Champagne and Socks

22 October 2014

Show Notes

 http://galactisuburbia.podbean.com/e/episode-109-22-october-2014/

In which we solemnly swear we will repeat the title of our culture consumed after discussing it. Pinkie promise. 

Maybe I’m just incapable of finishing things?

In knitting, it’s called Startititis – the urge/disease/need to start new projects, usually before finishing ones in progress and usually more than one or three or five at a go. It’s no breaking news story to say I love starting new projects. I love the thrill of thinking of something new – the “can we?”, “would it be possible to…”, “what if?” I love pitching ideas to people, bringing them on board. I love the possibility and potential that new projects bring. I love the idea that I could be the person on the other side of starting a new habit or routine, the person who just is or does [whatever]. But I’m not so good at follow through. I’m not so awesome at taking things through to the finishing line. My most classic example might be my first postgrad attempt where I built the mathematical model, I played with it for 2 or 3 years, even published a paper in a pretty good academic journal, then I saw the problem I was solving through to the end *in my head* and I was good. I knew how the story ended. And I lost interest. Anyone will tell you the thing about a PhD, the thing the actual piece of paper says, is that you can complete something.

In my life, I’m surrounded by half started projects. Let’s see. I’m sitting at my coffee table. Let me tell you what I can see by looking around and without getting up or moving in any way –> to my left there is a started quilting project (the top was finished more than two years ago but never made it’s way to being quilted) and a block of my Solstice quilt with half a border. Panning right is a bookcase that is only partially sorted and some wedding gifts yet to be homed. In front of me are about 6 TV series I’ve started but not continued (yet). And on the table are pieces 4 different craft (quilting and knitting) projects, the rest of the TPP financial bank statements etc from 2014 that are yet to be formally processed (balanced against records, entered into financial software packages and spreadsheets and royalties statements), a book I finished reading and want to write a Goodreads review for and a whole pile of To Do Lists in various states of untidiness. On the printer is a shopping list for a cake I want to bake for Mothers’ Group on Weds. And to my right are receipts that were partially sorted a few days ago.

And I’m not even sitting at my study desk.

But I’m always striving to hope towards being better. You know how it is. As I mentioned previously, a couple of weeks ago we signed up for a program to help us organise our house in a structured way. We aren’t moving at the pace of the program but we’ve made enough progress that I’m starting to get inspired and hopeful we might be turning a corner. The other Alisa lives in a Vogue magazine spread. In whites and eggshell blues. I can see though that when you start to *feel* like you’re gaining control, that helps you gain momentum. It’s quite interesting how important it is how you feel rather than how it is for this stuff. In the GTD school of thought, just sitting down and corralling your to dos makes you feel accomplished. You don’t even have to do any of the items, you just feel back in control simply by emptying your head and itemising them in some way.

So with this thinking in mind, I decided last week to try that piece of advice (was it Mark Twain?) – eat the frog first. Find the thing you least want to do, that you are most avoiding or will be the hardest, and do that first in the morning. Normally, and in Michelle Bridge’s 12WBT, that’s supposed to be exercise. Get it out of the way up front etc. And look, I’m not that person so I’m not even going to pretend to myself that that’s what it will be. But last week, every day, I tried to start the morning, especially over my first cup of coffee, to do something I had been seriously avoiding. And wow! That was an interesting exercise. Not every task when completed made me feel awesome. Some things you avoid because you know you have to tell someone something they don’t want to hear. But getting it over and done with was good. And it wasn’t quite as confronting an exercise as I thought it would be. I actually got a lot of things done. And progressed things that had long been shelved. And it did open up a bit of a floodway in that last week was the first week in a very long time that I actually had really long moments (hours) of feeling “in the flow”. I’d forgotten how great that felt! So productive! And exciting!

It had the additional result of having me think about *why* I was avoiding particular things. One of the things I’ve noticed about how my email inbox can build up is that I don’t like making decisions. Not that I’m indecisive or incapable of making decisions but the act of sitting down and actually thinking something through to a decision feels like hard work. “Oh that requires *thinking*. No time for that now!” But actually the thought process ends up taking less than 5 minutes when you finally sit down and do it. Sure, it might mean you have to admit there are 5 or 25 actions that are required but … you know, otherwise, you don’t really want to do whatever it is you are looking at. And usually, once you itemise the actions required, you find yourself doing them without even noticing. Like, “Oh well I need to email … may as well just do that now …” etc. Or the admitting you have to tell someone no or that you can’t do something. That for me is usually the hard bit. Once I’ve done that, I can actually write the email or make the call. It’s the admission that is hard.

