I Don't Mind Rejection. It's Submitting That's The Problem.

So I've been spending the first two months of the year submitting an adult manuscript to literary agents. This gives me an excellent excuse (or at least an excuse) to mention The Trick To Writing Stellar Book Submission Letters published less than a year ago at Greener Pastures Magazine. 

Today's agent research experience also sent me off a few minutes ago to start another humor piece about literary agents. That sounds terrific, except what I meant to write about today was doughnuts.

Time Management Tuesday: An-Hour-And-A-Half Chaos Break, And Now I Am Calm Again. Well, As Calm As I Ever Am.

To get right to the point, which is, arguably, a time management technique, I've been feeling chaos creeping up on me lately. A couple of days ago I had to lean on my mantra "Finish something" to get through the day. What did I finish? Beats me. Things were piling up enough that I can't even recall.

Chaotic desk these days

So I took an hour and a half, or so, off today from my May Days in October writing to clean my desk. I feel much better now. Especially since cleaning my desk included making a submission. I needed to make a folder related to that project so I could file things away, and since I had all that out, anyway, it wasn't that much more work to submit it somewhere.

Yes, I am ready to go, and I know where I'm going. 

Why Is Controling The Material Chaos Around You Time Management?

Back in 2014 I wrote about some studies that

"...indicate that a "disorganized environment can leave you feeling out of control, which drains your reserves for future self-control, leading to poor decisions including impulse spending." What does impulse spending have to do with time management? It's not the spending we should be concerned with, it's the draining self-control or discipline. If a disorganized environment makes people feel out of control enough to impulse shop, won't it make us feel out of control enough to shake up our work schedules? In fact, according to ScienceDaily, the researchers on one of the studies Karp refers to, Environmental Disorder Leads to Self-Regulatory Failure, were "looking for changes in behavior like impulse spending as well as poor mental performance or reduced stamina on tasks that require advanced thinking skills."

Personally, I try to control disorder and chaos all around me now, not just on my desk. No, that doesn't mean I'm always on top of folding my clean laundry. It means I keep the clean laundry down in the laundry room so I don't have to see it all over the house. Om.

Minimalism And Desks

You may have noticed that the desk in the picture above doesn't look all that bad. However, I am one of those people who uses her e-mail in-basket as a to-do list, meaning I keep all kinds of things in it until I've dealt with them. So the in-basket becomes an extension of my desk and an extension of disorder and chaos. E-mail in-baskets are not like laundry rooms. You have to look at them all the time.

Chaotic desk in the old days

Certainly, though, the situation on the desk, itself, is nothing like the ones I was dealing with on desks years ago. For that I can thank the file draw in my new desk where I can keep working files instead of letting them pile up all around me.

I can also thank minimalism.

My present work station contains nothing but work-related materials.

• No pencil holders, that's what drawers are for, and no knickknacks.
• No shelf of writers' journals, which you can see in the older picture. I purged them a couple of years ago, moving material I thought I might use to a digital journal and tossing the rest. I can accept that if I've done nothing with an idea I had in the 1980s and have no interest in it now, chances are I'm never going to use it.
• The red dictionary in the old picture is gone. It was outdated, anyway, and I use on-line dictionaries now. 
• I see some medical bills in the old photograph. I have a file in the new desk for them, too.
• Oh, and I think my trail journal is on the desk in the old picture. It's not allowed on my desk now.

For the most part, the desk chaos stays at a lower level, because I have fewer things to end up on the desk. 

It's amazing how mindless, soulless things are able to create such chaotic feelings in people who do have minds and, presumably, souls. It's also amazing how much faster it is to deal with the chaos things create when you don't have many of them.

Thursday and Friday won't be writing days for me this week. But tomorrow is. I should be able to do a lot more with it now that I've cast off the psychic burden of that chaotic desk.

Time Management Tuesday: Essentialism And Set-Aside Times

Here we go with the fourth and final portion of our discussion of how we writers can apply Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown to our lives. Today we’re talking about one of my favorite time management techniques, what I call set aside times. (Sometimes I've hyphenated it, sometimes I haven't. I accept that.) I'm talking a chunk of time--a weekend, a week, a month, or even more-- that we have set aside to do one thing. You can think of it as binging. Binge writing, binge editing, binge submitting.

