How To Do It All

because you know you can't... right?

I love the adorably American pastime of pretending we can ‘do or have it all’ just about as much as I love the meme that says you have to pick between having a social/family life, physical fitness, lucrative work. You know the one I’m talking about? That suggests you can two of like… five essential life options? I love it because it’s true, and also, I love to hate it because it can’t be true.

Others have it all. They have it all figured out.

Right?

Efficiency and hacks and best practices are irresistible buzz words for me - I’m a connoisseur of the listicle - and so I’m often approached by folks who ask me how I do it all.

I don’t do it all - I feel woefully behind on everything while simultaneously feeling ashamed of my overgrown English garden of a resume - overfilled to bursting, and not much through line. Surely, I’ve had a few moments when it felt all together - the ‘hand wash only’ laundry was washed, the taxes were taxed, everything was filed, and there was no such problem as ‘having insufficient storage on one’s iPhone with which to install an update.’ As I reflect on my decades previous to 2020, filled with double and triple bookings, and feel loads of self-loathing and frustration at how much I am just not able to get done anymore.

I can’t contextualize whether I’m doing ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’ relative to you, nor can I imagine I’m doing ‘it all’ or ‘doing it better.’ What I am willing to do is share my methodologies for doing what I do, in case they are either entertaining or useful.

I hope they are both. And maybe you’ll have something new to add?

Things Should Have Places
While it certainly wasn’t either of my grandmothers, someone’s grandmother is recognized for having cross-stitched “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” My grandmothers were the most diametrically opposite individuals possible, with wildly different strategies for nouns. One was a collector of things - mushroom-decorated toilet seats and fancy cut crystal butter dishes - and the other was fanatically anti-waste, known for making a bathrobe into towels into wash rags into hot pads (and also wearing grandpa’s underwear after he died, so they wouldn’t go to waste). Both extremes common palates for those raised in dust-bowl food insecurity. My thoughts on the matter are a mish-mash of a frantic collecting things of value and not wasting them.

I am so much less precious about my sock drawer than Marie Kondo, and don’t individually portion out food items into respective plastic containers, but I do ascribe to the philosophy that a certain sort of thing ought to be limited to a certain amount of space. For example, I have a latching plastic tote for off-season clothing. One for holiday decor. One for first aid supplies. One for office supplies. They are labeled and limited, and if something doesn’t fit, it either has to go, or something else does to make room for it.

This might mean I am a collector of junk drawers, as nothing within the totes is organized, but that’s also the beauty of the methodology. It doesn’t need to be. It is contained, it has a place, and it is remarkably movable. The containers don’t all match. They are not perfectly sized to the closet they live in. They are good enough.

This also means I am not preoccupied with the upkeep of rigid systems or beholden to the gods of Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Time Blocks Can Be Considered Things
I have four google calendars, and my life is either scheduled or documented among them.

One of my calendars is for Work. It’s where my mind/body need to be in actual time, that needs to be shared with colleagues. It includes commute time, as needed, for in-person activities. Originally, this was to prevent the scheduling bot I use from double booking me for virtual calls while I was driving, but has become a really useful methodology, because my tendency is to want to double-schedule myself and this keeps me realistic. I have no teleporter, and even if I did, I seem to need some unscheduled buffer between things in order to pivot from one weird line of work in my English Garden to another. I imagine we all do?

Another calendar is for my personal life - details I don’t necessarily want to share with all colleagues, who can possibly just see the fact that an appointment exists, but not help themselves to the details of whether I’m seeing the dentist or dermatologist. Again, it’s a real-time, physical or mental body needs to be somewhere, including commutes. Again, the commute time keeps the bot in line. I can share the boring details with folks who need access to that (like my partner, who also happens to be the last person on earth who is interested in such things).

My other two calendars are ideological calendars. One is for work-tasks that are not time-fixed, such as copywriting, accounting, and other movable administrative tasks. The other is for school tasks that are not time fixed. No one sees them but me, and I use them both proactively and retroactively.