So I’ve found that for me a lot of the procrastination is in the required thinking through of something and making a decision on how to act. Once I’ve done that … whee … I’m in flow.

Building onto that is what I’ve been focussing on over the last few days. Is it true that I just can’t finish things and if so, why? I’ve noticed that I can’t finish a novel, for example. That I haven’t finished a book in over two years. Even books I’m enjoying. And a friend of mine mentioned to me one day last week that a mutual friend of ours is now reading 3 books a week just by not doing anything else. And I thought, wow, when did I last finish a book and is it because I “distract” myself with things like TV and craft etc? Have I given myself a short attention span by not staying long attention fit? And … is this the issue I’m having with my reading for my PhD? And … what about all these other things I start but don’t finish? What do I lack? Is it attention? Is it staying power? Commitment? Who am I? And where is my mummy?

The only thing to do was to challenge myself to finish a novel. To just keep bringing myself back to that task. And I did it! (See finished book above!) I finished a book. Wow. 1 frigging book. I proved to myself that I can in fact do it. Good. Though this isn’t enough. But I think shows that I’ve shortened my attention span in the way I interact with things in my world. Yes yes I mean Facebook and Twitter. And only half reading pretty much any article I click on. So I’ve challenged myself to finish a whole bunch of started projects in my house. For the rest of the year. And then I’m going to post a list as my end of year summary – what did I actually finish this year.

And as with all things, it’s not so hard. It does involve thinking through why I’m not finishing something and figuring out what the next action is and sometimes holding my hand though the decision. Here’s the quilt top that was finished over two years ago but not ever actually progressed further. It turns out, I just needed to admit that backing material I’d bought was in fact backing material and the world would go on if I cut it up. And then I just needed to measure and cut. And layer batting in between. And then pin it all up. And get out the quilting hoop. And then … begin quilting.

Time taken to get to this point? Over two years.

Time taken to do all the above? Less than 15 minutes.

The trick it seems is to ask yourself “What is next?” and when you brain says “I can’t do X because I still need to do Y”, to then ask yourself, “Well, what do I have to do to get Y?” It’s usually not as hard as your brain likes to pretend.

Here are last week’s finished Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt blocks. The bow tie ended up too small and I’ve fixed this by just creating a new (third) border size to frame it (and several others that are also undersized) to bring it up to the same size. It’s not perfect but it will do.

. .

On Friday we released the brand new cover of the third story in the Cafe La Femme series being publishing by our crime imprint Deadlines and I realised I was remiss by not posting it here.

The Blackmail Blend by Livia Day (Tansy Rayner Roberts) is a mini mystery set between the first two novels in the series – A Trifle Dead and the newly released Drowned Vanilla. It will be released in ebook formats only and there will be more information soon on how to order it.

Meanwhile, here is the beautiful cover design by Amanda Rainey and a bit of a blurb of the book:

The tl;dr to the title question is: you don’t.

You notice how they never ask men if they can have it all? You know why, don’t you. It’s because noone can have it all, it’s an impossible question AND actually, noone really wants it all. But we ask women that question all the time to passively aggressively imply that they don’t get to give up the expectations of stuff in one part of their lives in order to do the stuff they also want to do in another part of their lives (or heaven forbid, instead of). Women have to juggle. Men get to delegate.

The expectations. The expectations are there no matter how hard you fight the patriarchy – there from me, there from others. I still stress out when people come over and my house isn’t tidy and organised. *I* know that I’m pulling more than 2 full time jobs at the moment. And I know that other people know that too. But still you can kinda see them think, when I say I haven’t done something or got to something yet, “but it’s just” or “you just have to” or “it’ll only take X amount of time”. And I think but mostly don’t say “When exactly do you think I have time for that?” We all prioritise and triage. I just wish we didn’t also have to feel guilty about doing that. Yes, this is me working on killing the dream of the SuperWoman. She doesn’t exist. Just like cake, she is a lie.