Binging whatever you think is essential.

Life is chaos, as I've mentioned here a number of times over the last couple of years. Planning to work in blocks of time that we've committed to specific things helps to control that chaos, at least for a little while. To quote myself,  "Looking forward to our future, which we, of course, expect to go on forever, it's hard to get a handle on controlling things, because will power and self-discipline are finite." With shorter periods of time, it is possible to get some control. Additionally, if we try to manage our time around what is essential to us, that's not going to work long-term, either, because, as I said in an earlier post in this arc, that keeps changing. So we can't rely on just defining what is essential to us to help contain chaos for a lifetime.

But we should be able to use it to contain the chaos for a weekend, a week, or a month. Maybe even a semester, if we've decided a class is essential right now.

Planning

In his book, McKeown speaks briefly about extreme preparation. Preparation is going to be a big help in working with set-aside times. In the lead up to any kind of set-aside time, we'll want to plan: 

• To get other small work jobs out of the way before we start so they won't divert us from the essential task 
• To get as much pre-writing work done as possible
• To decide what pre-writing work we want to do, if that's what the set-aside time is for
• To coordinate the set-aside time with our day jobs so that we aren't trying to work intently on something essential to our writing at the same time we know we'll have extra work for the day job
• To get as much personal life work out of the way or under control, meaning we don't plan trips or guests during the set-aside time, and to try to find a way to bring family obligations down to a minimum for that period.  

A Perfect Example

A perfect example of applying essentialism to writers lives in a set-aside time is National Novel Writers' Month. That has helped many writers jump starting new projects or completing first drafts. They had one essential thing they were doing for one month--writing 50,000 words.

You can find a multitude of information on-line about preparing for National Novel Writing Month, much of it involving plotting and working on character development or settings before November 1, NaNoWriMo's starting date. Additional planning could involve keeping your November weekends clear of commitments, finding help with the kids, getting meals made ahead of time. (That may only be important to me.)

The more plans you can get in place before NaNoWriMo or any set-aside time begins, the better your chances of being successful with it. 

 

Round-up Of Original Content's Essentialism Posts

A Summer Reading Arc On Essentialism

Essentialism And Work Clutter

Essentialism And Choice

Situational Essentialism

Time Management Tuesday: Chaos Involving Time, Place, And Money

Last week's TMT post was about my  favorite subject recently, writing in chaos, becoming one with the chaos. While writing it, I was reminded of an article I read a few months ago at Literary Hub,  The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer by Olivia Campbell.

Campbell is writing about women who are actually working as writers while functioning as the primary caregiver for children, not women who get most of their income from other jobs. Caregiving is just plain chaotic, and these women are writing while living with the chaos. They end up having to do what we've talked about here many times. They use small pieces of time to write, because the demands of their lives are such that they don't have big chunks to work with. While it would be terrific to have a month, a week, a weekend or even half a day to write, you can also write with little units of time spread over a long period.

Campbell's mother-writers deal with another level of chaos, of course, in that they often can't work in the same place all the time. It's not unusual for them to have to move around, writing in cars or at child events or in odd spots in their own homes. 

Time is one thing, place is another. Using whatever 20-minute, 45-minute, 90-minute unit of time you can grab when you can sit down at the same desk each time you grab it is very different from using those same amounts of time while in a room with people watching TV or at the lake while someone's having a swimming lesson. I can remember bringing some pages with me to a nursing home to revise and some reading with me when I was going to help out with some childcare in someone else's home. I ended up bringing it all back to my place. Years ago, before the splendor of the iPhone that is in my pocket right now, I bought a small tape recorder to carry with me in the car, so I could record ideas and plans for projects I was working on. I used it a couple of times and think I threw it away this past year.

I'm not touching the whole place thing here at OC. 

