working it out as I go along

On the fourth day of Advent, I ‘cheated’ again, by using a method I’ve tried before. But it occurs to me it’s a bit daft to think in terms of ‘cheating’, because surely the best way of finding strategies in one’s life is looking back at things in one’s life which have worked and been a positive experience, and thinking how to adapt them to the present. In fact, I realise that all my strategies so far have been things I have done before, and which had a good effect. Perhaps, really, that is what finding strategies is all about. Accentuating positive things, and eliminating negative ones.

My strategy on day 4 is what I have done in the past when totally overwhelmed about housework. Making lists of things to do is not helpful for me – it overwhelms me and I don’t know where to start, and I feel I’ve failed if I do one thing different from the list. However, something I’ve found useful in the past when faced with a room full of junk and paper on the floor is to tell myself ‘I will pick up ten things and put them away’ (or throw them away, if they are rubbish). And so I focus on the number ten, and I count the things I pick up. And then I feel happy that there are ten less pieces of mess in the room. I don’t have to finish it at that moment – the idea of finishing is overwhelming and scary to me – but ten is a manageable number that I can achieve. It’s a countable goal – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely (all the things that make up a SMART goal, which normally I find so irritating when we have to make them at college, but here in this context I can see how it makes sense). And it’s a goal I do right away, so I don’t have to have it hovering in my head as something I must do in the future. This is what overwhelms me about organisation – all the things in my head about what I must do in the future.

Well, my strategy was to do five lots of ‘ten things’ per day. At first, I wondered if five would be too many, but then I found they came so easily and quickly. Pick up ten pieces of rubbish from the floor and throw them away, iron ten items of laundry, put away ten things from my kitchen counters, pick up ten books from the floor and put them in a neat pile, hang up ten items of laundry on the washing line, wash up ten items… it went on forever. Sometimes I’d do several lots of ten of the same thing (but it always has to be in multiples of ten! I like to count the ten items!).

I actually realised that rather than worrying that five lots of ten things would be too many, I needed to think instead about stemming the many more lots of ten things I decided to do (as I easily get carried away, and find it hard to stop something once I’ve started!). For two 40-minute segments in a row, I was doing lots and lots of ten things, and then I finally realised I was getting tired, and that these 40-minute limits are good to stick to, or I’d end up spending all day doing these ten things. So there needs to be a balance.

Today I have only done five lots of ten things. I decided to stick to the five today. I suppose time will tell whether I need to adjust that number, but so far my house is looking a lot tidier than it has for ages.

On the third day of Advent, I thought back to when I was a child, when I never used to get so overwhelmed by life, because I lived in a world of my own. I thought about it some more, and remembered how, yes, actually I did still get very overwhelmed and upset when I was a child, but I could very very easily turn off that feeling and become absorbed and focused. As a child, I would run to my room crying and upset, with my feelings all in turmoil, and I would sit on my bed and pick up the latest book I was reading and read it. And I would become aware that as I read, my confused, upset feelings would melt away, and I would become absorbed in the book I was reading. I would regain a sense of peace and focus as I ran my eyes over the black words on the white page – familiar words, whose shapes I knew, interspersed neatly by spaces and commas and full stops and various other punctuation marks. I knew the rules – and I also found it wonderful and magical that these simple words, with their simple rules, could depict worlds in which I could easily enter in my imagination. Characters whom I could get to know – characters who were so much easier to get to know than real life people, because their thoughts were described. Real life people kept their thoughts in their heads, so you never really knew what they were thinking. But in books, the narrator would let you in to their thoughts.

So it occurred to me that maybe it might help me, organisation-wise, to start reading novels again. My house is full of novels – I have over a thousand of them. I buy them whenever I go into charity shops. I love books. But I don’t read them because I am too overwhelmed – too many things that I should be doing. And then I end up doing nothing – neither the things I should be doing nor the things I could be doing – because I freeze at the thought of too many things to do.

So I wondered whether reading might help me somehow be more in touch with myself, with my feelings – to somehow engage with the world in a different way, and focus myself, which in turn would help with organisation. I am aware that this is a rather odd way to get organised – ‘read fiction every day and you’ll become more organised’ seems nonsensical in our everyday understanding of organisation being about lists and timetables. But part of this Advent period is to try anything – even the most bizarre-sounding ideas – if I think there is a possibility they might help. So I tried it. I read half of a novel on Wednesday and finished reading it yesterday. Today I’ve read half of another novel. I might finish it today or I might wait till tomorrow, but that is not the point. I have told myself it doesn’t matter how long I take to finish each novel.

I don’t know whether this will help with organisation – it’s too early to tell. I know that it has helped me in terms of filling a couple of segments of my day doing something I used to love as a child, and it adds a richness and a joy to my days. It has showed me how I can add things I enjoy to my day without them taking over (that is what I was frightened of – that the reading would take over things like studying and housework and things that seem more important to get done). And it has helped me focus, and weaned me away from the internet a little.

(By the way, is there a way to make this layout not do indented paragraphs? It is annoying me. I have tried all the layouts and this is the one I like best, but I don’t like the indented paragraphs.)

