Ok, hands up, who started lockdown with a list of all the jobs they could/would get done whilst we were stuck at home?
I did!
Once I realised that my coaching was going to decrease for a period of time due to many of my clients being small businesses or self employed people, I decided to compile a list of all the jobs that I could use the time to do.
This included the following things;
- Paint the garden walls
- Clean all the grouting in the bathroom and re-grout kitchen floor
- Sort through the 4532+ photos stashed on my desktop deleting the duplicates or to be honest, the ones that I’d never look at again.
- That good old wardrobe declutter
- Sew buttons that were my Mums onto a cushion cover (rather than hidden in a tin)
- Sorting out the “junk drawer” in the kitchen and the cupboard under the stairs
And so it goes on……..
I have done quite a few of these things and feel slightly smug about them (not so smug that I took photos and posted on social media) but there are a number of things that I’m yet to achieve and I’m not sure that I will! What I’ve come to realise is that it doesn’t matter how much time I have on my hands there are some jobs/tasks that I feel so little enthusiasm for and have so little reward (not even a sense of smugness) that I just won’t do them and actually, that is ok!
HOWEVER – I know that a few of those jobs do need doing and that as much as I tell myself there is going to be a lot more time available to me certainly over the next month as the lifting of some of the lockdown restrictions won’t enable us to return to “normal” anytime soon, that time will suddenly whizz by and I will be cross with myself that I haven’t used this time to get them done.
So, this weekend I had a bit of a word with myself, had a look at my lockdown list and decided which things were tasks that actually either a) needed doing or b) that I would feel hugely satisfied with myself for achieving i.e finishing a cushion cover I’m making that I know will look lovely once it’s done.
Do you know what the really liberating bit was? It was deciding on the tasks that fit neither of those 2 criteria and realising that no matter how much time I had, I just didn’t want to nor did I need to do them. So – goodbye creating photo books of our holidays (I can look at them on line anytime) goodbye making my Christmas cards for this year (I might not even send Christmas cards this year) goodbye to deep cleaning my house the Hinch way (my house is perfectly clean and quite frankly I can’t be arsed!)
Oh it felt so good.
So over to you – what were you hoping to achieve from your lockdown list? Are there things that you can give yourself permission to write off? What on the list do you need to do whilst you’re still at home that once “normal life” resumes you just won’t have the time or possibly energy and so getting it done now will be a HUGE tick?
Who knows when lockdown will ease significantly enough for us to start living a busier life again? You might have decided you don’t want to go back to the way of doing things you did before and that’s ok too and it’s what I’ll be looking at in my next post. In the meantime, be kind to yourself, get those tasks that need doing done but know that if you can’t, they either aren’t that important or they can wait for now.
Take care, stay safe and stay at home.
