20 for 2020: week 25

Week of 15 June 2020

My 20 for 2020 list.

This week seems to have gone really fast with not much being achieved! My idea from last week of allocating time in the afternoons to work on my creative projects has been a bit hit and miss, mainly because I haven’t always been home in time to do the work. Or is it because I have prioritised other things over doing that work on those days when I’ve been out in the afternoons?

I need to think about that a bit more.

We’ve been talking about return to work plans and I have tentatively come to an agreement with my manager about what I’m going to do over the next few months. I’m not sure when it’s all going to start but I will still be working from home most of the time, so I’m very happy about that.

After a full day assisting a family member with a medical issue on Wednesday, I got home just in time for this week’s uni webinar (thing 8). There has been a lot of interesting material but I don’t feel like I’m engaging with it very well at the moment. I have a couple more weeks before the assignment is due and I’m hoping that will tie at least some of the work together in my head.

I spent a lot of time over the weekend working on the assignment. The power helpfully went off at home on Saturday morning so I went to work to do it there. It’s weird seeing all the new signs and things that they’ve had to put in place to allow people to return safely to work in this new Covid-19 world. I don’t think things will go back to the way they were there for a very long time, if they ever do.

I listened to a webinar from the wellbeing program that I have been working through (thing 3). What I like about this program is that it runs every year in exactly the same format (my structured brain loves this) so you can revisit the material over and over again if you want to. If you’re like me and love some structure, you can work through it week by week, taking whatever you need from it, which might be different each year. Or you can do nothing on it for weeks or months, and it will all still be there and you can go back to it whenever you want. Or if there’s a couple of things you want to refresh your mind on you can just dig back into to those classes and get what you need when you need it.

I missed most of the first two modules in “real time” because I was struggling with getting through the material from the last module of last year, which was the thing I wanted to complete this year. Now that I’ve finished that, I’ve started going back over the earlier material just to refresh my mind and grab any tips that I think I might need at the moment. One session that I caught up on recently was a session on transitions and change, which is great for me right now. It reinforces what I learned last week about just focusing on one thing at a time and letting go of what doesn’t absolutely have to get done in the period we’re talking about. The session looks more at transitions in terms of daily routines, like chaotic mornings when frazzled mums are trying to get kids ready for school, but the principles can apply equally to bigger, longer transitions or periods that feel unsettled because things aren’t quite “normal”.

The main takeaways I got were to identify what absolutely has to get done, to make a plan for getting that stuff done and to reduce your expectations of what you can do in challenging times. So, much like I concluded last week, I can’t complete my uni work and a Photoshop course while I’m working pretty much full time and keeping my house running. If I try, I will do a half-arsed job at both. Far better to let the Photoshop work drop off while I complete this unit and then go back to it with my full attention in a couple of weeks. I’m feeling a lot calmer about everything now I’ve made that decision, even though the looming deadline is filling me with terror!

Summary for the week

• Things completed this week: 0
• Things completed to date: 10 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18)
• Things I progressed: 1 (8)
• Things in progress I didn’t progress: 5 (7, 11, 13, 17, 22)
• Things not started: 6 (2, 9, 12, 19, 20, 21)
• Days I stuck to my 15 minutes creative habit: 4
• Days I read a book: 7
• Days I did yoga stretches: 7