I have spent many a winter Saturday morning at wrestling meets this year. This weekend was no different, except my 7-year-old had wrestling events on Saturday AND Sunday. It was a lot of wrestling. I think probably I have had enough wrestling for a while. But — fortuitously! — this wraps the season up, and the upside of tracking my time is that I know the weekend still had a lot of other space. I left the house at 7 a.m. Saturday and was home at 10:30 a.m. (it was a home meet). I left the house at 8 a.m. Sunday and was home at 12:30 p.m. That’s 8 hours total. If you look at the weekend as 6 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Monday, I should be awake for about 38 of those hours. There is still a lot of non-wrestling time. My husband and I went to dinner on Friday night. I ran Saturday and Sunday. And I finished The Little Paris Bookshop and read the entirety of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
I had read it before in high school, but remembered nothing about it. Having read it a second time now I think that’s because it wasn’t really all that memorable. I did like this line I emailed to myself (as I was reading on the Kindle app): “Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.” Yep, one man’s moment of enlightenment is often hard to recount after the fact. You kind of had to be there.
In other news, due to some poor planning, my husband and I went to the grocery store three times today. The upside of that: Acme has a sweepstakes going on right now where you get Monopoly pieces with every purchase and my 9-year-old is now obsessed. He is standing over me right now and wants to inform the blog readership that he has 5 out of the 8 pieces necessary to win $1 million. Here’s hoping!
I did manage to clean out the two files of kid medical records and house repair files I put on my project list for the weekend. And that’s about it. I believe in limited project lists. Lower expectations to the point where you feel no resistance. That’s not a quote from Siddhartha, but perhaps it could be.
I love the idea of Limited project lists. It helps for you see a short list instead of a long one making you more encouraged to take action. I limit my to-dos to 3-5 items each day. This gives me some extra time to tackle things that may suddenly come up along the way.
@Daikuro- totally agree. I try to keep my lists short too. Other stuff will definitely come up, but with limited lists I get through them. Too much and I won’t – and there’s no virtue in putting stuff on a to-do list and then not doing it.
Limited lists are the best, but I struggle to keep them that way!
I remember the end of each sport’s season for the kids – a sigh of relief, but excitement for the upcoming season (e.g., I’m so sick of cross country, but basketball is on the way – YAY!). Glutton for punishment.
PIC just reminded me that grocery store Monopoly is back, and we’re really due for a win, now. That must be how it works! 🙂
@Revanche – if only that were how it worked! I recall playing McDonalds monopoly a lot when I was younger. I think we won a lot of free fries at various points. Not much else.
I love the limited lists, too – Laura, you gave me the advice when I had a newborn and a 3yo to just try to get ONE thing done each day and that made a huge difference in how I felt 🙂
Currently, I’m trying out the idea of doing 2 week “sprints” for personal projects and tasks aligned with our Agile software development sprints at work. The idea is that you choose a limited set of items you can COMMIT to finishing in that period. This really helps me focus, but also gives me choices of a few things to work on in case I’m just not feeling one of the items on the list at a particular time. I’ve done this for 4 weeks now and it is starting to eliminate the helplessness I get when I have free time and am paralyzed just thinking about doing all.the.things.