One-Day-At-A-Time: Break It Into Achievable Bits
One-Day-At-A-Time is so hard. Seriously, sometimes it just seems things will never end. Other times, it is done far sooner than I anticipate. It is, perhaps, surprising that I came to this realization just this week:
- I always underestimate how long things will take if they are things I want to do.
- If I don’t want to do something (there is a lot of this in my life, not for particularly good reasons) I think it will take forever to accomplish.
This project has gone on for days! I realized it was soon going to be an “I don’t want to do this” project, so I’ve done a small bit every morning. I am a bit more than halfway done. I am so happy with the results. But it is tedious. One-Day-At-A-Time.
One-Day-At-A-Time: Time Flies If I Like What I’m Doing
When I am thinking about my knitting, or any portion of those projects, it seems I chronically underestimate the amount of time it will take. It is like a long car trip, in which I forget all the boring bits and only remember the enjoyable parts: Leaving, meals, pretty scenery, arriving. So when I am planning my knitting, it is very hard to estimate correctly.
I don’t particularly like writing patterns, and it seems like they take forever, but the part I hate, actually writing the pattern, doesn’t take as long as I think. The excess of time is spent on the things I like to do: making charts, creating schematics, editing, fiddling with the layout. One-Day-At-A-Time.
One-Day-At-A-Time: Focus
I am, today, doing my 25th drawing for the CreativeBug challenge (a clock). I have done these every day. I have carved out 30 to 45 minutes which I didn’t think I had because, well, I decided I wanted to do it. I am sure there are things I let slide to get that time, but I have completely enjoyed it. By limiting the amount of time I could spend on each piece I was also able to let myself be loose and not worry about whether I could do a better job. It has felt really good to refresh some skills that I have let get way to rusty. One-Day-At-A-Time.
- I don’t want/need to spend a ton of time on this for it to be enjoyable and to get what I want out of it.
- Having someone else give me subject was really helpful.
- The enjoyment didn’t come from the end quality of the piece; I did feel particularly satisfied if I liked the result, though.
- I tend to look at things literally when drawing so the challenge was to allow myself some license–if it looked okay, but wasn’t exactly what I was seeing, that was fine.
One-Day-At-A-Time: Do It Before You Talk Yourself Out of It
I am always moving on to the next thing. As a result, I fail to savor things along the way. I’m working on it, but I always seem to feel time pressing in on me and I have so much I want to do. So I don’t do the things I don’t want to do like filing or sorting through stuff until it has become overwhelming. But I get a ton of stuff done, a lot of it things I’m not all that thrilled about because I just make it habitual. I don’t leave myself room to discuss with myself whether or not I want to do it. It has to be done, and I am never, ever going to feel more like doing it. You know the stuff, dishes, laundry, ironing, cooking some meals (some I enjoy making), hanging up clothes, keeping common space tidy, buying food and necessities. etc. Sometimes I just set a timer or work against the clock. One-Day-At-A-Time.
One-Day-At-A-Time: An Incomplete List is Better Than No List
I never remember all the steps. And I never think of everything at once. I am preparing a new version of a pattern to upload, and it seems to be a constant stream of stopping to add something I forgot I wanted to include. I have drawn a line in the sand, but it didn’t get done in the timeframe I wanted it to. I made lists. I checked things off. There were just things that didn’t occur to me until I was rereading it once a gain. Then Boom. Happened more than once. You can see that this list had something I forgot too. Details! One-Day-At-A-Time.
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