20 for 2020: week 5
Week of 27 January
I was on leave this week and fully expected to spend it hanging out with Kramstable, doing some work on my uni course, and working on some of my photo projects.
I didn’t anticipate that I would be spending a lot of the week dealing with a family issue and that my plans were going to unravel.
The first thing to disappear was my 15 minutes a day working on my photo project (thing 1) as recommended in the creative kickstart course (thing 6). My plan, as I explained in week 2, was to set aside 15 minutes every morning after I return from my (non-negotiable) walk to work on a creative project. The aim was to make this as non-negotiable as walking is, but it hasn’t clicked yet. I guess I’m still in the early stages, and thinking how much of a struggle it was to get back into walking after I stopped for a couple of weeks, and acknowledging the difficulties of the moment, I don’t want to be too hard on myself. I just have to keep trying. This week I did it two days out of seven, which is better than no days out of seven. It’s 30 minutes I wouldn’t have otherwise done.
This is the second official week of my second uni unit (thing 8). I sat in on a webinar with the lecturer early in the week to discuss the work we need to do before our first face to face workshop and for our first assignment, which is due on 9 February. I started work on the assignment and am feeling pretty overwhelmed by it all right now. I have a lot more to do and the unexpected events haven’t helped. I have to keep reminding myself that I can only do what I can do, it doesn’t have to be perfect and what is most important is the learning, not the grade I get. (I struggle with this idea. A lot.)
I completed all the remaining photo collages from 2019 (thing 4), so now I have to print them and stick them in the book. I think all up I’ll have about 26 collages to trim and stick. A boring task for when I’m really bored. I also completed the first four weeks of 2020 and have to figure out a way to keep this work up to date so I’m not left with weeks and weeks to do at a time. That might actually mean trying to make it a weekly habit rather than hoping it gets done and ending up weeks behind like I have been. How does that sound for someone who can’t stick to a schedule? This needs some more thinking.
I reviewed the work I’ve done so far on the creative kickstart course. The “just 15 minutes” is the main takeaway I have so far. I worked through two more days of the material (Days 12 and 13).
Thing 22 (of 20, yeah, I know) was to commit to and do the monthly review in Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year workbook, which is intended as a prompt to remind me to actually keep what I’ve said I’m going to do this year at the front of my mind rather than complete the workbook and forget about it for the rest of the year.
I wasn’t sure what a monthly review would look like, so on Sunday I grabbed the book and went to my local coffee shop to reflect. I made a note of the main events of the month and completed the sections on what I’ve been grateful for that month and what you’ve learned. Following that are some reflection questions that are different each month, so I jotted down some responses and made a list of action steps to take as a result. I flipped through the workbook and had a look at everything I had written and started to feel overwhelmed because there were all these grand ambitions but no real plan to put them into action. Not how I wanted to feel.
I decided to let that go for now and try to focus my attention on the most important thing at the moment (other than the family issue), my assignment. At the moment it’s the thing on my to-do list that is weighing most heavily on me. I feel like until I can get everything I want to say out of my head (and out of the readings) and onto the page so that I can sit down and start to edit it, I’m going to continue to feel feeling scattered and light headed. I’m recognising a pattern here in every assignment I do, and I’m not sure if there is another way to do this, or accept it’s just the way I do things and to roll with it.
Summary for the week
• Things completed this week: 0
• Things completed to date: 2 (10, 18)
• Things I progressed: 4 (4, 6, 8, 22)
• Things in progress I didn’t progress: 5 (1, 3, 13, 14, 16)
• Things not started: 11 (2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21)