Fun! (And how I forget to have it)

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

Last year, I read a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It was more than a book, it was more like a self-paced course to help blocked creatives become creative again. I didn’t know that before I started, I just read it because it had been suggested by so many people in podcasts and blogs. It was a worthwhile experience.

It’s full of activities and prompts to help you dig into your own creativity and to find joy and to make time to explore and make and do. 

One of the activities, fairly early on, was to write a list of 20 things that you enjoy doing.

Now, I wasn’t in the best of places at the end of last year. I don’t really think anybody was. I was not in crisis yet, but I was well on the way. 

I found it really hard to write a list of 20 things I enjoyed doing. 

And maybe a week or so after I wrote the list I thought, ‘Hang on. I enjoy dancing. Dancing is a big part of who I am. Why isn’t dancing on that list?’ 

I had lost touch with myself. I had lost touch with the part of myself that had fun.

Playing and having fun is a big part of being human. It’s an important part of mental health. 

And it’s a very easy thing to squeeze out of our lives.

I am a Type A personality. I admit it. I love lists. I love structure. I love to Get Things Done. But I can get so involved in looking at the jobs that need doing and crossing them off that I forget to enjoy life on the way through.

I like things to have purpose. And that’s good. But some things should be done for no purpose. Just for the joy of it. Not to monetise, not to add to your body of work, not to be part of your business. But just for fun.

My father-in-law has started a new project. He’s fulfilling a life-long ambition to make a model train set. In their back room he has a table on wheels and on that table is a train track that goes around and around, and he’s sculpted some hills and some rivers, and used 3D printing to make houses and train stations and people and so on. Last weekend, to celebrate his 70^th birthday, all the boys in the family went to his place and worked on the train set. They wired in lights, used Arduino technology to make them come on in interesting ways. They worked on the train whistle. 

Now, I looked at the train set and my whole self went, ‘But why?’ What is the point of this? You can’t even make a story out of it. It just goes around and around.

But that is the point. That is the whole point. This project is play. It’s deep play and it’s great.

Moz is teaching himself to play piano. I enjoy listening to him play through worship songs, or some Elton John or Annie Lennox. He plays just for the fun of it. He doesn’t want to be part of a worship team or a band that plays gigs every week. He just enjoys playing. I love that. I need to put more of that in my life. I think all of us need to have these fun things in our lives.

I’m not good at play. Mostly I just look at all the things that need to be done, and try to do them. Try to get the whole list crossed off before the week ticks over and I have to do it all again.

Or if I do enjoy something, like writing, then I write whole novels and sell them and try to make a living doing that. 

I’m trying to change though. Now I put on funky music and dance in the kitchen, just for fun. I have an adult colouring book to work my way through and I’m trying not to stress too much when I colour outside the lines. I play card games with people and try not to mind when I lose. I mess around on the bass guitar, not for any reason, just to enjoy the music. I meet with friends for coffee and laughter and fun conversation.

Fun reminds me that I don’t have to ‘do’ all the time, that it’s OK sometimes just to ‘be’. That I am valuable for who I am, not just what I produce.

It’s so easy to lose this part of ourselves, but life with out light and laughter is no life at all. In all our organising and bringing order to our lives, let’s not forget to leave room for a little bit of fun every now and then. Make time to do the things you enjoy, just for the sake of enjoyment.

What do you enjoy doing? What do you do to bring fun into your life?

Decision Fatigue

There are so many choices

I don’t know if it’s because I’m officially a ‘highly sensitive person’ (according to the book Quiet by Susan Cain) or that I’m an introvert, or what, but I seem to need a lot less stimulation than other people. I know that if I let it go too far, then I risk depression, but generally I am a happy person when my life is filled with routine and order and when I don’t have to deal with many changes.

One of the places where this shows up is at breakfast time.

You see, I eat the same breakfast nearly every morning. I soak oats in milk overnight, I add some stewed pears and some Greek yogurt and I’m good. It’s delicious, nutritious, and filling. 

Moz, on the other hand, could not bear the thought of eating the same thing every single day. He doesn’t much mind what he eats as long as there’s some variety. Some mornings toast, sometimes an omelet, sometimes cereal, sometimes fruit and yogurt. Variety.

The thing is, I try to limit the decisions in my life as much as possible, because in my line of work I need to make decisions every day. Many decisions. 

If I’m writing a novel, I need to decide what the characters are doing. How they feel. What arguments they have. What the threat is. And so on. And at the moment I am making decisions about a whole world. What does it look like? What’s the currency? What kind of activities are available?

If I’m editing, I need to decide on the right word, the right turn of phrase, the exact place to put a comma. 

And because I work for myself, and my time is my own, I have to decide what to do with it.

I don’t need to be bothered with deciding which breakfast cereal to eat in addition to all the other decisions I make.

I asked google how many decisions the average person makes in a day and the answers ranged from 70 to 35,000. I guess if you look at the very detailed and subconscious choices you make, e.g. whether to start walking with your left foot or your right, the answer could come to 35,000 (one choice every two waking seconds of the day). But in terms of the choices that contribute to decision fatigue, I’m going to go with Sheena lyengar’s research that estimates that we make about 70 decisions daily. 