I Will Touch Money, Though

One of the things Campbell writes about is the fantasy that writers, particularly men, work in seclusion at big desks. I am going to argue that if this exists anywhere it is probably just for the most successful writers, male or female. The situation you see for Tom in Home Economics, who I think in one episode was working at a desk in a room with a crib, is probably much more the case for the majority of writers. 

Success and the money it brings is where things become tricky for writers, particularly mother-writers. As Campbell pointed out in an example from her own life, you need a certain amount of writing income to pay for child care so you have more time to write more so you can make more money. This becomes even more frustrating since writers have to spend an enormous amount of time on work that may never generate any income at all. Some of us are giving a lot of work away trying to develop a reputation that editors and publishers will be interested in, which could generate income in the future but there's nothing there to pay for childcare now.

Virginia Woolf is often quoted as saying that in order to write, women need a room of their own. But she didn't just say they needed a room of their own. She said they needed a room of their own and five hundred pounds a year. 

It's the lack of money--from either writing income or family--that has such an impact on mother-writers. It's what leaves them in chaos and working with little units of time.   

Time Management Tuesday: The Chaos Theory Of Time Management

I think from now on the bulk of my time management efforts are going to revolve around living with chaos. We are all a moment away from a time-consuming crisis, another illness (our own or someone else's), a breakdown, or storm damage; we are all a moment away from having today, tomorrow, or most of this week--hell, most of next month--totally consumed with something unrelated to what we had planned. 

You can be broken by chaos or you can roll with it. I'm still working on rolling with it.

A Case Study Using Set Aside Time, The Unit System, And Beginning Again

The case study, of course, involves me, as so many of my case studies do. For the past two months, I've been functioning as back up child care during a period involving a change in school schedules as well as one of those family illnesses that circulates around a couple of weeks and takes the regular child care provider out of commission, as well. 

Set-aside Time. My first step in dealing with this was to treat the period while I was going to be doing this particular part-time job as a set-aside time, like the May Days program I do with a Facebook group or National Novel Writing Month, when people set-aside the month of November to try to write the first draft of a book. During the time I was going to be committing a lot of time to family assistance, I would shift how I work. I wouldn't try to complete any particular work task. Instead, I would try to do something every day. 

This period started at the beginning of March, the beginning of a month, and the beginning of a time period is significant. It's easy to feel excited about starting something new then. 

Unit System. The second step in dealing with this situation was to accept that I didn't need huge periods of time in order to do something. I didn't need the whole month, a whole week, a retreat, a weekend, a day. In fact, there's a great deal of evidence that working over long periods of time actually decreases the quality of work. That's the argument for breaking your time into units or segments. 

The point being, having only a short period of time to work most days isn't a reason to give into the what-the-hell effect . Do something. Do anything.

During the month of March, I maintained a folder in my word processing program and every day I had to put something into that I had done. It could be reading a NetGalley ARC, which will become a blog post here. It could be working on one of several humor pieces I have in progress. It could be research. It could be working on a chapter.

Working like that during the month of March I was able to get a chapter started in the never-ending book I'm working on, finish revising a humorous essay into a humor piece, format it, and submit it, revise a story from years back and submit that, and submit a manuscript to an agent. 

It wasn't orderly, but I did something and moved forward. All the submissions have already been rejected, but one was a good rejection. A great rejection with feedback and the offer to look at a revision. This is a very positive outcome, and it came during a period when I wasn't working at my best.

Unfortunately, the end of time periods are just as important as the beginnings. When the end of March came, I couldn't maintain that daily work load, as minor as it was, because my set-aside time was over. Done.

Begin Again. And that is when beginning again comes into play. The end is in sight with the childcare situation. Gail shouldn't be twisting little minds much longer. I have a couple of days this week to get back on my feet and prepare for my more normal schedule next week. And then after that comes this year's May Days Facebook initiative, which I've found helpful for dealing with chaos in the past. What happened in March and most of April is in the past. It's behind me. I am beginning again.

Now, of course, that's only one possible future timeline, because remember my first paragraph--we are one call or text from chaos. But if I don't begin again next week, I'll try to use the May Days program to get back on task with a daily writing chore. That's a plan! 

Either way, I will begin again. 

