Dear reader, I hope your week is going exactly to plan. Mine is not. I had a lovely day out to visit my friend, came home intending to check my e-mail, write a blog, relax and instead discovered that the carpet in my office needed to come up. Some new flooring is going in on Saturday, and the concrete underneath the old carpet is wet. I thought it was just a little corner, it was actually three quarters of the room! So my lovely plan to relax and chill out turned into a mad few hours moving furniture around to get the carpet up and moving boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff out to the garage to leave as much of the floor exposed as possible so it will dry.
Big, deep sigh. It also means that my plans for tomorrow (in a relaxed way catch up with admin, marketing and writing tasks) have been replaced by ‘box everything else to get it out of there’. In the meantime, my office is a building site. So in true ‘beach’ style, I will be trimming other tasks to make way for this to happen, not frantically trying to pack everything in and collapsing exhausted at the end. Which reminded me of this mini article that I thought you might enjoy.
– Emptying Every Spare Minute –
I was thinking last week about what stresses me out, and noticed that about 99% of the problem was my insistence on filling every spare moment with ‘something to do’. Got 15 minutes before a client? I’ll just go and write my blog. 10 minutes to spare? A quick tidy up. 5 minutes to spare? Check my e-mails. 1 minute to spare? Read half a sentence of this book…
No wonder I get stressed! And no wonder I often run late and work late. I have no time to myself to just chill, to reset, to plan. I cannot proceed from task to task in a nice relaxed manner because I have ‘mustbedoingsomething-itis’. Is this busy-holia making me more productive? More efficient? More at ease? Nope. Instead I am wild-eyed and fraught.
I have a client call in 15 minutes – if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use that 15 minutes to do nothing.
– Something to Play With –
My articles are usually longer, so take the time you would have taken and just do nothing for a couple more minutes. You can pretend to be reading if it makes you feel better. And all this week, notice if you are ‘filling time’ and experiment with emptying it instead. Want to share your thoughts on this article? Leave me a comment below.
Love
Donna.x