Heroes Not Zombies

I don’t know if it’s partly due to going into the second significant lockdown here in France, or mainly down to the wider disruption of normal routines and activities which we’ve all been experiencing for almost a year now, but I recently felt pretty dissatisfied with how my days can so easily drift.

I decided that were two areas of activity which have always increased the quality of my day – creative activities and learning activities. I so enjoy writing, photography and playing music – my main creative activities. And I have a life-long, curiosity driven, passion for learning.

Do you know the “pomodoro” time management method? Based on the classic Italian tomato shaped kitchen timer. The idea is that you set the timer for 20 minutes and start your activity. When the 20 minutes is up you take a short break, then set it for another 20 minutes, and go again. Well, starting from there, but deciding I wanted sessions to last longer than 20 minutes, I came up with the idea of one hour, timed sessions – ones for creative activities, and ones for learning activities.

I didn’t want to schedule entire days….well, I’m retired now and don’t need to schedule entire days the way I had to during four decades of work as a doctor. But I reckoned that even if I managed one of each of these timed sessions a day, the day would feel better. And you know what? It does.

My one hour of creative time and one hour of learning time are my minimum. I can have other ones if I want and if it’s feasible to have them on a particular day. So, there’s nothing to stop me having one hour of learning a language, and one hour of learning piano, for example, to make two learning sessions. Or one hour of one writing project, and another hour of a different one, to have two creative sessions.

I did have a notion to apply a similar technique to other activities in my day and on reflection reckoned there were two other major kinds of daily activity – there are all things you have to do just to keep life going – washing, cleaning, food shopping, meal preparation etc. And there are all the things which are just done for enjoyment – listening to music, watching movies, reading fiction etc. So I thought of “Doing sessions” and “Enjoying sessions”. But I abandoned that idea before I got going – it felt like a slippery slope to something too micro-managed – and, hey, even without trying I find that every day I do the “doing” things and the “enjoying” things anyway, so I really don’t need to do anything to enable them to happen. What I needed to pay attention to, and to consciously create, were the creativity and learning sessions.

I share this with you today, because maybe you too are feeling you’d like to have more quality in your day, or maybe achieve that nice balance of quality and structure. Anyway, if you like the idea, please develop it the way it will work for you. Play with the types of sessions, and the specific activities you want to include in particular sessions. Decide how long you’d like a session to be, and how many you want to include in an average day. Then just start.

Why not let me know how you get on? I’d be delighted to hear from you. All comments on this blog are “moderated” – that means I have to approve them before publishing them – so if you want to tell me something but don’t want me to publish what you tell me, just make that clear in the comment you send me, and I won’t publish it.