HTR Results - side effects

I have to admit that there have been a number of side effects to re-ordering my life using HAVE TO reduction ideas. Some are obvious, some are expected, but I am seeing every combination from both to neither of those. Start with the obvious, of course. That is always easiest!

The blog: Obviously, this blog is suffering. In typical Ang fashion, I am very engaged in prototyping my new systems right now, so I don't really want to talk about them! I'm definitely in doing mode. Silly, yes. But it is the way it works. In light of that, I am planning to reduce the blog to 3 days a week for the next few weeks. I will also have to decide about the blog while I'm traveling. Do I really want to blog from my work laptop? Hmmm....

My desk at work: I applied the HTR philosophy at work last week. I packed up my desk on Wednesday in preparation for a move. Including all of my files, books, random desk toys, and work-provided briefcase (for which I should've found a new owner - it is so ugly that I have never used it), I ended up with only 2 boxes. In comparison, one of my friends had 8 boxes packed and counting when I left. That was a very nice side effect!

House: The cleaner the house is, the more I clean. This is a weird one. Because the "baseline" level of clean in the house is so high now, little things bug me more. And because I don't have to spend much time keeping that baseline level up to par, I now have time to do something about the little things. I cleaned all of the grout and caulking in the kitchen and bathroom last week. With tile counter tops, that is a formerly unimaginable time commitment for a regular cleaning day. But I had plenty of time to deal with it Why? Because everything else looked good in 10 minutes or less! So, the cleaner the house is, the cleaner it gets. It is entropy in reverse. Call it antientropy. (I think that is my new favorite superhero name.)

Presence: I feel more present in every activity of my day. When I am working through my list for the day, that is all that I am doing. When I am cooking dinner, I am not trying to also wipe down the microwave. I just cook. When I'm done for the day, I can truly relax a bit. Well, OK. I don't really have that part down quite yet, but I don't think about all of the things I should be doing instead. I think about things that I would like to do.

Projects: This is a natural result of having more time, but it is a bit odd. I have time for projects. Guilt free, no hurry, do-what-you-like time for projects. Weird, huh? Anyway, I've already done all of my mending pile. I also started repairing an almost 30 year old blanket made for me by MawMawE. The batting finally detached itself from the last few spots in the wash. So, I ripped out the seam, removed the batting and bought some new stuff this weekend. It will take an hour or so to get it all properly laid out, but after that I'll just set it by the TV and do the quilting a bit at a time for the next several months. I also have a pattern and fabric for a pair of pants. This, like the sewing machine that I own, may be pure, unadulterated optimism on my part, but I think I might actually sew! Yeah, I think it is crazy, too, but it could happen!

Improvements: I also have the time for a few little project-based household improvements. For example, I like the Swiffer idea - a pole with an attached pad that picks up dust and cat fur quickly and easily. But I hate buying new pads for the thing. So, I'm making my own pads with thin dollar store dishtowels that I picked up on my errand run yesterday. I'll spray them with Endust or dip them in an ammonia/water solution, depending on the floors involved. I think it will work well, but the big thing is that I had time to think about it! Pretty amazing.

I guess the biggest overall side effect is that I feel like I have more time. In other words, when I do have time, I don't have a nagging list of things that should've been done 2 weeks ago. I just need to deal with what I want to do today. It is very freeing. And it is obviously the right thing to be doing right now. HTH has had several weeks in a row of 60+ hours of work. Prior to this time, we ran the house in partnership, but that will looks like it won't work this summer! The good news is that, by doing this, I am also freeing his brain up a bit. We'll just see if I can keep it going!

HTR Results - My time last week: Running the house

So, I've confessed to no longer putting in 9 hours a day (yes, 9: 8-5 is 9 hours, folks, not 8) on work. In addition, working from home 4 days a week has eliminated my commute - which ranged from 45 - 90 minutes each way. So, what have I been doing with myself?

Between now and my business trip, I am doing what I think of as "vacuuming under the couch". While this analogy comes from house cleaning, I'm applying it across the board in the generic LIFE category.

So, running the household. The premises that I am working from (and these are still under refinement) are pretty simple. The first is the FlyLady philosophy of "Swish and Swipe". I started looking at her site based on a paraphrase from my friend K. K said that "if you spend one minute every day wiping an old washcloth over your counters and throw it in the washing machine, you bless your family." That has done two things for me - provided a method and provided a motive.
Another philosophy that I am playing with this week is a combination of zoning and batching. I'm dividing the house into areas that require similar tools. We'll talk about that more in the details below.

The big driver behind my efforts to do housework during the "work day" is more basic. I need to create some shared family downtime. If I let him, HTH will actually run himself ragged and unfinished tasks might actually tug at him even more than they do me. By completing these tasks during his work day, I create time for us to relax together as a family.

So, what did I actually do? Last week, I spent an 1- 1.5 hours in every room of the house - with the exception of the office (I was wiped out by Friday - so I did it this week) and D2's bedroom and bath. Here is what I did.