Proactively - I know that I need to devote 10 hours this week to re-writing a sales-cadence email campaign for a client (who also happens to be me, because I don’t take clients in July). I do not do my best work of I just cram ten hours into one day. So I schedule a few smaller blocks into my week on the calendar that no one else sees, between other appointments. I do the same with my school objectives, but I keep school on a separate colored calendar for reasons I won’t bore you with. With everything on the calendars, I can look at them all on Sunday and arrange my week in such a way that it looks pretty balanced, but I also don’t schedule every minute. I endeavor to keep one day soft to account for the fact that I also hope to enjoy my life and not force a mechanical rigidity into the way I operate.

Retroactively - As each day begins, I spend a few minutes assessing what’s on the schedule as well as updating the previous days’ unfolding. Maybe I devoted an extra hour to studying yesterday, or perhaps a friend bopped into town and I wanted to take a yoga class with them, so I need to move what I thought I was going to do onto another date into the future.

By allowing each task to exist on my calendar, I’ve given it a place and considered it a thing. And so, this methodology is just a reinterpretation of the first principle above.

this is my actual, redacted calendar from this week, which is adorable because I take July… off…

Email is A Thing
Email is a weird thing that is neither a physical object nor a chunk of time, but is also somehow prone to the same problematic forces and can be corralled with the same concepts. This may be intimately tied to the theory of relativity, but I’m not sure. I have such a love/hate relationship with email, because there is some of it that is so valuable I actually pay for it (and if you’re reading this, you do too, and thank you!), some which is functional, and quite a bit that is blah. I just don’t have much time for it, so I don’t give it much time. I scan, file, archive, and delete.

Administrative task emails - these are dealt with in a time-limited way, the same way that shoes are allowed to occupy one box only. One box to contain them all. One time block. Race the clock and move on.

For review - I pay for substacks, and I want to read them. Now that I have commute time scheduled between appointments, I love getting where I’m going early so I can open that email folder and actually read something I want to read. I am willing to do this with five email newsletters, and I can set up a filter so that they bypass my inbox and land in my ‘for review’ folder.

The blah - Two choices - the sales flyers bypass my inbox as well (sorry and/or do better!) or unsubscribe. I read things from Laura Belgray and The Dollar Shave Club because they do a bang-up job of engaging me. You can always re-subscribe to anything you miss, but you cannot reclaim the time you have invested reading or sorting or deleting.

I’m not there all day. I don’t check my email all day. I’m in each inbox once in the morning-ish time, and during the work day I’ll check my work-ish emails once or twice more maybe. But probably not. The constant checking of email is - for me - as useful as taking cereal out of the store package, and then repackaging it every time there is a smaller quantity: some in the bowl, some in a new box. More to wash. Unnecessary shuffling.

Social Media is NOT a Thing
I know we are supposed to loath social media, because it’s like electronic cotton candy, but honestly I love it because it gives me opportunities to connect, stay connected, get ideas of what to write and where to travel. And even though it STILL will not show me handmade pottery and soaps which I would like to buy and continues to sell me eyebrow crafting tools, I still enjoy it for what it is.

But not enough to put it on my calendar.

I dip into social media between sets of my weight lifting (which I do actually hate! ICK! This shit takes an hour three times a week?! GAH!). I scroll in the evening after I’ve finished my studying, and while I take my dog on her sniff walks and we stop to take inventory as to who has peed already this morning. Facebook is very nearly a dumpster fire, so I just pop into the PSC group I’m part of, some doula and writing groups, and of course the Buy Nothing group, which makes quick work of things I have too many of and things I’d like to add.

Nourishing or Joyful or Both
I’ve said it about food, but actually, it might be about everything. Time and space and social media and email. It ought to be nourishing or joyful or both. Maybe you need a different word than ‘nourishing’ to describe your can opener or dental floss, but you get what I mean. When we devote our precious limited resources like time and space to fighting in the comments instead of learning about humpback whales, whose fault is that?!

Thanks for reading. I’m curious how you do it all?

K