And in other myths. I’m finally having to admit that I can’t still work at the pace I was pre-baby. Horrible realisation. Comes with the “it’s actually impossible to have it all” myth. I hit my wall just over a week ago, one convention shy of my 2014 commitments. Burn out. The worst. I got pharyngitis which is both painful and totally yuk. I’ve ended up on 1 week holiday, self enforced. And am looking at a second week off just to make sure it sticks.

I’ve been doing the traditional rewatch of The Gilmore Girls as antidote for burnout (aka my Business Model – TM Tansy). And working on some sewing. I’ve nearly finished sewing on the borders for the blocks for the Solstice Quilt and then piecing them together. I just had three star blocks left. Tonight I finished Block 11:

I’m working on the Farmer’s Wife project. I was supposed to be posting 2 blocks a week here (you might remember that one). And then I fell off the wagon. I ended up precutting a whole bunch to take with me to Canberra and have been posting the finished ones over on a Pinterest board here. I discovered that the reason I’d been letting this project lie fallow is that I hated some of the decisions I’d made. I felt locked in to the first couple of blocks because I’d started quilting them, and the backing I cut was too short. And I also didn’t actually like the border I’d chosen and some of those blocks. I decided to bite the bullet and change the borders – some are now the strips and some are triangles with the block on an angle. Eg:

And here is the before (or first go) and after (and second) on the first block, which I really hated.

Today I started working on this new project too. Ages ago I bought a fat quarter bundle called Nightshade – really fun cameos that I thought I could cut into panels and then do something with. The problem was that I really liked the purple ones but the way they cut the fabric, I didn’t get the faces that I liked. I did, though, get them in the green. So I was sort of half-hearted about the project. I made the first one and then I guess I got a bit procrastinaty about it.

Last night I figured out part of my problem was the maths – the purple face was going to be a different size, and I had to work that out (and cut it in a perfect rectangle). And then I had to redesign the log cabin pattern to match the new size of the face and finish at a similar size to the first. But importantly, this doesn’t have anything to do with finishing off the above piece, which just needs now quilting and binding (course now I have to figure out the backing … but I digress).

Voila to the cut piece, BIG progress. And I have designed up the log cabin block. Currently I’m piecing one to see if I like the fabric combinations.

I still have to decide if I make 3 or 4 of these – 4 seems a bit of an odd number for hanging purposes.

So that’s what I’ve been doing this week of “holidays”.

I’ve also been working on our house project. Just before we headed off to Canberra, I got C to sign us up to this Organise your House in 20 days project (by way of The Organised Housewife). Because being organised at the end of 20 days sounded awesome. It started just as we were leaving so we already knew we would be finishing it after the rest of the sign ups. When we got back, I had a look through the first week of tasks – each day (of the working week) you get a room assignment and a list of tasks. I admit I freaked out. I’m still not sure how other people are completing each day within the day – did they start out more organised than me? Was there a baseline organised requirement that I missed on sign up? Do they not have kids? Other job commitments? Do they spend 8 hours on these tasks each day? The mind boggles. My husband, though, pointed out *we* don’t need to complete this challenge in the 20 days. As long as we set aside an hour or so a day and move forward, we can still win.

Our goal for by the end of the weekend was to have finished the first 3 days’ worth and whilst we’re not quite there, there is very definite improvement. I’m almost completely on top of the laundry, even having done about a half or more of the handwashing. I also had to sort through all my jewellery in order to complete the bedroom tasks. It turns out that I had not ever sorted my collection and instead of making use of my boxes to organise things, I had them stuffed full of stuff I knew not what and most likely didn’t even like, leaving the stuff I did like, all piled up all over the place making everything look messy and also getting dusty and too gross to wear. So, both displeasing to the eye and meaning I haven’t been enjoying wearing jewellery for some time. I’m not quite finished sorting it all and in true GTD fashion, it generated other next actions like – get broken pieces fixed etc. But I’m more inspired, I’ve culled lots of stuff that I can finally admit I’m never going to wear and don’t like or have outgrown, and my dresser is starting to look like a happy place again.

I’m liking the organising challenges. As long as I can be ok that it’s going to take us longer than the 20 days.

Which kinda summarises this whole post. You *can* have and do it all, *as long as* you adjust your estimated timeframes accordingly.