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I made absolutely no progress on the mildly amorphous question I had (do home food processor machines have negative health implications by making it easier to reduce particle size of food? now that I think about it, this could be extended to kitchen motor appliances in general. Hmmm), so I’m going to abandon that question for now in favor of something completely different.
Scheduling/planning/personal organization/time management/stuff management/decluttering are collectively a form of “Adulting” and/or “Executive Function”. I’ve got an unwieldy Advice Book 2 project which is roughly, Know what you want and use the motivation from that along with some tools from the executive function box to have a satisficing life.
As I attempt to construct this very unwieldy Thing, I’m thinking a lot about how I accomplished various goals/projects/change processes in my life. This is great. It tells me this is a super useful project even if nothing ever is _produced_ by the project, because it is a very enlightening Life Review exercise, which is the job of Middle Age. If I ever do produce anything, hopefully, it, like my earlier efforts, will remind me and suggest possibilities to others, of what we could do, what we were thinking and feeling when we made those decisions, and how we felt about it as we went through it.
ALSO! It’s really clear to me that pre-second-kid, I could still mostly reliably, mostly complete large-ish tasks by getting largish (2+ hours at a time) blocks of time and working on those tasks in bursts. Post second kid, not so much. It’s not that I never had 2+ hour blocks of time; it’s that I couldn’t work in a burst on anything because I was either interrupted, exhausted, in the wrong location to productively work (in a moving vehicle, usually) or some combination thereof. I’m not saying anything particularly novel here; I think all my readers know exactly what I’m referring to.
Once first kid learned to drive, and as he is getting really quite good at managing his schedule (with support), I’m getting more and more of those blocks of time back (but you know, never 2+ hours when I’m not tired. Dream on). Which is fantastic! Also, the exhaustion is better, now that I’m not so borderline anemic all the time (possibly on the wrong side of that border, now that I’m better, I can feel that I probably would have felt better sooner if I had made some different choices regarding my health). Today’s theme is going to be a look at how a large chunk of the “Adulting” skills of project/time/stuff management exist so that you can get at least some of what you want, slowly, while being comprehensively overwhelmed all of the time.
Scheduling is basically, how to have a life by gleaning the tiny slices of time that you have remaining after everything else that you cannot cut out of your life.
Sorry, there was an interruption.
Is this one of those annoying screeds about saving for retirement that tells you you should have started saving for retirement with all your birthday and Christmas money, or at least when you got your first job, or at least when you got a job that matched 401(K) you should have always maxed it out and never emptied it and so on, _when the author never did that themselves_? No! No it is not that. Nor is it one of those things that tells you that when the kids were small you should have gotten up an hour earlier and blah blah disrespect sleep blah blah that if the author did that themselves they are also now dealing with the health consequences of disrespecting their sleep or they will be soon.
No. I hate those too.
This is a set of rambling observations of how I backed into a *management scheme that works far better than it ought to and that had the _effect_ of letting me use productively tiny slices of time when I wasn’t exhausted, so that I could do things like rest or read a book or watch a TV show or whatever when I had a larger block of time but was too tired to do anything useful with it.
I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of _how_ because that is way out of scope even for a blog post that may well become a book chapter. But I _noticed_ that I was describing to someone how I had figured out how to fit certain cooking or laundry activities into very tiny slices of the rest of my day. I _clearly remember_ when grocery shopping was an Expedition, and preparing for that Expedition (or preparing someone else for that Expedition) was a 20 minutes minimum activity. I _clearly remember_ a Snowmageddon without power that happened right before a trip to WDW in November (over a decade ago, obviously) and which I went into with a pile of laundry so I was really worried I wasn’t going to be able to pack clean clothes for the trip. I _clearly remember_ one of the things I did when everyone else was doing the French Toast Emergency trip to the store because of a forecasted storm (eggs, bread, milk — you use it to make french toast, and it is also the core list everyone is buying right before a storm) was catching up on laundry so I would never be in that no power and no clean clothes situation again. I also vividly remember looking at the bottom of an empty hamper when I went to go see whether there was any laundry to catch up on before a recent storm. There wasn’t even any laundry to do. (Yes, I wandered around and collected everything that was kinda dirty from the kitchen, bathrooms, PJs, etc. and did a half load. I may even have stripped the beds so we would have clean sheets. The lack of pre-storm laundry honestly kinda rattled me.)
Does it help that my son now does his own laundry? Kinda. I mean, he “did his own laundry” yesterday, but that basically means it put it in the washing machine. R. moved it to the dryer. I took it out and folded it and left it in the basket. He put it away. All of these things happened in small slices of the day.