Our ability to make decisions decreases with the number of decisions we make. And once we run out of oomph we are inclined to make mistakes, like procrastination, or impulse buying. You know this if you’ve ever gone to the grocery store at the end of a long day. 

One way to limit decision fatigue is by limiting decisions. Here’s a few ways you can do that easily in your daily life:

• You can limit the clothes that you wear. Steve Jobs apparently wore the same clothes every day (not the exact same clothes, we assume, but different sets of the same colour and style of clothing) so that he didn’t have to think what to wear.
• I’m not as extreme as Steve Jobs, but I try to wear shirts and trousers or jeans that are grey, black or navy and then add a colourful jumper or scarf. And (don’t tell anyone) I often wear the same outfit twice in a row. I have specific outfits for when I’m leading church or giving a talk. I know that they look good, so I don’t mess with them. I don’t try to choose what to wear every time. I just put the suit on, and get the thing done.
• You already know that I limit choice in what I eat. I haven’t gone all the way to a weekly meal plan yet, but some people swear by them as ways to help with the choices when shopping and when cooking the evening meal. For a while we invested in one of those meal plans where a box of groceries and a couple of recipes get delivered to your house each week. That got us through some tough times and meant we ate a lot less takeaway food. We only had to decide each week between the two delivered recipes (though even that choice was too hard sometimes).
• One of the stories in Sandra Felton’s The Messies Manual is about a woman who struggled to choose what to eat at a restaurant. She made it easier for herself by deciding to limit her choice each time. One time she would have a fish dish, the next, poultry, the next red meat. That way, she didn’t have to choose from the list of every dish on the menu, but only two or three dishes.
• You can limit decisions by having a schedule or routine. You might not be able to schedule your whole day like I can, but you can have a morning routine that you just do automatically. And you may be able to schedule things like exercise or grocery shopping.

I’ll show you what I mean by this by explaining how I schedule my gym visits. At the moment I am trying to get to the gym to do 30 minutes of vigorous exercise six days a week. But if I didn’t schedule it, I’m sure I wouldn’t feel ‘in the mood’ most days and I wouldn’t get it done. It would be a decision I would struggle with. 

So I go with a routine:

• On Mondays my exercise is a lunchtime thing. I head to the gym at around 1pm.
• Tuesdays I go on my way back home from my writing group, Creative Space. I put my gym clothes in the car so I don’t have to go home to get changed. If I did go home I would struggle to get back out the door to go to the gym.
• Wednesdays I go first thing: breakfast, put on gym clothes, exercise.
• Thursdays I go and write my novel at a cafe first thing, then gym on the way home, clothes packed as on Tuesdays.
• On Fridays the gym comes after my coffee visit with my Mum. That visit generally falls at about lunch time so I pack a muesli bar as well so that I can’t talk myself out of going if I’m hungry.
• Saturdays and Sundays are a bit more fluid, but I will try to go first thing on a Saturday and I go after church on Sundays, especially if I’m leading.

I still don’t make it to the gym every single day, but you can see how I’m making it easy for myself by scheduling, linking the gym with other activities, and packing what I need so that I get rid of excuses. This is a schedule for an ideal week, and no week is ideal. But if I didn’t have this picture of what I’m aiming for then I think I’d be hitting nothing most days and not exercising at all. Without the schedule, each day I would have to decide, ‘do I want to go to the gym?’ And the chances of the answer to that being ‘yes’ are much smaller if I’m deciding afresh every time.

If you’re struggling with decision fatigue, or finding it hard to make the myriad choices that are required to get through the day, then I encourage a little bit of planning. See if you can cut down the choices you have to make by meal planning or just deciding to limit your breakfast to one type of food. And work on a schedule for the activities where you need willpower. 

Why other areas can you see that you can pre-decide? Do you have a special way of dealing with those ‘extra willpower needed’ activities? Do you like a daily schedule or are you a more spontaneous person?

How and why to sleep well

I’m not an ‘early bird’ or a ‘night owl’. I’m more some kind of ‘permanently exhausted pigeon’.

From https://www.gemmacorrell.com/

No, that’s not quite the truth, it’s just a quote from Gemma Correll’s brilliant comic that I like. I’m more of an early bird these days. But I do seem to need more sleep than your average bear.

Sleep is so very important. I’ve been reading the book Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and I’ve learned a bit about what sleep can do for you:

• It helps your body to grow
• It helps your body to fight infection
• It helps your body to repair wounds and scratches
• It is a time when myelin is generated (a substance that helps your body to send nerve signals and is damaged in MS)
• It is a time when your brain washes out toxins
• It is a time when brain injuries are repaired

Lack of sleep is associated with increased risk of ulcers, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, dementia, and cognitive decline.

Sleep is a time when your brain solidifies its memories. Visual, emotional and procedural memories are solidified during rapid eye movement sleep, and verbal memories during slow wave sleep.

And while we sleep, our subconscious mind works on problems from the day, which can lead to moments of insight. We can wake up and find that our problems are solved!

When we are busy or trying to be productive, it can be tempting to cut into our sleep time. To think of sleep as unproductive, wasted time.

‘No sleep is going to be lost time’ says Pang. And when I look at the list of things that sleep helps with, I have to agree.

Sleep occurs in cycles that are 90 – 110 minutes long. If you get woken in the middle of a sleep cycle you feel groggy and horrible. But waking at the end of a cycle makes you feel more refreshed.