• Each room was put into order, dusted/scrubbed, and vacuumed/swept.
• Each room had at least one "project cleaning" thing done. I moved the living room couches to vacuum. In the bedroom, I gathered up the items to be mended and sorted out some of my closet to go to Goodwill. The office meant sorting books. You get the picture.
• I did NOT do all of the project cleaning that needed to happen in each room because I plan to do some every week.
• Every day, sometime after the breakfast dishes are created but before the school/work day ends, I take a break to do dishes and wipe down the kitchen.
  

This week, I'm doing some thinking about batching based on tools that I am using. So, I cleaned the living room today. That required the vacuum, dusting stuff and glass cleaner. Now that I'm on week 2, and have been keeping things fairly neat all week, I realized that this wouldn't take much time today - even with the project cleaning that I had in mind. So, what else could I do? The only other glass in the house is the bathroom mirrors which were just a few steps away. So now I can put the glass cleaner away for the week. Dusting and vacuuming needed to happen in the office, too, which is just a few steps across the kitchen. Both of those got done today.

So, the for the rest of this week I'll continue to look at batches. Dusting and sweeping need to happen in the quiet room, and Donovan's room. Sweeping and mopping both need to happen to the tile (foyer, kitchen, pantry, bathroom). The bathroom cleaning will have to get done on or before the tile day as well. The bedroom could've gone with the dusting/vacuuming work today, but the project clean in there needs to be done first and it wasn't. (The office already had books sorted and the living room project was vacuuming couches and the cat fur area of the front curtains.)

So, using my freed up work time, I spent some time getting the house back into easy maintenance mode last week. Now, I'm moving through "vacuuming under the couch" cleaning projects in each room as I do maintenance cleaning - and I feel like I'm spending much less time on cleaning than I used to with the "I can't stand this anymore, I have to DO something in the next 4 hours!" method. And the time I'm saving from both of those is freeing me up further to take care of other projects! But this is long enough already. Posts for another day!

HTR results - My time last week: work

Last week, I implemented several changes to the way I manage my time. The bottom line is that it turned out to be like no other week that I have ever experienced. It represented the culmination of my current state of HAVE TO reduction research, so there were changes in almost every aspect of my day to day life. Obviously, too much for one post! So, over the next few days, I'll post about each component with a note about where I found the philosophy that informed the change - and what I used from that. Ya'll know how I am - I take inputs from anywhere, but I'll modify those inputs until I'm happy with them!

So, today we talk about my job.

As you know, I have been reading The 4-Hour Workweek. In my opinion, this book will only work well for 2 groups of people: those in a very similar position to Tim Ferriss and those, like me, who take the philosophy behind his program and tweak it to the point that he may not even recognize the implementation. (He doesn't strike me as easily offended, so I don't think that will bother him much.)

I liked the idea of ruthlessly paring down time and energy spent on silly things. To do that, I also had to spend some time - as he recommended - working through ideas on what I would like to be doing with my time. This provided the motivation that I needed to complete my work- leaving nothing hanging over my head to worry about later - as efficiently as possible. I should point out that I would not have done this if I were still in the office everyday. There is no incentive for me to free up work time if all I can do is sit at my desk for that last hour or so a day, but it is a great motivator if I can go clean my house!

It was also really important for me to recognize that work my behavior patterns were not particularly productive. Somewhere along the line, I decided that everyone was my customer. This is, obviously, not true. I realized that while taking a look at how I spent my work days.

So, what did these ideas actually get me to do?

• As I mentioned last week, I dropped off of the internal IM and started checking my e-mail about once an hour instead of once every 10 minutes. Needless to say, this saved me a ridiculous amount of wasted time.
• I saved all bulk distribution e-mails to be read at one time at the end of the day. After doing this for a week, I've determined that there are 2 that show up every day that I do not need to read.
  
• I resent agendas for each of the weekly consulting meetings that I hold with project leads. Two meetings went from 1 hour to 30 minutes or less. One meeting went from 30 minutes to 15.
  
• I spent an hour (saved above!) coaching one project lead to establish an agenda for his weekly team call and I asked him to let me know when he wanted me to attend. This dropped a weekly 1 hour "working level" meeting from my calendar entirely until the team works through all of the things that we have already discussed.
• I got rid of 5 nagging "I need to get around to this" tasks from my work list
• I spent 2.5 hours working through an activity analysis requested by another project team. This was, in my mind, a silly HAVE TO, but it is part of a very high visibility project that is run by a "checklist" style project manager. I met her deadline, but I was probably still within 10 days of nasty e-mails to me with a cc: to my boss.
• I actually had time - on my one day in the office - to get my face seen by everyone that should see me. This is a first since I started working from home.
• I finished every day without feeling stressed or exhausted and I completed everything on my list.

Although all of these are nice, the most important one for me was really that last one. By focusing on the work that matters to my actual customers, and ruthlessly getting rid of everything else, I know what my work day should include. When I have finished those tasks - including some silly HAVE TOs - I am done. Although this was true before, I was managing my time so ineffectively that I left tasks on my list each day. This led to a constant, nagging tug that uncompleted tasks seem to exert on me. Now, I'm finished with each work day at the end of each work day. Since I work from home most days, there is no benefit in trying to look busy forthe rest of that time, so I can move on to taking care of other areas of my life. And you aren't going to believe what I got done with that - but that is a post for another day!