Slicing up an activity works _best_ if it either occurs virtually (and you can access it from anywhere) or you are going to be in the physical location that it occurs in for an extended period of time, doing other things. The way I do laundry would not work if I had to go to a shared laundry facility outside my home or if I was outside my home all of the time that I was awake. I’d probably find a by-the-pound laundry service if I was outside my home all of the time that I was awake.
Food was really a struggle for a long time, because I had to go through the fridge/freezers/pantry/snack drawer to try to figure out what we needed, capture that on a list, remember to bring the list to the store, go to the store (possibly with small children — memory holds fewer things more horrifying than going to the store because you absolutely have to, with 2 children, neither of whom can speak and all three of us with autism), hope you can find it all, hope you remembered everything, and ultimately find out that, you know, no, you didn’t remember everything and no, you couldn’t find everything and now you’re tired and maybe still don’t have what you need to feed yourself and your kids. I tried so many strategies with paper lists in various locations and asking people what they needed and trying to get them to text me what they needed or at least what they had used the last of. Being able to say alexa, put blah on the shopping list was a great solution, except the kids kept putting “poop” on the shopping list over and over and over again (for years) and otherwise treating it like a toy and trying to remove things or adding things that we definitely did not need. That got really bad when first child figured out that adding things we might plausibly need didn’t get removed instantly.
Everyone involved in the food collective needs to be trained (when possible) to add things to the list as they realize that things are needed and/or when they use it up. Everyone needs to have a current copy of the list (virtualizing it is really the way to go, but you don’t have to use alexa, you can use a shared google note or some app or whatever) with them when they might go to a store. _And the information on the list has to be detailed enough or familiar enough to the person at the store for them to figure out what to get OR they need to be able to contact the person who put it on the list/manages the list and ask while they are at the store_. If all these criteria can be met, then the job can not only be sliced up into absolutely minuscule, seconds-consuming tasks (including the trip to the store, if you can get delivery, altho you probably are going to have to spend a few minutes putting everything away when it arrives), but it scales better with the group, because each member of the group contributes effort to the task.
I do understand that your group has not yet been trained. I was there, also, and it was a grinding source of misery.
But is this really scheduling. Yes. Yes it is. In fact, it is “stochastic scheduling”.
I’m taking a break. I’m not going to promise to be back, but I’m pretty interested in this now, so, probably.
Scheduling/planning/personal organization/time management/stuff management/decluttering are collectively a form of “Adulting” and/or “Executive Function”. I’ve got an unwieldy Advice Book 2 project which is roughly, Know what you want and use the motivation from that along with some tools from the executive function box to have a satisficing life.
As I attempt to construct this very unwieldy Thing, I’m thinking a lot about how I accomplished various goals/projects/change processes in my life. This is great. It tells me this is a super useful project even if nothing ever is _produced_ by the project, because it is a very enlightening Life Review exercise, which is the job of Middle Age. If I ever do produce anything, hopefully, it, like my earlier efforts, will remind me and suggest possibilities to others, of what we could do, what we were thinking and feeling when we made those decisions, and how we felt about it as we went through it.
ALSO! It’s really clear to me that pre-second-kid, I could still mostly reliably, mostly complete large-ish tasks by getting largish (2+ hours at a time) blocks of time and working on those tasks in bursts. Post second kid, not so much. It’s not that I never had 2+ hour blocks of time; it’s that I couldn’t work in a burst on anything because I was either interrupted, exhausted, in the wrong location to productively work (in a moving vehicle, usually) or some combination thereof. I’m not saying anything particularly novel here; I think all my readers know exactly what I’m referring to.
Once first kid learned to drive, and as he is getting really quite good at managing his schedule (with support), I’m getting more and more of those blocks of time back (but you know, never 2+ hours when I’m not tired. Dream on). Which is fantastic! Also, the exhaustion is better, now that I’m not so borderline anemic all the time (possibly on the wrong side of that border, now that I’m better, I can feel that I probably would have felt better sooner if I had made some different choices regarding my health). Today’s theme is going to be a look at how a large chunk of the “Adulting” skills of project/time/stuff management exist so that you can get at least some of what you want, slowly, while being comprehensively overwhelmed all of the time.
Scheduling is basically, how to have a life by gleaning the tiny slices of time that you have remaining after everything else that you cannot cut out of your life.
Sorry, there was an interruption.