You can plan for this by looking at the time you wake up and counting back in 90 minute blocks to find the best time for you to go to bed. For example, if you need to wake up at 6 am then going to bed at 10.30 pm will get you five full cycles (if my maths is correct) and 7.5 hours sleep. 

I need more like 9 hours sleep myself, but my husband Moz is fully loaded at 7.5 hours. A while back, he would do his best to head to bed at 10.30 pm in an attempt to get all his cycles in before the alarm went off in the morning.

There was a problem with this calculation though. The thing was that in order to get all the sleep he needed, he had to drop off to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. He came to bed needing to fall asleep straight away. And that kind of stress is not very sleep-inducing.

Now, he’s fixed that by heading to bed a little earlier. He’ll be reading in bed at around 9.30 or 10 pm and turning the light off shortly thereafter. That means that often his sleep cycles finish early in the morning. He often wakes quite relaxed and refreshed at 5am. But that’s ok. He just gets up and goes to his study (leaving me still peacefully snoring) and plays on the computer or peruses the internet until it’s time to get going for the day. The activities he used to do at night he now does earlier in the morning. And he’s a lot less stressed, but he’s still getting the sleep that he needs.

There are even smart watches that keep track of your sleep cycles. You can tell them the time that you need to be awake and they will use a vibrating alarm to wake you at a time near to that where you are in a good place in your sleep cycle and less likely to be groggy. No more waking out of deep sleep to the insistent buzzing of an alarm.

Even naps are helpful. Did you know that Winston Churchill took afternoon naps all the way through World War II? Even a five minute nap apparently helps your memory work better. A 30 minute nap helps renew your depleted energy (I took one of those right before writing this) and a longer nap can cut your day in two so that you can work longer into the evening. 

I know that some people who nap for longer wake up feeling disoriented and groggy, so I prefer a nice 30 minute nap. Enough to restore energy, but not too deep into the sleep cycle.

I want to finish with a few tips for getting yourself a good night’s sleep. 

Turn off your screens an hour or so before going to bed. The blue light from screens keeps you awake and the dopamine hits from social media or the adrenaline from playing games or watching TV dramas are not going to help with the calming down either. A book is a great alternative.

Keep your screens and your work out of the bedroom. Use the bedroom for sleeping. Keep your work life elsewhere in the house so you’re not drawn to worrying about it at night.

If worrying about things keeps you awake, choose a time of day when you will worry, either a few hours before bed, or first thing in the morning. Dedicate that time to worrying and write down your worries. Then give them to God (I put them in a shoebox that is God’s inbox). When worries wake you at night, you can tell yourself that you will worry about that in your ‘worry time’ and go back to sleep. (It sounds strange, but it works for me.)

Make sure you do some exercise, again, earlier in the day and not immediately before you’re going to jump into bed and turn your light out. And make sure you don’t drink caffeine late in the day either. Most people stop drinking caffeinated drinks after lunch so that the caffeine has a bit of a chance to leave their systems.

A warm, milky drink before bed and a cool room should be a good combination that will lead to a peaceful and restful night’s sleep.

I am still working on my sleep habits. But I know it’s worth working on and getting right. Sleep is not wasted time, it is incredibly important for both mental and physical health. I hope you can prioritise your sleep and be energised and ready to face each new day.

PS here are a few websites you might also find helpful 🙂

https://www.healthline.com/health/sleep/sleep-calculator#not-enough-sleep

https://startsleeping.org/sleep-calculator/

https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/sleep-hygiene#general-suggestions

My Life Changing Moment

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

I used to be a messy, disorganised, cluttered person. I didn’t enjoy it, but I didn’t know how to be anything else. I didn’t know why I was how I was. I didn’t know how to change.

I remember vividly one morning looking at the house and how disgusted I was by it. I couldn’t face the dishes in the kitchen from the night before. I couldn’t face the breakfast dishes that had joined them. I couldn’t face the toys the kids had left all over the floor, or the clothes that were waiting to be washed, and taken off the line, and folded out of the basket. I couldn’t face any of it. It was disgusting. 

I want to make clear here that I was disgusted by my house for myself, not because of what anyone else would think. I did not like living like this.

The mess made me feel angry and confused and weary. The piles everywhere messed with my brain. I was tired from trying to remember where everything was. I was weary from the never-ending cycle of attempting to clean it up, then feeling so tired that I let it get messy again.

That morning, I couldn’t face any of it. I ran away. I crossed the street and had a coffee with my friend and let our kids play together. I knew I was just procrastinating, but that’s what I decided to do. 

And that’s the morning that Moz did something that I had wanted him to do for a while. He brought a mate from work over to have a cuppa. They were doing some electrical wiring in the vicinity so they dropped in to say hello and to have a drink. 

I wasn’t there. They didn’t get to see me or have a nice conversation. What they got to see was my super-messy disgusting house. And Moz never tried that again.

I felt terrible. I really did. But I didn’t know how to change.

Then one night I listened to Focus on the Family on Ultra106.5. That night a lady called Sandra Felton introduced her book, ‘The Messies Manual’. She talked about the underlying reasons we live with mess, with a cluttered house, the reasons we procrastinate. She spoke to something deep inside me. I bought her book and I have never looked back. I now have several copies of her book that I lend out to friends who share with me their problems with keeping a tidy house. 