Time Management Tuesday: Goals And Living Chaotically (Also, A New Publication)

So last week I was working away on 143 Canterbury Road, my first goal for this year, when I heard about a writing challenge at Medium, where I've published humor. It involves four writing prompts you can pick and choose from, writing for as many or as few prompts as you want. You publish your work directly to Medium, not to a publication on Medium, using challenge tag words, which will mean your work is considered by judges. There's money involved but, more importantly to me, is the possibility to have work read. 

I have short form work I've started or been interested in starting this past year. So the challenge is attractive to me. But...the work has to be up by the end of August. That's going to take time away from 143 Canterbury Road, which I'd really like to get behind me so I can work on short form writing, similar to what I'd do for this Medium writing challenge. (Notice the little cyclical thing going there?)

Then Saturday morning I saw a tweet from one of my sons involving the Olympics, which gave me an idea for a humor piece. However, the Olympics will be over next week. No one will be interested in an Olympics humor piece after next weekend. This was Saturday, remember. In the past, I haven't worked weekends. But I sat down for a few hours and knocked off a rough draft, trying to get something that could be submitted to a humor site on Medium, where it would have a chance of being considered and being published before it would be too old to be of interest to anyone.

I Am Chaos

Serena Repice Lentini on Unsplash

Once again, I'm throwing any hope of an orderly life out the window and living chaotically. The weekend work paid off, because my latest humor piece, Daddy is Watching the Olympics Again, was published today at Frazzled, a site that publishes parenting humor. I've never been able to write something in time to take advantage of a current event, so this is significant for me. Even though I had to give up some order in my life to do it.

And, yes, I'm going to put 143 Canterbury Road on the back burner for August, though I'm hoping to do enough to stay in the Canterbury Road world, so I can work on a couple of short pieces for the Medium challenge. This is another example of taking advantage of an opportunity, though it means upheaval to my writing plan and not staying on a task.

Goals 

Two things are providing anchors in this chaos:

1. We're talking short periods of time here. The Olympics piece had to be done in a couple of days. The Medium challenge lasts only one month.
2. While I'm putting off work on one of this year's goals, "Finish a draft of YA thriller that could become an adult thriller," I'll be working on another, "Work on short-form writing, essays and short stories." If all goes well, I'll have a couple of pieces submitted for this challenge, which addresses still another goal, "Concentrate on submissions and concentrate on increasing the number of submissions I make."

So long as the goals are being addressed, does it matter how orderly or chaotically you work to meet them?

Time Management Tuesday: Living Chaotically

I just finished up another May Days, that month of the year when I get together with some Facebook friends to set aside a time, in this case the month of May, to work on something special. For some people it's finishing a draft, for others it's editing, or getting started on something new. Our leader checks in once a week with encouragement. There's a lot less enthusiasm at the end of the month than there is at the beginning, but, nonetheless, a good-ish time is had by all.

I Love Set-Aside Times

I use the term set-aside time for blocks of time set aside for a special project. You see them a lot in writing. National Novel Writing Month is a famous one. Last November I wrote flash for a month. Last summer I wrote it for six weeks while taking a flash writing workshop. I've been doing May Days for years, and my May group gets together in October to do it again.

Set-Aside Times have a couple of benefits.

• Concentrating on one thing helps you to slow down. You're not frantically juggling multiple tasks and can thus be more productive with one of them. Working harder on just one thing is a relief.
• Working on one thing for a relatively short time helps us to manage chaos. At least that's what I speculated last year, and last month it actually worked for me.
  

 

My Plan For May Days

For this year's May Days my goal was to get through first drafts of 3 chapters, which I thought might get me to an important turning point in the story. Recently I had only been doing 2 chapters a month, so this would be a push. I wasn't thinking in terms of writing every day or of writing a certain number of words. I was thinking in terms getting to a certain point.

Living Chaotically

As so often happens for me, I started May Days unable to work for the first four or five days of the month to tend to family. I can't even remember how long I had to put off starting, but it was a significant chunk of time. 

 

I was experiencing my old friend, chaos. I took a breath, didn't give in to the what-the-hell effect, began again, and leaned on whatever other tricks I'd learned for dealing with chaos.

