The beauty of doing things half-a$sed

Big A effort, small a wins

According to everyone I’ve ever met, my calendaring system is precise, comprehensive, and profoundly weird. At the same time, folks tell me how absolutely much I get done (versus the how absolutely much I don’t get done, which is what I am aware of).

Thank you?

(spoiler - I’m not about to tell you how I do it, or that you should, too. This is not a how-to post.)

I don’t calendar every moment of every day, but I do have a lot of things on the calendar, because I do a lot of things. I’m a champion of moving a fleet of small intellectual or imaginary ships in the directions of their individual destinies at once.

Rather than having one or two calendars - say, home and work- I have four*. But before you fret, they’re all in the same platform and no one has access to all of them.

This works for me in part because I work for myself, or in collaboration with a number of wonderful humans who each interface with a part of my life, not the whole thing. No one has to tolerate or observe or hold space for the absolute fruit basket of my calendars.

In my nine-month old role at the hospital I share a job with a colleague. We have the same responsibilities and workload, inside of a system that is terribly erratic and evolves quickly, but we also have wildly different strategies, which is the point of this latte.

She, my sweet colleague, is a start-to-finish sort. She’ll grab a task by the horns and wrangle it all the way into the stable through rain or snow. One horse at a time, one step at a time. Start. Finish.

My strategy is to get a critter to a landmark on the way to the barn, when I pick up the last one and move it sideways, and then grab the branch that needs to go with me… I pivot and continue along.

Her day is A-B-C-D and mine is A-D-F-L-Q-A-B-D-D-L-R-A. I can’t say that either of us gets more done, exactly, but that we get things done differently and I feel some modest degree of shame in my way.

Is this multitasking? No, not precisely. I think of it as micro tasking with a conservation of steps or resources which goes quite well so long as most things get to (or close to) completion. Perhaps you do this? Take the shoes from the front door to the bottom of the stairs (but not up and into the closet), then grab the trash from the bathroom and move it into the laundry room (add the dryer lint), grab the stack of clean folded clothes from the dryer to take upstairs and grab the door shoes from the steps to take with you, leaving the trashcan at the bottom of the steps.