I know that Felton is not the only one giving this kind of advice. There are so many books, blogs, podcasts and courses helping those of us who need organisational help. But I want to publicly thank her for what she did in my life. I am so grateful for the clean house and the clear head and, yes, the headspace for my writing that I don’t think I’d have without her advice.

Sandra Felton shares so much wisdom, but today I will just share the major idea that helped me the most: Her decluttering method.

Sandra calls this the Mt Vernon Method. You start somewhere, say inside the front door at the hall table. You have three boxes: a box for the things you will give away, one for things to throw away, and one for things that belong somewhere else. As you look at every surface, and open every draw and every cupboard, you look at each item and put it in one of those three boxes. And you put back in the drawer the things that belong in the drawer and those things only. And no keeping things ‘just in case’. (She does say that you can have an extra box for those things you can’t decide about. When that box is full, you store it for a predetermined amount of time and then look through it and make the decisions then.)

This is a marathon, not a sprint. As you can, you attack the next space in the house. When you have to stop for the day, you stop. But you just keep going, until over time you declutter your whole house.

I had kept far too much stuff in our house. We had moved four times in a year, I hated the packing so I had left a lot of our goods packed up in boxes just in case we needed them again. I was also keeping every little bit of rubbish, sorry, I mean craft supplies that I thought could possibly be useful for children’s activities. Toilet rolls, cereal boxes, scraps of wool and so on. I was keeping a lot of memorabilia too, like all the letters my grade 10 boyfriend had written to me. It was all taking up space in a tiny house, spilling out onto benches and the floor. Taking up cupboard space so that things we actually needed could not have been put away even if we had wanted to.

I was hanging onto stuff to give me security. But stuff can’t do that. All it did was take away my peace. I needed to throw stuff out. I went through and ‘Mt Vernon-ed’ my house and suddenly our hall cupboard could be used for hanging up our coats, all our food could fit into our pantry, and all our clothes could be put away in our chests of drawers.

In my house now, I even have several drawers that are empty. Not all the drawers and shelves have to be full, you know. You don’t have to keep stuff just for the sake of it.

I am now in love with clear surfaces, with clean lines in a house. With ‘a place for everything, and everything in its place’. As I got organised and cleaned up I found that I enjoyed the experience. That I wanted more and more organisation. Not just of my stuff, but also of my time and my thoughts. 

There are other methods that might work better for you. Marie Kondo famously tells people to pull everything out (for example, make a pile of every piece of clothing you own) then only hang on to those things that ‘spark joy’. Dana, from A Slob Comes Clean, prefers a bit-by-bit process that starts with getting rid of the ‘trash’; the rubbish that is just sitting there in whichever room you are deciding to clean first. I think that’s a great starting point too.

It doesn’t matter much which method you use. If you find that you can never get on top of the cleaning in your house, maybe consider that you might have just a bit too much stuff, and get rid of some. For me it was the starting point of a new way of life.

Hearing Sandra Felton speak on the radio was the start of the Quiet Life journey and I’m so grateful to her and to God for sending her along at just the right time.

If you would like to hear me say a bit more about this, you can find my podcast at ruthamos.com.au and you can sign up there to receive this blog in newsletter form too, straight to your inbox.

How do you declutter your house? Have you come across any organisational tools that you’ve found particularly helpful? I’d love to hear about them.

Brain Buckets

When we talked about the big brain dump list, we talked about how our brains cannot hold all the things we would like them to hold. How if we are keeping everything in our heads, there is a big chance that some of the things will fall out.

And, when it comes down to it, do you want to use your brain for keeping track of things? Or do you want to use it for thinking?

I often thought, when I had small children, that some of the reason for the ‘baby brain’ – the clouded mind, the inability to think – was that I was keeping track of everything using only my brain. I had trouble thinking through a complicated idea, but if someone asked me where the socks with the pink stripe were, or what had happened to my son’s sunhat, or whether there was milk in the fridge, I could answer those questions straight away.

But I don’t want to use my brain’s powers for keeping track of the dirty laundry and remembering that we need to buy milk and that Moz is on the roster at church on Sunday. That is not a good use of my brain. I want to use my brain to write novels and blog posts, to edit complicated scientific papers, and to daydream.

So what to do?

It’s quite simple, really. Use tools to keep track of things and use my brain for thinking.

But the trick is to use the proper tools. There’s no use writing the grocery list on the back of an envelope, and the roster on the church newsletter. Then your brain has to keep track of where the envelope and the church newsletter is, and also it spends time wondering whether that particular scrap of paper has been thrown out by mistake when it has a VERY IMPORTANT thing written in the corner that you MUST NOT forget. 

And tying a knot in your handkerchief, no matter how bad your sinuses are, is also not very effective. 

So the tools we use must be effective, efficient, and limited.

Decide what you are going to use and use those tools at all times. Don’t get caught in the trap of using too many tools and then having to look between them all the time to find the thing. Choose some tools and go with them.

Here’s how I am doing it right now.

Groceries are written on a pad on the fridge. When I use something up, I write it on the pad. I have also trained the members of my household to do this, and they do it most of the time. If they don’t, I don’t take any responsibility for it. If it’s not written on the grocery pad, then they will need to go get it themselves.

