Last week was a strange week, but it reinforced the idea that when I create more, I am more motivated. So while on paper it’s going to look like I missed the mark with a lot of my goals, it felt like a pretty productive week.
On Monday, I was getting ready to work when I got hugely derailed by an idea for a new project — not a writing project, per se, but an idea to create an ADHD planner. I’ve come to suspect that I have undiagnosed ADHD (more on that in a future post), and I’ve had ADHD planners recommended to me — but when I look at the ones available, I never see anything that quite meets my needs.
So I started thinking about what I might find useful, and with that, I was off to the races. I started designing mine in Canva (and realized when I did so that most of the ones you see for sale are just Canva templates with “ADHD” slapped on them). Most of the day Monday and Tuesday was spent on this, and in the end I think I came up with a planner page template that suits my needs much better. I also have ideas for other planner pages that could potentially be combined into a comprehensive, hyperlinked planner with the same goals in mind.
A few Facebook friends voiced interest when I posted on social media on Monday about my day, and I ended up creating a Facebook group for the purpose of finishing and beta testing the planner template.
It’s not a writing goal, per se, though in a way it’s in the same category. I’m leaving it out of the writing category goals, even though I do intend to keep working on it.
Here is the rundown for the rest:
Writing
On the subject of being more motivated and productive when I create more, on Wednesday — after two days in a row of intense focus on my planner project — I had a sudden idea for a short story. Without thinking about it too hard, I immediately wrote the story. The result was that I spent about three hours writing a little over 4,000 words, and I love the story. It’s one I hope to do something with eventually. I’m going to sit on it a little, then revise and polish it a bit. It might be a good freebie when I start self-publishing.
This gave me one of my two days of writing last week. Even though it wasn’t on my novel, I’m happy for the burst of motivation and the lesson that following my focus and creating, even when it’s not something that’s on my to-do list, both energizes and motivates me.
Decluttering and Organization
My goals in this particular category kicked into high gear last week when I discovered my mom will need surgery again soon — this time, the other hip. Last February she had her first hip replacement surgery and spent a month at my house, recovering. I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare before that one, either — maybe even less — which made cleaning and organizing for her pretty tough, plus I got sick right beforehand and that meant I had even less time.
Hopefully before this surgery, I’ll have more time to organize and truly get everything in order. I have a lot of stuff in my living room that is to be fixed up and/or resold, so I may need to consider storing it somewhere until after she has recovered. I hate to pay for a storage unit, but if I don’t, I’ll have to depend on other people’s kindness and hope someone will let me take over a corner of their basement or something.
One thing at a time, though — I have at least five weeks and a lot of organizing to do before I need to make that decision.
Dolls
No progress here and I don’t expect a lot over the coming weeks, since I’ll be more focused on decluttering, organizing, and cleaning — and after that, taking care of my mom.
Taxes
No progress here either, and I expect this one to be tabled for a little while as well.
Lessons Learned
I feel like there are two lessons to be had here:
- Creating is a motivating activity for me. Theoretically, if I follow my creative urges around more often, I could potentially have all the motivation I need — but I do suspect that I would crash at some point from doing too much.
- Life doesn’t just give you lemons, it wings them at you like they’re fast balls. Forget the lemonade! If you’re lucky, you can hit them out of the park.
This post is going up late too, obviously, and I’m happy to say that, like last week, it means that I’ve been productive. I actually started this post on Monday but I’m just getting around to finishing it! That’s also partly because I’ve also been pretty distracted all week, despite being actually rather productive.
Exciting things to blog about next week, but… I’ll leave that for next week’s post.
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