Is this one of those annoying screeds about saving for retirement that tells you you should have started saving for retirement with all your birthday and Christmas money, or at least when you got your first job, or at least when you got a job that matched 401(K) you should have always maxed it out and never emptied it and so on, _when the author never did that themselves_? No! No it is not that. Nor is it one of those things that tells you that when the kids were small you should have gotten up an hour earlier and blah blah disrespect sleep blah blah that if the author did that themselves they are also now dealing with the health consequences of disrespecting their sleep or they will be soon.
No. I hate those too.
This is a set of rambling observations of how I backed into a *management scheme that works far better than it ought to and that had the _effect_ of letting me use productively tiny slices of time when I wasn’t exhausted, so that I could do things like rest or read a book or watch a TV show or whatever when I had a larger block of time but was too tired to do anything useful with it.
I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of _how_ because that is way out of scope even for a blog post that may well become a book chapter. But I _noticed_ that I was describing to someone how I had figured out how to fit certain cooking or laundry activities into very tiny slices of the rest of my day. I _clearly remember_ when grocery shopping was an Expedition, and preparing for that Expedition (or preparing someone else for that Expedition) was a 20 minutes minimum activity. I _clearly remember_ a Snowmageddon without power that happened right before a trip to WDW in November (over a decade ago, obviously) and which I went into with a pile of laundry so I was really worried I wasn’t going to be able to pack clean clothes for the trip. I _clearly remember_ one of the things I did when everyone else was doing the French Toast Emergency trip to the store because of a forecasted storm (eggs, bread, milk — you use it to make french toast, and it is also the core list everyone is buying right before a storm) was catching up on laundry so I would never be in that no power and no clean clothes situation again. I also vividly remember looking at the bottom of an empty hamper when I went to go see whether there was any laundry to catch up on before a recent storm. There wasn’t even any laundry to do. (Yes, I wandered around and collected everything that was kinda dirty from the kitchen, bathrooms, PJs, etc. and did a half load. I may even have stripped the beds so we would have clean sheets. The lack of pre-storm laundry honestly kinda rattled me.)
Does it help that my son now does his own laundry? Kinda. I mean, he “did his own laundry” yesterday, but that basically means it put it in the washing machine. R. moved it to the dryer. I took it out and folded it and left it in the basket. He put it away. All of these things happened in small slices of the day.
Slicing up an activity works _best_ if it either occurs virtually (and you can access it from anywhere) or you are going to be in the physical location that it occurs in for an extended period of time, doing other things. The way I do laundry would not work if I had to go to a shared laundry facility outside my home or if I was outside my home all of the time that I was awake. I’d probably find a by-the-pound laundry service if I was outside my home all of the time that I was awake.
Food was really a struggle for a long time, because I had to go through the fridge/freezers/pantry/snack drawer to try to figure out what we needed, capture that on a list, remember to bring the list to the store, go to the store (possibly with small children — memory holds fewer things more horrifying than going to the store because you absolutely have to, with 2 children, neither of whom can speak and all three of us with autism), hope you can find it all, hope you remembered everything, and ultimately find out that, you know, no, you didn’t remember everything and no, you couldn’t find everything and now you’re tired and maybe still don’t have what you need to feed yourself and your kids. I tried so many strategies with paper lists in various locations and asking people what they needed and trying to get them to text me what they needed or at least what they had used the last of. Being able to say alexa, put blah on the shopping list was a great solution, except the kids kept putting “poop” on the shopping list over and over and over again (for years) and otherwise treating it like a toy and trying to remove things or adding things that we definitely did not need. That got really bad when first child figured out that adding things we might plausibly need didn’t get removed instantly.
Everyone involved in the food collective needs to be trained (when possible) to add things to the list as they realize that things are needed and/or when they use it up. Everyone needs to have a current copy of the list (virtualizing it is really the way to go, but you don’t have to use alexa, you can use a shared google note or some app or whatever) with them when they might go to a store. _And the information on the list has to be detailed enough or familiar enough to the person at the store for them to figure out what to get OR they need to be able to contact the person who put it on the list/manages the list and ask while they are at the store_. If all these criteria can be met, then the job can not only be sliced up into absolutely minuscule, seconds-consuming tasks (including the trip to the store, if you can get delivery, altho you probably are going to have to spend a few minutes putting everything away when it arrives), but it scales better with the group, because each member of the group contributes effort to the task.
I do understand that your group has not yet been trained. I was there, also, and it was a grinding source of misery.
But is this really scheduling. Yes. Yes it is. In fact, it is “stochastic scheduling”.
I’m taking a break. I’m not going to promise to be back, but I’m pretty interested in this now, so, probably.