My general list of things to do is on the Actions app (from Moleskine) on my phone. So no matter where I am, if I start to think, ‘I should put the rubbish out’ or ‘go to the bank’ or ‘fold the washing’ I put that on my phone. If it’s important and time limited I can add an alarm to remind me. But because I know that the jobs are there on the phone, I usually just look at what needs to be done. The app I use can set certain days to do certain tasks and can also make some tasks repeating tasks. It’s all very handy.

I write out my work to-do list on my paper diary on my work desk. That helps me to limit the list of things I’m trying to do in a work day. And it helps me to plan the day too.  

But those two lists are not my brain dump list, of course. For the brain dump I use Evernote. And I also use Evernote for any thoughts about projects – like book ideas, blog post ideas, or even larger household projects. And Evernote is great because you can put websites in it too. I also keep my ‘books to read’ list in Evernote. The only issue with Evernote is that it can become a ‘write-only’ piece of software. You can put heaps in it that you never look at again. So be wary of only adding information that you will want to look at later.

Another thing I keep in Evernote is a packing list. When we go anywhere to stay the night I can easily pack for the occasion because everything I usually pack is written in the list. So I feel confident that I’m not going to forget my chargers or my decaf coffee, they are on my list and they will be remembered.

I have a small notebook that I keep by my bed. I use that for those pesky thoughts that come just as you get comfortable. ‘You must remember to ring your mother tomorrow’ for example. I write it down in the notebook and then transfer it to my phone the next day. (No, my phone does not live next to my bed and I hope it never will.)

I also have a small notebook in my handbag, but I tend to use my phone instead these days rather than pen and paper.

And finally, I use google calendar for keeping track of my appointments. I love that I can add things on my phone or on my computer. And if I want Moz to know about them I can put them in the calendar we share so that we both know. It’s kept on the cloud so I’m not going to lose the dates even if my phone or computer dies.

Those are the things I use to remember things, to keep track of things, and to store my thoughts so that my brain is clearer and I can use it for thinking. 

So remember, keep it simple and limit the number of brain buckets, but make sure you write it down.

My novels can be found at rjamos.com and you can drop me a line @ RuthAmosAuthor on Facebook, @aquietlifeblog on Twitter, or email me at ruth@ruthamos.com.au

A Daily List

Previously on this blog I talked about ‘The Everything List’ – the big brain-dump list of everything, the list that you use to clear your brain and to keep track of all the different jobs that you need to do. That is a really important list to use to get life organised, but it is not a list that you can work off on a daily basis.

If you just use the one big list, you run into a couple of problems pretty quickly:

1) You can jump from thing to thing on the list, never quite finishing anything and never getting focused work done, and

2) You end up feeling like you never achieve anything because the list never gets any smaller. 

This means you never feel productive, never get that nice feeling of being finished, never feel satisfied that you’ve done a good day’s work, and that leads to procrastination.

There is a solution: use a daily list.

The list for the day should be small. It should contain only the number of things that you can realistically achieve in that day. At first, that might be hard to judge, but as you go on you’ll start to see how much you can do and limit your list to those things.

For example, it took me a while, but I realised that editing 5,000 words takes me about two hours. I used to hope that I could squeeze it into an hour or so, and add more to the day. But now I know that if I get a 5,000 word editing job, I need two hours to do it. And so I set that time aside. I don’t try to do more than I can in the number of hours I have.

To keep the list small, it’s helpful to write it in a small place. You could use a Post-it note or an index card. I use a paper diary that has a week to a page, so each day has a small section of about 2 cm by 5 cm. The diary has the hours of the day on it too, so if I need to block out two or three hours for a job or activity I can do that and limit the amount that I can add to the rest of the day. Just having the limited space to write the list on keeps me aware that my time is limited too.

With this small space to write your daily list, you then turn to your master list. Look down that list and figure out what you are going to attempt to do today. What does today hold? As your eyes run down the master list, some things will catch your attention, maybe because they are urgent, or maybe because you have a desire to do them today. Both these attitudes are good – in fact, it’s a good idea to have a mix of things you have to do and things you want to do on your list if you can possibly achieve that. And don’t forget all the regular things too – checking email, washing clothes, all those repeating tasks. You need to set aside time to do those too. 

But only as much as you can fit into a day.

And what if a new job appears through the day? Because you’re almost guaranteed that something’s going to show up. You’ll have a request pop into your email in-box. You’ll get a phone call. Someone will knock on your door. 

Well, the thing is, your day is full. The new job either goes on the master list, or it goes on tomorrow’s list. But you don’t just try to squeeze it into today. Today is booked already. You have a complete list today.

If the job is extremely urgent, then you can bump one of today’s jobs onto tomorrow. But I don’t recommend that. If at all possible, tell the asker that your day is full today, but you can do the job tomorrow. You’ll be surprised at how often they will accept your explanation and put off the deadline.

Wouldn’t it be nice if time was unlimited? If you could squeeze more and more in to a day? But it’s not the case. Time and energy are limited commodities and we need to act as if they are. We need to take control of our day and use our time to serve us and to enable us to do the work that we have chosen to do.

Annie Dillard said, ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.’ 

Let’s use our daily lists to make sure that how we spend our days gives us the opportunity to give to the world the gift that only we can give.