Then I learned another one, which I'm calling Living Chaotically. 

Remember, I was only thinking about getting to a certain point in my manuscript. The only way to get there, I decided, was to give in to the chaos and give up my weekends. If I couldn't get to the end of a chapter or some other good stopping place by Friday, then I would have to give up the order I've established in my life--no working on weekends--and get to those points by working then. Essentially, I was adding more chaos.

But only for the month of May. I thought I could live with this kind of chaos for one month. And I could.

What Did I Get For Living Chaotically?

I didn't actually get to the point I wanted to get to, because I added at least one more chapter. And then I was noticing that the point I wanted to get to was coming too late in the story. And then I realized I needed to start another draft. 

Since I am a big believer in not pushing through to the end of a first draft when you know something's wrong, that was exciting rather than despair-making. Beginning again, in my experience, always leads to moving forward. 

So I was very happy with my May Days. I got some significant work done, but more importantly, I found a method I plan to use again to deal with and become comfortable with chaos.

Time Management Tuesday: Managing Chaos With Approximating Correct Behavior

I was a big believer in approximating correct behavior when my children were little. If they got anywhere near close to a behavior I was hoping for, instead of complaining about the near miss, I rewarded whatever they did. I took it as a win. My idea was that step-by-approximating-step, they would reach what I was shooting for. I can't recall how often that worked, but at least we avoided a lot of conflict.

Writers can manage some of the chaos in their lives by encouraging a similar attitude in themselves. Particularly in situations in which we've set up short-term objectives around a schedule, we have to be careful not to fall apart when (notice I didn't say if) the schedule can't be adhered to as we fantasized it would, when we can't reach the behavior we were hoping for.

Falling apart causes chaos. 

A Case In Point

Last month I took part in FlashNaNo2020. The plan/schedule for that was to write 30 flash stories in 30 days. I veered off into flash essays and memoirs, so I wasn't sticking to the plan for that right from week 2.

It also became clear at the end of the first week that I wasn't going to meet the planned, "correct behavior," writing 30 pieces of flash in 30 days. I had to put that correct behavior aside and accept that I was going to have to approximate it. The alternative to approximating correct behavior would have been to give in to the dread what-the-hell effect. "I'm obviously not going to hit the behavior I want, so what-the-hell? I might as well give up on this whole thing."

The what-the-hell effect is a lot like what passes for chaos at my house.

What Can Writers Gain From Approximating Correct Behavior?

 

Consider National Novel Writing Month. How many people actually complete a 50,000 word draft of a novel during National Novel Writing Month? Many of them probably realize early on that they're not going to make it. They can fall apart into the chaos of either struggling with work and personal commitments in order to continue trying for the correct behavior or or they can feel that they are incompetent failures. OR they can accept an approximation of correct behavior. In which case, they might come away with a 10- or 20-thousand start on a new writing project. That is a win they can run with in the future. Ask anyone who has written a book.

 

The pressure to meet your desired behavior on a traditional writing retreat (meaning writing goals) must be intense. You've put down some money to be there, you may be walking away from a day job or family to write. Fall apart on Saturday afternoon when things aren't going well? Or shoot for approximating correct behavior and go home with something instead of nothing?

 

As far as my FlashNaNo2020 experience is concerned, I ended up with 15 pieces of flash. I dipped into my writing journal for many of them, which was very gratifying. I'd wanted to do something with some of those thoughts for years. One of my writings from last month was published at a humor site last week. I rewrote one traditional short story as flash and am considering submitting it this month.

Between those 15 new stories/essays/memoirs (some of which need some more work) and the material  I produced at my flash workshop this past summer, I have quite a bit of new writing to submit. This is important, because I've read of a number of writers who manage to get 5 to 10 stories published in a year. They do that, though, by making huge numbers of submissions. You need content to submit in order to do that.

Descending into chaos when you can't maintain the correct behavior you think you need to write doesn't get you material to submit. Approximating correct can.

