not used my bullet journal since a couple days after I officially retired.
To wit:
But it has come to my attention that maybe I should pick it back up. The SOTWAP being what it is, my days are blending. The only thing keeping me aware of what day it was, and what that meant, was Jack’s visits to his dad’s. Then there were a few weeks when we were officially quarantining, and then Jamie’s work schedule changed now that he’s working from home.
Now I have no idea where I am or what I’m doing, and it doesn’t even matter anyway.
It’s like a very gentle, socialist Lord of the Flies around here. Or Calypso on the island of Ogygia with Odysseus. Time doesn’t mean anything, and any attempt to add meaning just feels forced, engineered, man-made.
Jen left a comment that I think describes it nicely:
My overworked brain is gradually catching a break because the world is on fire and everything has slowed down. How do you reconcile the SOTWAP with a sense of hmmm, this is apparently the month of Sundays I've been wishing for all these years, delivered in the worst possible packaging available?
My “month of Sundays” wish presented itself as a frantic, desperate, urgent need for ma 間, the Japanese word for negative space. That’s what I was so desperate for at the beginning of the year. Not since That Thing That Happened* have I felt such an urgent compulsion to act NOW. (Back then it was an urgent compulsion to leave the United States on the first available plane.)
But this time it was space! Quiet! Emptiness! Ma!
Well, I got the ma that I was looking for. That’s cool. But it’s been all ma all the time for long enough now that even I must admit, some structure would probably be a good idea.
Oh, but how?!?
How do I start?
How do I start when everything feels urgent in my blood and my bones and my heart, but is so visibly not urgent because, what’s urgent in the apocalypse? Plus, I’m unemployed! And my kid doesn’t go to school! What can possibly matter enough to get time priority?
I want to update the pictures on my blog posts. These ones were chosen randomly, satisficed, the first pictures I liked that worked enough to run with. (The first one actually came with my blog theme. The theme was about food and the post was about food, and I just kept it, which, in hindsight, I’m not absolutely certain I was permitted to do.)
I want to give myself a proper pedicure because corona pirates or no corona pirates, summer will come whether I’m ready or not.
I want to put makeup on. I want to make a video series about ma and such. (These are probably more related in my mind than they are in yours.)
I want to shave my legs.
I want to Swiffer the floor.
I want to learn how to edit audio files properly.
I want to read more and write more and draw more. I’m doing a lot of random things accidentally, but I want to do decided-in-advance things on purpose. This is unlike me, but we’re living in a strange time, and I’ve never been stranded on an island with Odysseus before. A girl can change!
Anyway, I came up with an idea. I’m certainly not the first person to come up with this idea. It’s not even the first time I’ve come up with the idea. But in the last couple of days, something has shifted in me that has made me like this idea in a more resonant way than I have in the past.
Ready?
“Is there one thing you can do? Can you do one thing?”
Like I said, this is not exactly revolutionary on the surface. Léan has been flossing one tooth, stitching one stitch, and writing one word every day for a decade or something. She does one thing like nobody does one thing. (And she’s autistic, for heaven’s sake!) But for her, I think, it’s about consistency. It’s about not breaking the chain.
Other people have you do one thing because they’re sneakily trying to trick your subconscious into doing more. Like, you know those coaches who are like, “Just go to the gym for five minutes! Then you can leave if you want!” They know that you’ll never leave the gym after five minutes, so you’ll end up doing a full workout. Then they’ll be like…
My subconscious is savvier than that, people. My subconscious is like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. My subconscious is a hip, denim-jacket-wearing rebel that knows exactly what I’m trying to make myself do and it. ain’t. having. it.
(Aside: Dear Microsoft Word spell checker, I think we can all agree that “ain’t” is a word by now. Stop making the squiggly line. It’s an artistic choice. You’re just getting on everybody’s nerves at this point. xx Naomi)
But I’m not doing my one thing for any of those very good reasons.
I’m doing one thing because if I do one thing, one thing gets done.
Before I knew I had ADHD and started taking it seriously – I don’t medicate it, but I do therapy it – here is the kind of scene that would happen in my house several times a week. If the day was a bad day, it would happen several times in a day.
I would be in the middle of doing something. Hanging up laundry in the closet, for example. I would go through the tortures of the damned getting myself to put all the laundry away and at some point in the process, my brain would just shut down.
I would be standing in front of my closet with a pair of jeans in one hand and a hanger in the other and I would stand there, staring, for minutes on end. I had no idea what to do. The next action was in my hands, and I didn’t know what to do.
Why? Why would I be in the middle of a task, with the next step obvious and in my hand, and I wouldn’t know what to do? If I couldn’t make myself do it, that would be weird, but it would make sense. But honestly not knowing?
Qué?
Well, I can’t speak for every ADHDer out there, but for me, it was that the number of steps in the task had become so numerous that my brain couldn’t process them anymore. Like Lucy and the chocolates, except there were so many chocolates the machine just shut down. Maybe it jammed. But I think what actually happened was that there was an override in my mind that says, “Danger! Overheating!” and my brain shut itself off to keep the machinery from jamming.
One time, when he was around seven or so, Jack found me in this position, staring at the closet, and asked what I was doing. I told him I couldn’t figure out what to do next. And, God bless his Virgo heart, he walked me through it.
“Put the pants on the hanger.”
And I did. Somebody – a seven-year-old somebody, but a somebody nonetheless – had given me one explicit instruction. One thing? I can do one thing.
He giggled because it was absurd, and when you’re seven, absurdity is the height of comedy.
“Now make a spot in the closet.” I moved the left stuff lefter and the right stuff righter, leaving a nice jeans-sized gap.
“Now hang up the pants.” I stared for a moment. My mind went blank. Then I hung up the pants.
“Good job! You did it! Now we can cuddle.”
And we did.
In a child’s mind, the objective was to hang up the pants.
The objective was not to hang up all the pants, all the shirts, and put the rest of the laundry away.
The objective was not to reorganize the underwear drawer, or come up with a new laundry system, or get out my spring clothes.
The objective was not to get through the laundry… so I could get to the dishes… so I could get to the dinner… so I could get to the movie… so I could get to the storytime… so I could get to the sleeping… so I could get to the waking up so… so… so…
The objective was to hang up the pants.
Once I had achieved that objective, I was free to go about my life.
When you can’t do everything, but you can do one thing, you should probably do the one thing.
Yes, it’s easy to feel like Lucy, flapping around because there are so many things that wanna be done.
Yes, it’s crazy-making when there is a great backlog of wannas, and there are five new wannas coming in every day and only one wanna going out.
But the alternative is five wannas coming in every day and NO wannas going out. And that sucks.
So yesterday, I painted my toes. I didn’t do a very good job of it. I didn’t do the base coat and the cuticle thingy and the apricot oil treatment. I didn’t do a topcoat, so they’ll look pretty cheap and grotty in a couple of days.
But when I woke up this morning, I saw this, and it was a nice surprise.
When the world is falling apart, a nice surprise can make all the difference.
“We woke up like this.” - my toes
* I was targeted by an online hate site from 2011-2013, including death threats, harassment, and, of course, public and unfavorable opinions about my breasts. I will talk about it someday. Today is not that day. Tomorrow’s not looking good either.