Do you have another way to organise your day? Do you use pen and paper, or an app on your phone? How do you make sure you don’t try to squeeze too much into a day?

Focus

Our culture seems to be a little addicted to overwork. I mean, working hard, putting effort in, getting heaps done. That’s all good, isn’t it? That’s valuable. That makes us feel like productive members of society.

We can tell ourselves that we are working and that it’s all goodness and duty, but maybe sometimes we are working long hours to avoid our families, or our feelings, or ourselves.

And just because we are putting long hours in, doesn’t necessarily mean we are getting heaps done.

Moz remembers a time when he was doing a night shift. He and his boss worked until around 3am when they realised that their productivity and efficiency had gone right down. They chose to take a nap for a couple of hours and then get back on with it. They finished up at around 7am.

If they had worked through, they probably would have still finished at around 7am. The nap gave them the boost of energy they needed to work efficiently for the rest of the night.

In a similar way, the other week my pastor took a mental health day. He works six days a week and after a while he got a bit tired. (Fair enough!) By taking a mental health day he could come back to work refreshed and get more done, more efficiently. 

But I hope you notice that there’s a word that keeps coming up in this discussion, and that’s ‘efficient’.

A business in the UK (Voucher Cloud) surveyed 1989 workers and asked them how many hours they would actually work in an 8-hour day. The answer averaged out at just under 3 hours a day. What did they do for the rest of the work day? They read the news, chatted, made snacks and hot drinks, made phone calls, and even applied for new jobs! 

By working efficiently and effectively, you can get more done in less time and free up time to do what you love.

There are several tricks that you can use to get this efficiency and sense of focus.

Firstly, it is a good idea to figure out what you are working on right now. Make a list, prioritise, and then focus on the job that is the top of the list. If you’re jumping from job to job, you’re not going to make a dent in any of the tasks you need to achieve. Find one task, focus on that one, and get it done.

You can trick your brain into getting into work quickly by using separate spaces for different activities.

If your brain knows that this is a ‘work space’ then it will get into work mode much more easily. 

Caleb (my son) worked this out during the COVID year when he had to do his university studies from home. He had a desk and a desktop computer where he could have listened to lectures and worked on his assignments. The problem was, that desk was where he played his computer games. So when he tried to work at that desk, his brain told him that it was a gaming space. He did much better when he worked on his university assignments at the dining table, and relaxed by playing computer games at his desk.

As I do all my work from home, I need to do the same thing. I have a desk, an office space that I use for editing work and administration. When I want to write my novel or work on something creative I often move to the dining table, or even take my laptop to a café so that I can be in a different frame of mind. To relax, I head up to the lounge room. But I try not to do any work sitting on the couch. That is my relaxation space.

Another way to keep focus is to get rid of interruptions or distractions.

I used to keep Facebook and Twitter open on my desk top so that I could look at it for a ‘break’ through my work day. But I realised just how much I was being derailed by that, so now I usually peruse the socials on my phone in my relaxation place, rather than on my computer in my admin place.

And when I really REALLY need to focus I bring in another technique. This is the Pomodoro technique. Named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. Remember those?

I set the timer on my phone for 25 minutes. During that time I am completely focused. I do nothing else. No phone calls, no socials, no email. The job is the thing. I do the job. Then, the timer goes off and I give myself a five minute break. I walk around. I stretch. Then it’s back for another 25 minute work session and so on until I get the job done.

Studies show that it takes 5-10 minutes to refocus after an interruption. That is why it is so important to keep your phone on silent and your socials closed, and even to turn your email off while you focus on a task. 

Speaking of email, the best way that I have heard to deal with that constant interrupter is to only check your email three times a day and to deal with it as you check it. Schedule it in, like a meeting. That way it doesn’t derail your other good and focused work.

I don’t have a problem with good productive work. But I do have a problem if it takes over your whole life and leaves you no time for anything else. And one way that I see that happening is if you half-work when you should be focusing. It means your work drags out, doesn’t get done, comes home in the evening, takes over your weekend.

Instead, try setting a timer and really focusing on your work. That way, when you get it done you can really relax, have some fun, be creative, play, with no guilt at all.

What do you use to help you focus?

Living by Your Values

Do you know what your top values are? Do you know why you make decisions to do, or not do certain things? Do you have any idea what it is you’re really reaching for?

Recently I found out that I really didn’t know what values I lived by.

I had been talking with my psych about some unhelpful ways of thinking (that I am learning not to use) and she said, ‘Yes, that’s unhelpful, but that’s ok. You notice, you tell yourself that you understand why you’re thinking that way, and then you go back to your values and live from them.’ Which is very helpful information. Unless you have no idea what your top values are. 

So I asked her about that, about how to find out your top values. She gave me the following exercise, which I did on my holidays.

The first thing I did was google ‘list of values’. I copied off two lists and ended up with about 150 different words or phrases that described things that we can value. Some of them doubled up, that’s ok.

I printed off the lists and cut up the pieces of paper so that a different word or phrase was on each piece.

The first thing to do was go through the pile of values and divide them into three piles:

1. Definitely me
2. Maybe me
3. Not me at all

After that, I got rid of piles two and three and concentrated on pile one.

It became much harder now.