On the second day of Advent, I realised I was feeling very overwhelmed and confused, and I was crying for no particular reason, and I realised there is a chaos inside me of which I feel out of control. So, in order to calm myself down and see things more clearly, I took my laptop and I wrote my feelings down, just as they came. For me this is a good way to capture my feelings and make my world less chaotic. (It is also why I like to write blogs). Also, part of Aspergers is that it is difficult to process feelings. I am not always aware of what I’m feeling – not just emotions, but also tiredness and hunger and things like that. When I am sitting writing about what is going on in my head, however, I am slowing down and becoming more in tune and in control, and then I realise my feelings. I can sort them out and name them.

As I sat and wrote my feelings and thoughts out, it occurred to me that this would actually be really useful for organisation. For me to start every day writing everything that is in my head for half an hour, to empty it of confusion, to sort things out, and to be ordered. I know it works, because I have done it in the past – for instance I made myself do this every day for a while after my Grandad died, because I knew I would have lots of different painful overwhelming feelings (because that is what happened when my Granny died, which I didn’t deal with very well) and I wanted to have some kind of control over them. And also because I was so busy that I was scared I wouldn’t have time to be sad (because I can’t multitask my feelings – if there are lots of them, I just get confused). And it did help very much. So I remembered that, and thought about how it would be helpful to do it every day, and not just when something extra sad happens.

So I have been doing that every day too – I know when I make my 40 minute segments that one of them must include writing my feelings and thoughts. The way I have been doing it has changed. First I was typing my thoughts out on my laptop, but then yesterday (day 4) I decided to try hand writing them on A4 paper, to see if it makes a difference. I did that and decided it was more comfortable, and I like having a tangible piece of paper to put in a file. Yesterday, I also decided to try writing my thoughts and feelings more than once in the day. I did it midday, to take stock of all I’d done, and then at the end of the day, to sort out the day and my feelings about it in my head. Realistically, I don’t know whether I’d be able to do it three times a day as a general rule, but I do like the idea of doing it every morning and every evening.

Some positive things I’ve noticed about writing my daily thoughts: in the morning things will occur to me that I have to do at some point, and I write these as they occur to me. The very act of writing them down helps me remember, even though I don’t go back and read over what I write. So on Wednesday I wrote that I should hoover upstairs. I also wrote that maybe I shouldn’t do it on that day as I was feeling very tired. But I’d written it as something to do at some point, and later in the day, when I wasn’t feeling so tired, I remembered and did it. And there was no pressure – I knew I didn’t have to do it at that moment, but I also knew that I could, so I did.

On the first day of Advent, I cheated a little and used a strategy I’d already thought of over the summer, and tried out for a couple of weeks. This was a strategy that had potential, but when I failed at it, I gave up. But that is also because during the summer, I was looking at what I was achieving through the strategy, rather than the strategy itself. So I decided to try it again, and to put it into effect for Advent, starting at day 1.

The strategy is this: I have a spiral bound book and in the morning I write the date on the top of the page, and then I divide the day into segments of 40 minutes. Like so:

Monday 1st December 2008
8:00
8:40
9:20
10:00

etc. All the way through to the evening.

This is sort of like how shop-bought diaries do it, and how people plan their days, but this has two differences.

Firstly it’s in 40 minute segments, rather than hour-long segments, so there are more of them, and I therefore feel more positive about the number of things I can achieve. Also, 40 minutes is less daunting than a whole hour. And 40 minutes is supposedly the optimum amount of time a person can concentrate on one thing.

Secondly, I don’t plan the day out beforehand. Doing so never works for me. I think I know why this is – it’s the disruption between top down and bottom up processing. So instead, I make the whole thing bottom up. I write things in as I do them. I have no plan. I just know that at the end of every 40 minutes, I must stop and do something different for the next 40 minutes. This is good because I have difficulty with stopping an activity, switching to a new one, and starting a new one. For instance, I will often stay on the internet for hours on end. But because I have the day set out in 40 minute segments, I have to pay attention to time. This is good for me because I don’t have a good sense of time. It shows me what I can accomplish in 40 minutes. That it is possible to accomplish things in 40 minutes.

I am not always succeeding as much as I would like with this plan. I often spend several 40-minute segments in a row on the internet. But normally when I spend ages on the internet, I think there is no point stopping, because the day just slips away anyway. But when I look at my day in 40-minute segments, I realise that I have lots of segments left and I can still do some different things, so that makes it easier to come away from the internet.

Without these segments, my day is like one big blur.

To start my alternative advent, I had the following premise: that it must concentrate just on organisational strategies. So the aim is to think of and experiment with organisational techniques, rather than to use these techniques to achieve important things. Of course, that would be the ultimate goal, but not the advent goal. This is because, in the past when I have tried to use organisational methods, I have been concetrating more on the things I will achieve through them, and when I don’t achieve them, I feel down on myself. And I am also not good at concentrating on more than one thing, so then I freeze and do nothing.

So, my advent goal is simply to try different organisational strategies that I think will suit my personality and the way my brain works. I am simply to try out these methods (and not judge myself by whether they work or not). I will have plenty of time after Advent to put the strategies into practice to achieve things, but right now, the very coming up with and trying strategies is the only achievement I am after.

(I am now going to write posts in order of day 1 of advent, day 2 of advent, so at first there will be a few posts on one day because I have to catch up!)

(Hi to everyone who remembers me, and those who left me comments. I shall also leave comments when I get the hang of how this site works.)