DITL Takeaways + MAY

Takeaways from the DITL/Time Tracking

First of all, thank you all so much for your support during the last week of DITL posts! As I wrote yesterday, I had fun doing it and it made me feel vulnerable and also took quite some time! I am sure I will do it again in a future season — I know that it will even be fun for me to look back on posts like this someday (for fun: here’s one from 2007 and another from 2014!).

The above stalogy notebook was my recording instrument for all of this tracking this week. As usual, I generally enjoyed doing it yet found it challenging to keep up with.

I do think that tracking your daily activities and mapping them to a timeline can be really useful as a general practice, and do in fact do a slightly looser version of this on a daily basis.

Some of you remarked on my energy levels. I have a few notes on that:

• Sometimes I DO NOT have energy — such as Tuesday when I ended up napping and scrolling for several hours after a tough workout and a speaking gig!

• I am used to running fairly high mileage at this point, as I’ve been doing it for months. When I started, an 8 mile run used to make me feel tired all day. Now it doesn’t at all. SO my workouts may sound more impressive than it actually feels at this point? (Exception – the speed workouts and long runs DO take a lot out of me! And both times I did those last week, I thankfully got to rest for at least a bit afterwards. I know I am VERY LUCKY I can do this right now! Life wasn’t always conducive to training at his level and that is why this is my first marathon in ~15 years!)

• I absolutely recognize how having help with laundry + weekday dinner prep takes a big burden off my plate. I do think about what things may be like someday when our arrangements are different.

Some reflection – anything I wish were different?

• I wish Josh and I got more solo time together! I think it’s just the season, but this is definitely an ongoing challenge. On the positive side, I feel like our relationship is strong so this is not a situation where I’m trying to ‘fix’ anything. But I just love hanging out with him and getting to have adult conversations and time together. If we could do one date night weekly I think it would be so much fun, but with the kids’ activities and his unpredictable work schedule, this isn’t all the straightforward.

• Honestly, I feel overall very good about my time use. I do think sometimes I need to remember what a ‘yes’ means saying no to, in terms of certain big projects. For example: giving the talk on Tuesday was awesome and I’m glad I did it, but it was in lieu of other things. I sometimes spend a bit of time scrolling, but it’s usually in a very conscious way, such as when I was very fatigued Tuesday afternoon. Other than that, I really don’t see a lot of ‘wasted’ time. Marathon training is absolutely taking up time right now but I’m having a great time doing it (and it will be less time pretty soon with the taper and then post-race recovery).

• Planning out each day really (REALLY) helps me. Setting my priorities and really taking the time to understand each day’s hard landscape helps me figure out when I need to push and when I can rest. I continue to believe those 5-10 minutes in the morning have dividends upon dividends for the rest of life. PLANNING POWER!

MAY!!!

So did I set some goals? YES I DID! After emptying my inbox and finishing with patients on Wednesday I had a little bit of time and created my May list, pulling out my Q2 (Spring) list for reference.

I’m keeping things pretty minimal – mostly sticking to the projects I previously talked about and not much more!