I needed to take that pile and divide it again into:

1. Definitely me
2. Not quite so much me

It was important to me to note that all the statements in this pile are things that I value. Getting rid of one out of the pile didn’t mean that I no longer valued that thing, it just meant that it wasn’t part of the group of absolute top values.

I repeated this step until I was left with a list of five values.

It was simple, but not easy.

I had three nights away. It took me two and a half days to cut my list down to five. 

When I journaled about those five values I found something interesting. There were two in that five that could be incorporated into the other three. Which brings us to another important point. Words, like Humpty Dumpty says in Alice Through the Looking Glass, can mean whatever you want them to mean. This list of values, it is supposed to clarify things for you. Not to lock you into a box. Not even to broadcast to others (like I’m doing now) so that they can lock you into a box. They are to help you live your life with clarity and purpose.

What the words mean to you, might be very different from what they mean to another person.

My top five values were:

Peace

Family 

Security

Wellness

Excellence

But as I journaled about them I realised that Wellness to me means peace in my body. So that comes under the value of Peace. And I value excellence in my work because it enables me to keep my job. So that comes under Security. (Also, my year theme, the Year of Order, comes under the value of Peace. As I bring order to my life, I get more peace.)

So I ended up, after three days, with three top values:

Peace

Family

Security

These values can be lived out in two ways. They can be selfishly grasped, or they can be lived for yourself and others according to God’s will. They are not morally good or bad in themselves, it all depends on how we live it out.

For example, I can approach the value of Security in two ways. I can save up all my money, work harder and harder, trust in my money, my investments, my work to give me the security I long for. If I do that, the Bible calls me a fool. I could be as ‘secure’ as I could possibly be and the stock market might crash, or even worse, I could die (like the rich fool in Luke 12). What would my security gain me then? Nothing.

But if I place my security in God then I will be ‘like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither’ (Psalm 1). 

Your values are your great strengths and your great weaknesses. It depends how you live them. 

I think this is an excellent exercise to prayerfully undertake. I don’t think you need a week’s retreat to do it, but I suggest you do it over a few days. I did not find this an easy undertaking. But I have found it super helpful.

And if you would like to share your top values with me, I’d love to hear them. Leave me a comment, or head to http://ruthamos.com.au and use the Contact Me box, or find me on Facebook or on Twitter @amos_rj.

Silence and Solitude

‘I had 90 minutes to myself,’ the tweet read. ‘No questions, no demands, just 90 minutes for me. OK, it was a root canal, but still.’

When was the last time you had time alone?

Now I know that COVID meant that we were all living on top of each other, and in most places in the world people still are. It’s hard to get time alone. 

And if you managed to get some time alone, what would you do with it?

Would you fill it with music? TV? Social media?

No judgement here – I obviously started this blog with a Twitter quote, and I’m not going to tell you how many levels I have completed in Candy Crush.

But there is real value in spending time in silence. Alone, and in silence.

Silence and solitude is one of the great spiritual disciplines, and it is that for a reason.

Sitting in silence with God at the beginning of the day reminds you that you are a human being, not a human doing. That you are loved by God just for who you are. That the world doesn’t need you to spin it in order for it to turn.

Sitting in silence for ten minutes after a hectic morning resets your body and your brain and helps you to get your priorities right again.

Sitting in silence reminds you that it’s not all about you and that you’re not needed. But that you are loved. It helps you get in touch with your own thoughts and feelings. It helps you know where you’re at and where you’re going.

It’s a circuit breaker in the 100 mile an hour rush that life easily becomes.

This is how I do it:

The first thing I do is write down everything I’m worried about. I put that all on a piece of paper and then file that piece of paper in the shoe box that I’m calling God’s In Box. Now the worries are for him to deal with and are out of my head.

I have a special place, I sit on one end of my couch. The other end from where I sit when I’m watching TV. Other people go all out with special places for this and decorate and light candles and such. You do you. But it helps to have a regular place where you do this. If you keep places separate, then your brain and body knows, ‘This is where we do this. We’re doing silence now.’ This separate places thing works for other activities as well.

You can set a timer, so that you’re not always looking at your clock to see how the time is going. I sometimes set a timer, but if I have time I just leave it and go until I feel done. At least ten minutes, but sometimes as long as fifteen. I hope that someday I’ll be able to go even longer.

I start by taking three deep breaths – in for four, out for six, or something like that. This helps me to know that you’re starting now.

Then, I just sit.

If distractions come, I bat them away and keep going. If I find that my mind is still running at a hundred miles an hour, I stop and listen. I see how many different sounds I can hear. Birdsong, distant traffic, the house creaking as it warms up for the day. 

This is a time of not achieving, not doing, not being productive. I’m not thinking things through, I’m not actively praying in words. I’m just being. 

We can be addicted to words. Especially if you make a living with words like I do. We can think that they are absolutely necessary all the time. But they are not, and praying without words like this is … it’s just a beautiful thing.

We can be addicted to activity. Why sit for ten minutes when you could be cleaning? Gardening? Ringing a lonely person? Working? Exercising? But sometimes we need to know in our souls that we are worth more than just what we do. We are valuable for who we are. And that it doesn’t all depend on us. I am not the saviour of the world.

Sometimes I finish with The Lord’s Prayer, sometimes with a prayer of gratitude, sometimes I just finish.

