I crave spontaneity but I desperately need structure in my life in order to thrive. I love traveling and I am perpetually dreaming of breaking free from my day-to-day routines but I have discovered that those same routines are absolutely essential to my mental and physical well-being. I want what I can never have. Woe is the plight of being me.
I need structure in my life - and structure I have developed. I have a Google spreadsheet that contains a template for my day-to-day schedule - customized by the day of the week and what my anticipated calendar will be for the day. Every morning I copy the cells from the template and paste them into a new tab - creating a “To Do” list for the day. The list contains things I need to do for work, things I want to achieve in my personal life, and floating long-term projects that I hope to get around to if the time fits. I get really granular in this daily log - capturing everything from daily showers to planned snacks to my television and movie-watching habits. Everything - and I mean everything - is planned out in advance. If I stray too long from following this Daily Schedule Google Doc, I begin to flounder. My health goes to shit, I lose a perspective on my priorities, and, in general, I feel like crap - mentally and physically. This Daily Schedule Google Doc is essential in a way few other things in my life are.
* Side note - I have kept a version of this document for the last seventeen years. Before I discovered the joy of Google Drive’s cloud, I would use an Excel spreadsheet and carry it on a thumb drive - frequently losing this thumb drive or leaving it plugged into computers at Texas A&M’s school libraries. One of the most embarrassing moments of my adult life happened when I accidentally sent the Daily Schedule file as an attachment to a work colleague. She responded with, “Why did you just send me an Excel spreadsheet with your planned poop breaks?” I had no answer.
The last few weeks I have had to stray from my Daily Schedule. My life has been crammed with more stuff than I have time to do - moving apartments, long hours at work, COVID booster shots, oil changes, Christmas present shopping, hair cuts, and so on and so on. Certain things have taken a back seat including my daily exercise schedule.
When the world shut down due to COVID, I was faced with long days and not a lot of stuff to fill them with. I decided to really take a hard, long look at my health and figure out if I could make some better life choices. I started eating better and - more importantly - started working out three hours a day. As a result, I lost a lot of weight. More importantly, I felt healthier and more active than I had in years.
When movie theaters began to open up again and I started having to work longer hours than I had been in the early days of COVID, I made a pledge that I would not sacrifice my exercise time. Even with a full-time job, an additional part-time job, and writing a graphic novel, I found time to work out three hours a day.
Unfortunately, I haven’t exercised in almost two weeks. Not really. I mean. I did find a few hours to fit in a walk a week ago and I have certainly been carrying heavy boxes all over the Heights as I move into my new apartment, but mostly I’ve let my diet take a vacation (“Yes, I will try out the new Taco Bell that opened in my neighborhood - thank you very much”) and I neglected my health. As a result, I feel like crap.
I tell myself that this will all be over soon - the holiday rush at work, the move, all the year-end to-do’s - and I will be able to get back to my routine again soon. But the truth is, life is going to keep getting busier. I have more responsibilities at work, I’m trying to finalize the publication of WHERE WOLF and finish writing my new graphic novel and there are so many other things that cry out for my attention on any given day - more stuff than I have time to do.
I was feeling overwhelmed and stressed and is that tingling in my arm because I slept on my couch last night due to the fact that I hadn’t had time to set up my bed in my new place yet or am I having a heart attack!?!
I needed to do something - so I bought a notepad.
In an almost ritualistic ceremony, I walked to Target and bought a small notepad and a pen and then sat down and made a list of priorities. What were the most important things to me right now?
MY HEALTH - Number one with a bullet. I do not want to let my life slide back into the state where it was a few years ago. I refuse to put the weight back on and I refuse to feel tired and cranky and constantly like I’m on the verge of dying. My health, my diet, and my time to exercise are the most important things in my life. As soon as I finish getting my stuff out of my old apartment and into my new place, I will find three hours every day and exercise. No excuses, no debate.
MY WRITING - I’m so damn proud of writing WHERE WOLF this year. For years, I had talked about creating something personal and artistic, and then I just did it. That act - of putting my fingers on my typewriter and actually just writing the damn thing - showed me that I could be a writer if I just sat down and did it. And doing it - writing WHERE WOLF - showed me that I want to keep being a writer. I want to tell more stories and continue to create. To do that means setting aside the time, though. I work a full-time job and I have priorities that keep me busy during the day so, if I want to keep writing, I need to find the time at night or on the weekends and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
EXPERIENCES - This is kind of a catch-all, but it’s an important one. I want to live my life - whether that means traveling, going to concerts, hanging out with friends, dating, doing cool stuff at work - just, in general, being a human being with agency instead of just a lump on a log watching other people’s stories play out on my television screen. Don’t get me wrong - I love movies and TV and reading. Art continues to be extremely important to me, but I will fit all that stuff in around the edges of my life where it fits - it will not be the priority. I never want to pass up a cool opportunity to do something because there’s something on TV I want to watch.
Those are my three priorities in life - everything else fits in where it can. Keeping my daily routine remains an important factor in my brain functioning right but it is built around finding time every day for those three priorities. As long as I’m keeping healthy, finding time to write, and living a life worth writing about - I’m happy.
And you better believe there’s a tab on my Daily Schedule Google Doc to log and chart my happiness.