Learning to Prioritize: June Wrap-Up

Hello fellow adventurers!

It’s July 1st today which means — can you believe it?! — we’re halfway through 2104. What?!

If you’re anything like me, you’re staring at the calendar wondering where on earth the first half of the year went. These wrap-ups definitely help with that: even if I’m not sure what’s happening to 2014, I can at least look back and remember what happened to June!

Learning to Prioritize

I’ll be honest: I stink at prioritizing.

How do you prioritize your time?

My inclination is to be an all-or-nothing sort of person. As in, I will either get everything done no matter what and drive myself into exhaustion doing it…

Or I will decide, If I can’t do everything, why bother? and just veg out and read Apartment Therapy for hours at a time.

This month required a lot of careful prioritizing for me, though, so I had to learn to do it in a hurry.

My neck and shoulder are still acting up (Doctor’s advice: don’t use them. My question: how do you stop using your neck?) which continues to make it difficult to type for long periods of time. Writing things out by hand is even more painful. I’m trying to give my body time to heal, but that means cutting back on non-deadlined projects.

Things that get done every time: Writing for clients, writing here, pitching new work and taking on two new clients (always fun!)
Things that get done sometimes: Writing fiction
Things that aren’t getting done at all: Dance and performance work, starting the new authority site I have planned

I’m fighting hard against my inclination to let my whole to-do list slide when one thing gets left behind. The fact that all the items in #1 are on deadline (and I don’t get paid if I don’t do them) helps. But I get discouraged very easily when I don’t get everything done that I expect to.

I hold myself to too strict a standard sometimes, and I need to remember that it’s okay to let a few things slip if it means the important stuff can still happen.

Does prioritizing come easily to you — or are you like me, constantly battling between powering through and giving up?

Life Gets in the Way

All of this was not helped by the fact that June was an incredibly busy month! A lot of it was fun-busy, but at least as much was stressful busy.

I took a week off at the beginning to June to head to the beach — an annual trip that my husband and I take with friends. Our beach trips are fun and relaxing, but I always try to get a bit of work done while I’m there. This year that was a little difficult because there were TWELVE people in the beach house. But, I used those prioritizing skills, and the essentials still got done.

Beach time was followed by packing up our apartment and moving — a two week long process sandwiched between work and family travel that involved moving everything into storage.

As you read this, I am technically homeless, because our new lease doesn’t begin until after our old lease expires.

Trying to manage to get a full day of work into half a day’s time for two weeks was an exhausting process. By last Friday, the combination of physical exertion, previous injury, and stress meant that every. single. part of my body hurt.

But I’m excited for the new place, so I’m focusing on the positive. And, once again, the essentials got done, and that’s what counts.

Blogging My Writing Process

All of the above though — injury, travel, moving — meant that I fell even further behind on my WIP.

This is incredibly frustrating for me. Part of the reason for blogging about the process here was to keep myself on schedule and make good forward progress. I’m trying not to beat myself up too much over that and just recommit to making July better.

I did also use the times when I was in too much pain to write to get some good ground research done.

Lesson learned there: if you can’t stick to plan A, find another way to make forward progress. You can always create a plan B.