If an insight comes to me, then I might journal it. But this is not about journaling (another great thing to do) this is just about being.

And that’s it, really. 

Can you do it? Ten minutes a day. You could get up ten minutes early, or you could go to bed and sit quietly before sleep. You could spend ten minutes in silence while going for a walk in your lunch break. Yes, you don’t have to just sit, walking meditation is a thing, or swimming, or cycling.

I cannot recommend this practice highly enough. Ten minutes a day of just you and God. Give it a go.

If you want to learn more (and I highly recommend that too) read Invitation to Solitude and Silence by Ruth Haley Barton. This is the book that I’ve been using to start my practice.

And if you’d like to chat with me about your experience, why don’t you leave me a comment? Or head to the Contact Me box at http://ruthamos.com.au or find me on Facebook or on Twitter @amos_rj.

The Everything List

Today’s post is for you beautiful people who are feeling really overwhelmed right now.

The people who are finding that every time you turn around there’s yet another thing that you have to do.

The people who feel like they have so much in their head that if they add another thing then something will fall out. In fact, things might already be falling out, might be being missed, and you have no way of knowing what it is that you have already forgotten.

I have an excellent tool for just this situation. A tool that will work, just for you.

It’s an old fashioned tool. You might be so into apps and computer programs, smart phones and smart watches that you may have forgotten that this tool exists. But it’s a very good tool.

Excellent, in fact.

And for the situation of total overwhelm, I believe there is nothing better that you can use.

It’s a pen and a piece of paper.

Or, you know, a pencil, if you want to go even older school.

But make sure the piece of paper is a big one.

And this is what I want you to do:

Write down everything that you have to do on the piece of paper. Transfer everything on your mental list to the paper list.

No job is too big or too small. 

Just write it all down.

• Clean the car
• Finish the report
• Make tomorrow’s lunches
• Sort the sock drawer
• Paint the house
• Visit Great Aunt Mary
• Buy Christmas cards
• Write to the teacher about Billy’s homework

No job is too insignificant for this list. No job is too far off in the future. Every single thing that you can think of that you need to do, or to organise, every phone call or email you need to make, anything at all that requires an action or thought from you belongs on this list.

And another thing, resist the urge to sort the contents of this list right now. That comes later. At the moment your job is to dump on the piece of paper all the things you’ve been carrying around in your head.

You might even take a couple of days or a week to complete the list. You might think of new things to put on there. That’s good, just write them down.

Once you’ve got everything on your piece of paper you might find that you feel better already. There is a big difference between keeping it all in your head, and knowing that it’s safely written down somewhere.

So enjoy that feeling. Take a few deep breaths. 

Then look at the list again.

Now is the time to sort.

Now, there are a few ways that you can sort the list. And each of these could have it’s own blog post. But I’ll briefly outline them here.

1) You can make a big timeline. Give the jobs a due date. Put them on your calendar on that date. Now you don’t have to worry about the jobs until their due date comes around. You know your calendar will remind you then. So you can give yourself some brain space.

You don’t need to ring Great Aunt Mary until her birthday next month. Put it on the calendar.

Painting the house will be an autumn job, maybe next year. Put it on the calendar.

On the other hand, writing to the teacher about Billy’s homework needs to be done tomorrow. So put it on your calendar for tomorrow. There will only be a (comparatively) few jobs on tomorrow’s list and you can do them then.

2) Another way is to use the urgent/important quadrant method.

Divide another sheet of paper into four quadrants. Along the top write Urgent on one and Not Urgent on the other, down the side in the same way write Important and Not Important.

Now you divide your jobs among the quadrants. Are the jobs urgent and important (quadrant A)? Important but not urgent (quadrant B)? Not important but urgent (quadrant C)? Or neither important nor urgent (quadrant D)?

Once the jobs are sorted into the quadrants then you have four methods of dealing with them. 

For the A jobs, you really need to do those now. The B jobs need to be planned for in the future. The C jobs can be delegated to someone else. And the final quadrant? Those things should be dropped. You shouldn’t be wasting your time even thinking about them.

3) Another way to sort the jobs is using a mind map. I have created a map with me in the centre and from centre come categories such as home, work, school, church. Then looking at my large list, I divide the jobs among the categories. This helps me see which part of my life is the most overwhelming right now and helps me make decisions that might change that. 

4) A fourth way is to batch your jobs. Make a list of phone calls you need to make. Things you need to do in the car. Things you need to do on the computer. Things you need to do around the house. Or batch them under the headings of Do, Write, Call and Buy. 

Then when you’re in the car, do as many of those things as you can. When you’re ready to make phone calls, make them all. When you are able to get into email, write as many of those pesky emails as you have time for.

There are probably other ways to sort the big list of jobs. If you have a good method, I’d love for you to write to me and let me know about it.

One last thing I need to say on this topic is, make sure you keep the master list!

You might want to transfer it to a spreadsheet, or some notes software like Evernote or even to a task management app (I’m using the Moleskine app right now), but you really need to keep it so that your brain stays content that all of the jobs it was trying to remember are listed somewhere safe and sound.

I guarantee that this method will lead to clearer thinking, and much less overwhelm.

I’d love to hear how it goes for you. Please use the Contact Me form at ruthamos.com.au or find me on Facebook or on twitter @amos_rj.