 

Time Management Tuesday: Managing Chaos By Beginning Again

I was sure I'd written about "begin again" here in the Time Management Tuesday feature. It seemed like just the thing for managing chaos. But search as I would, I couldn't find anything here. So I guess I'm going to have to come up with some new original content.

Okay, if you spend any time reading about meditation, you will see the phrase "begin again." If your mind wanders while you're trying to meditate, no problem. Begin again. If you find that you're no longer in the present moment, that your mind has tiptoed off to your miserable past or your worries of the future, so what? You can begin again.

You're not a bad person because you didn't stay in meditation. You haven't failed. You're just going to begin again. Here is Joseph Goldstein explaining a very positive aspect of beginning again. In less than four minutes, people! How much do I love that? I love it a lot.

Overwhelmed By Chaos? Begin Again

Writers who've become overwhelmed by the chaos of living or at least their own kind of living and find that they are no longer on task with their work can use the same begin again thinking. Beginning to work again is important. But I think the really beneficial aspect of begin again is the lack of judgment. Judging and beating up yourself for work failures:

• Is time consuming. Now you have to spend time ripping into yourself, time you could have spent writing.
  
• Leads to the What-the-Hell Effect. When individuals become distressed about not maintaining goals, they can respond by giving up. We're lousy at what we do, anyway, so what-the-hell?  What's the point of going on with this?
  

Developing a begin again mindset won't keep us from finding ourselves neck deep in chaos. But it could help us get out of it.

Time Management Tuesday: Using Even Shorter Periods Of Time To Deal With Chaos

When we last spoke of time management, I was trying to manage chaos by setting aside the month of October to work on one project. My theory was that a month is a relatively short period of time. "...shorter periods of time are much easier to deal with chaos-wise. We can make a good guess about what's going to happen in the next month and plan for it. We have a good chance of extending our will power that long. Or maybe we can do it for a week? Or a long weekend?"

By the end of this week (and this month that I had set aside for this manuscript), I will have finished one chapter that I'd already started and completed two more. I've also reorganized the first part of the story structurally, including a new first chapter. More importantly, I think, I am into the world of the book again, a world I hadn't entered since, maybe, last spring.

Still Shorter Periods Of Time

In Boundless Creativity: A Spiritual Workbook for Overcoming Self-doubt, Emotional Traps, and Other Creative Blocks by Martha Alderson writes about assigning writing objectives to a time frame. She also suggests actually creating something tangible for each objective that you can manipulate as you work or complete your tasks.  

What you do, she says, is determine how many days you have available to work on a project, then make an objective for each of those days. In her plan, you write these objectives on a note and pin them to a chart on the wall. This month is the second time I've tried this, and I just create a stack of notes for each day. 

What I'm liking about this right now is that if things are going particularly well, I can do the next day or two's objectives and feel that I'm getting ahead.  If I'm not doing particularly well, I can revise the next few days' objectives to give myself more time. Or, perhaps, you could say I'm revising to be more realistic about what I can do.

Reality

Being realistic, in my case, means:

• Not planning an enormous amount of work for each day. That's setting myself up for failure
• Not planning to work on weekends. I rarely do any real, manuscript type work on weekends, anyway, and by leaving them free, I can have some time to revise these daily objectives, if and when I have to. To be really real, I haven't been able to spend the time I wanted to on weekends formally revising those objectives. I've sort of winged it whenever I could. But I've been okay with that, because, hey, I can live with chaos! 
  

 

Speaking Of Small Amounts Of Work

My May Days group, which organized this October set-aside time, shoots for writing two pages a day. I don't care about that much, so long as I'm working. But I have found this past month that I'll be working and think, Getting to the two page point won't be that much work, Gail. Keep going.

No, two pages isn't very much. But that's my point. Small, realistic objectives can keep you (or, at least, me) working toward a goal. They make chaos manageable for a little while.

Time Management Tuesday: Managing Chaos With Set-Aside Time

Back in 2012 I did my first writing project with my May Days Facebook group. I started calling setting aside big blocks of time like this for particular writing activities...ah...set- aside time. I've written about it a few times here over the years. In fact, just this past August I wrote about this issue in relation to an article by Anne Marie O'Connor in which she referred to set-aside times as "concentrated blocks of time." I was hopeful organizing time in that way could help writers slow down and become more productive.

