Week 08/2022: A busy week

Week of 21 February 2022

A busy week

What did I want to do this week?

• Week 3’s TAFE work (thing 8)
• Mindspot (thing 1)
• Work through more lessons from Cosmic Calibration (thing 22)
• Sort out my online writing support group
• Get through the event I’m organising for work on Friday

Did I do it?

See that last thing? Well, that was basically all I worked on this week.

It was a classic case of, I have something coming up that’s going to take most of my time and I’m still going to try and do as much as I do on everything else every other week.

This does not work.

In hindsight, knowing how much else was going to happen, I only had to look at the weekly plan to know that I was expecting way too much from myself this week. It’s okay though. It’s a learning experience . . .

The event happened. It was a lot of work, but we made it, and I am super grateful for the people I had around me who helped make it happen. It’s unlikely any of them are reading this, but I thank them for their work and their help leading up to this and on the day. It was a big job and we all learned a lot. Well, I know I did.

I had a bit of a crisis on Saturday that took up the entire morning, and I stayed at my sister’s place on Saturday night so we could do Run the Bridge on Sunday morning with Kramstable (we walked, he ran). Sunday afternoon, you might remember from last year, is video project time. It was a busy weekend after a full-on week so I didn’t have much time to work on my other projects.

I got a bit of the TAFE work done earlier in the week (thing 8) and am still working my way through the reading challenge (thing 21).

My fledgling daily and weekly planning and review habits (thing 12) didn’t stick this week. I did the daily plan three days out of five and the shut down routine only two days, and didn’t manage to get either of my weekly reviews done. However, my other established routines, for the most part, held together. I went for a walk every morning, I did my meditation and I practised French every day. I walked most afternoons and I kept everything else going.

I was talking to my sister about to-do lists and she told me about the one she uses, Focus To-Do, which is a to-do app with an inbuilt pomodoro timer that also tracks how much time you’ve spent on your tasks. She said it’s really useful for being able to keep track of how long she’s spending on her study and, the more tasks you complete and the more pomodoros you finish, the more sunlight you get to grow little plants in your forest.

(I’m assuming you know what I mean by pomodoro. If not, it’s a technique people use to get work done where you set a timer for (normally) 25 minutes and work on nothing but the task you’re working on for that time, then take a five minute break, after which you go back for another 25 minutes. Each 25-minute session is called a pomodoro, and you take a longer break after every four pomodoros. And yes, pomodoro is Italian for tomato, and I believe this came about because the guy who thought of the technique used a tomato-style kitchen timer.)

Focus To-do is not like some of the other plant-growing apps that actually kill your plants if you go off task, so it doesn’t strictly encourage you not to get distracted by other things, but it does seem to be a useful app that I might want to use.

But Barb, what about Evernote . . . ?

Hush!

I’m playing around with it at the moment for things that take longer than couple of minutes where I want to track how long they take. Evernote may still be part of my solution though. The trial continues . . .

22 for 2022 summary

• Things completed this week: 0
• Things I worked on this week: 4: (8, 12, 13, 21)
• Things completed to date: 3 (10, 11, 18)
• Things in progress: 6 (1, 8, 12, 13, 21, 22)
• Things not started: 13 (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20)

What do I want to focus on next week?

• Catch up on the TAFE work I missed this week (thing 8)
• Review this week’s event and summarise the outcomes
• Capture all the things to do after the event and decide what needs to feed into my project plan for the next stage (thing 9)
• Follow up with the writers group and get that happening
• My last Open House Hobart 2021 blog post

Weekly summary

What was the best thing about this week?

Lots of best things happened this week.

My super late Christmas present arrived. The event happened and it went well and I got to see an excellent MC in action. I hung out with my sister and Kramstable and we did the bridge walk/run. And I got a message from a dear friend who I hadn’t been in contact with for many years.

So yay!

What did I learn this week?

No matter how much you plan and get things in order, things will always change at the last minute and won’t happen the way you wanted them to. I also learned that sometimes, I can be quite calm, even when everything is going to shit and no one knows how inwardly panicking I am.

Sometimes.

I also learned that I need to concentrate on what I’m doing when I’m riding my bike out of my driveway and that it might be a good idea to keep the battery turned off when I’m making such a manoeuvre. That is all you need to know.

What I’m reading this week

• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Habit tracker

• Days I went for a walk in the morning (Goal = 7): 7
• Days I did my morning planning routine at work (Goal = 5): 3
• Days I did controlled breathing ((Goal = 7): 7
• Days I did jaw stretches (Goal = 7): 5
• Days I did my post-work pack up routine (Goal = 5): 2
• Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 0
• Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
• Days I went for a walk or did other physical activity in the afternoon (Goal = 5): 6
• Days I shut my computer down before 9.30 (Goal = 6): 4
• Weekly review at work: No
• Weekly review at home: No