I’m reflecting on recent musings from the last 12 months… Lots on routine, exploring being a grown up and some of the drivers for self-discipline.
This is what I said…
I adore those mornings where you stay deeply cocooned in your scrummy blankets, soft pillows tucked around your ears, and even better, the long-awaited couple of hours where you can covet the whole bed for yourself.
So, we’ve got this whole yummy morning, could stay in bed forever thing going on. Apparently, that’s not very professional and there’s this thing called ‘daily habits’ (the healthy productive ones). You too? I get this little bit of an icky feeling in the front of my mouth when I think about getting up and being a grown up.
Two things – COVID Level 4 & 3’s
My learnings from last year.
One of the curiosities from 2020 for me, was that without the team coming to work every day, I was forced to recognise that they were actually the external driver for my getting out of bed at a reasonable time of the morning. Not my own fabulous self-discipline, but the need for me to be at the team brief at 7.45 am with delegations and a plan for the day in hand.
The next external driver in my world is my horse has to come out of his stable and be down in the paddocks by 7.30 am (large 800kg monster gets really grumpy if that doesn’t happen at the same time each morning).
Shame got involved too; husband does the whole 5.30 a.m. thing everyday, does goodness knows what between then and 7 am when I begrudgingly appear in the kitchen to meet my walking partner. Never asked him, but presume he may hum softly somewhere in the house and seek world peace for several hours. Actually, he’s a glass half empty type of chap, so I reckon he watches the world news and ruminates over the end being nigh.
…I’d love to share an exert from Dream, Plan, Do, Be my book published this September. My take on being a grown-up.
Have you ever looked at other people and thought “When I grow up, I want to be just like you?” For me, I coveted people who had systems, were organised, and appeared (on the surface anyway) to arrive at meetings on time with the correct paperwork in hand. I was more like - “oh my gosh, I’m so sorry I was late; there were logging trucks blocking the road, 43 wild geese were holding up the logging trucks (7 trucks), and then the slip closed the road and the bridge collapsed (with the weight of the geese) – oh oh, and then the river came through the door of the car and washed away my paperwork plus a bull fell down the hill and broke his leg, (the geese scared him off the hill) and he was also blocking in the trucks”. Actual true story about the slip and the bull, not so much the geese bit though. Genuinely I do try to have at least one thread of truth in my bollocky excuses for my bad behaviour
The Actual truth - Snoozed the alarm (cocooned in those yummy blankets with soft pillows tucked around my ears), had a second coffee, took the cover off the horse in my beautiful Italian shoes because I was too lazy to change into gumboots, realised I was late and ran out of the house without my ducks lined up. Forgot my cell phone and because I hadn’t written the office address for my appointment into my diary and in fact, had no idea the office was even in Petone, (I thought it was in Island Bay), ah shit I had to go back for my cell phone so thought I might as well grab another coffee on the way through the kitchen, pat the dog, wipe down my shoes and then in fact a bull did fall down a hill onto the road and the slip was down so I had to four wheel drive 25 minutes over the hill and no it didn’t end well for the bull.
On the day that I realised “the gremlins did it” wasn’t a valid excuse, that timeliness and planning were a reflection of both my mental wellbeing and a public display of my professional reputation, this is what I did... I planned I know, go figure. I re-read the information I had on Eisenhower’s Matrix (watch this space for my Model IMPACT-Q), and I …
If you’d like to read more, order your book now!
Or join me on one of my retreats this year
And the continuum - Musings for September… Working from home
How do you commute from the bedroom to work?
Curious question.
Commuting is a ritual.
A habit is formed; there is a rhythm; we buy our coffee at a certain place, we sit in a preferred part of the train, often park in a familiar space, in other words, we embed and repeat a process that gets us safely, both physically and mentally from home to our work space. This forms a separation from one environment to another.
Part of the overwhelm we are experiencing with working from home is that we haven’t established boundaries. We move from the bedroom to the kitchen, grab a coffee, perhaps a slice of toast, mosey to our desk, drop crumbs on our keyboard, spill our coffee over our paperwork, and by the time we’ve popped up for a breath, the suns going down and we’ve been in our pjamas all day with hair that looks like a couple of ferrets wrestling in a sack, our bodies and minds sapped of energy and passion.
The other thing to remember is that often you are working ‘harder’ at home because you are experiencing less distraction. Remember my last Musings we spoke about the office environment; where we experience interruptions or distractions every 7-11 minutes. Home is often not like that. You don’t have an annoying open plan office, multiple phones going off and monkeys wanting feeding, “have you just got 30 seconds?”. Sure, the cat and the kids can be off-putting (but they can both be put outside for reasonably long periods of time).
Your 6-hour office stint at home, can easily be equivalent to 9-10 hours in the office with the routine distractions of that space. Stop, take stock, acknowledge the hamsters running around your head, know that monkeys can actually wait for pre-arranged feeding times, and start today, right now, planning your commute to work.
Action #1buy Sally’s book 😊
Action #2 get tomorrow’s tasks, set up the night before
Action #3 pre-fill your water bottles, plan your food for the day, pack your lunch and snacks
Action #4 figure out what your commute will look like and commit to it
- Get up, put on exercise gear and head around the block
- Come home, kitchen, coffee, breakfast (or not), touch base with family and friends, check on face-book, Instagram etc – social time
- Shower, change into business clothes, pick up your lunch and a second coffee and head to the office
- Turn off all social media notifications until lunch time
- Be purposeful, planned, and work the ‘grown up’ piece
Action #5 end of day, assess, re-jig, embed, repeat and be gracious with yourself
"If you fail to plan, you are planning on failing"
Benjamin Franklin.