Well, my group gets together every October, too, so I have started a new set-aside period for working on one of my goals for this year, the "YA thriller that could become an adult thriller." Since I'm now thinking in terms of chaos, I'm hoping set-asides will be useful for that, too. 

Why Set-Aside Times Could Slow You Down

To quote me: "Sometimes you have to juggle multiple projects--editing one thing while submitting another or marketing still something else. But finding blocks of time you can dedicate to just one thing slows you down, because you're not racing to work on multiple tasks. And that can increase productivity, because you can see some work getting done."

Why Set-Aside Times Could Manage Chaos

Organizing time like this could also help with managing the chaos of our lives long enough to do something. Mainly because we're only trying to do the something for a specific, and relatively short, period of time. Looking forward to our future, which we, of course, expect to go on forever, it's hard to get a handle on controlling things, because will power and self-discipline are finite. And time management is situational. We can't foresee what situations are going to arise over the next year or multiple years that will have an impact on how we are able to spend our time. Did you see the 2020 Pandemic coming? I rest my case.

But shorter periods of time are much easier to deal with chaos-wise. We can make a good guess about what's going to happen in the next month and plan for it. We have a good chance of extending our will power that long. Or maybe we can do it for a week? Or a long weekend? 

Can Set-Asides Counteract Chaos?

I've actually signed up for a 5-day mindfulness event this week. Because:

• Yeah. I am chaos. What could possibly go wrong with doing two set-aside activities at once? What? You say two simultaneous set-asides contradicts the whole issue of dedicating your time and energy to one thing? Won't that cause chaos? Those of us who are chaos just grab for the gusto.
• The mindfulness event is short. It's 5 days. I'm not planning some big mindfulness activity for the rest of my life. Talk about looking for trouble.
  

So my hope is that the shortness of this new event will counteract my running toward chaos with arms wide open.

Because when struggling with chaos, my thought is less is always going to be more.

Time Management Tuesday: Living With Chaos

I recently finished watching a multi-season TV show from another country. Both the show and the country will remain nameless in order to preserve your viewing experience. It was a very decent show, and I wouldn't want to ruin it for anyone.

However, the series finale was very interesting. In America, at least, a series finale usually involves breaking up the gang, boo-hoo, everyone is going forth in some different way. It's as if since the viewers aren't going to be there, anymore, the writers feel the characters can't be there, in their TV world, either.

In this foreign show, though, everyone does remain together. What makes it a finale, is that the main character experienced an epiphany. Her epiphany was "I am chaos." She accepted that about herself. And that is how we know she will go forth, with that self-knowledge.

My Chaos Epiphany

I experienced an epiphany when I watched that show. I am chaos, too. I am surrounded with disorder, some of it external (I am looking at you pandemic, elderly parents, illness, child-rearing, tropical storms, power outages, family-member's-cat-that-landed-here-for-two-months). Some of it internal (too many interests, too easily overwhelmed).

I am chaos. That would certainly explain why all my work sites become...chaotic. My spot on the couch with my multiple reading starts and drawing and card writing and other tasks...chaotic. My kitchen counters, in spite of my best efforts,...chaotic.

My own epiphany continued. What I'm trying to do with time management, I thought, is control the chaos. Then came a second thought. No, I am not trying to control chaos. Chaos--disorder, confusion, unpredictability--can't be controlled or it wouldn't be chaos. I am trying to live with it. I'm trying to manage it, here and there, so I can get things done.

Are Some Of Us More Sensitive To Chaos Than Others?

Supposedly, there are people out there who are capable of just sitting down and writing, though I'm not sure anyone knows how they're able to do it. Do these people not notice chaos? Are they able to live with it? Does it just roll off their backs?

The rest of us, who are sensitive to external and internal chaos, still have valuable work to produce. We just have to manage our chaos--both external and internal--for periods of time so we can do it.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be reworking some Time Management Tuesday material, thinking about it in terms of managing chaos.