missing in action

Yes I'm still here.

Look! I'm working very hard:

I have a couple of posts in my mind. They just have to be translated into something that vaguely makes sense. I'm rethinking what I want the blog to be about. I hope I get my thoughts in order soon so I can start posting more regularly.

the conflict within

The last few weeks I've felt like I'm two different people.

I'm very busy at work and the end date is rapidly approaching. Things need to be done yesterday and somehow, the two elements of the project that I'm responsible for have both ended up needing to be finalised at pretty much the same time.

I'm struggling, because it's been very much: do this, send it back, next thing comes in while I'm doing the first thing, do the second thing, send that back, in the mean time the third thing has come in, then the first thing has come back and needs revision . . . and it doesn't seem to stop.

Me-first is driven and determined to get this all done, and done right, and won't stop until everything is perfect. My part-time hours mean I haven't been there at some critical times, which means delays that I can't really afford. The days I'm supposed to leave at 2.30 to pick up Juniordwarf from school have been the hardest. Just because I've left doesn't mean the work doesn't keep coming in. So I've been taking work home to make up those hours.

Taking work home is something I said I'd never do, but Me-first is taking some kind of delight in working so hard and getting things finished. It must be the adrenaline rush or something, because Me-first has really been getting into the zone at these times. Working at home has become such a habit that last Wednesday, the first Wednesday for a few weeks that I didn't need to take anything home, I was wandering round the house feeling completely lost because I didn't have any work to do. 

I know!  That has to be the saddest thing ever, right?

The second me is feeling very very pressured and scared and overwhelmed and like I'm about to hit my breaking point. Me-two hears people tell me to ease up on myself, to relax and to take time for myself. Me-two knows that I need to do this, but Me-first is committed to the task and says that there is no time to stop now, I can rest when this is all over. It won't be too much longer, it really won't, and the pressure will be off.

So this inner dialogue between Me-two and Me-first is going on all the time, making me feel even more anxious. So now, not only am I feeling stressed about the work itself, which is bad enough, but I'm also feeling stressed about the very fact that I’m overdoing it. I think I'm just holding on by the skin of my teeth, so that I can have this break some time in the near future. At which point I will probably collapse.

Me-first decided to make things worse yesterday when Juniordwarf and I were watching a DVD, by telling me I really should be doing something more productive with my time with him rather than watching a DVD or letting him go on the computer. 

Thank you Me-first. That is Not Helpful.

I think part of this stems from the way I think about myself at work - or more accurately, the way I think other people see me at work - that is, that being part-time means I don't really pull my weight. So Me-first is determined to show them that I can contribute just as well as anyone else and not let the side down. Everyone else is under pressure too. Others are working full-time hours, some of them have kids too and they’re all coping. I just waltz on out of there at 3 pm, so what do I have to complain about?

Of course, no one has ever said that they think I’m slacking off because I’m part-time, and the majority of feedback I have received is that my contributions are valued and that being part-time hasn't affected my work performance. Some things might take longer for me to do because I'm not there all day, but this is generally factored into my time frames.

So it's a flawed argument, but it doesn't stop me feeling guilty every time I leave work at school pickup time. 

It would be easy enough for me to lay all the blame for this on work, but that’s unfair. When I took on the extra work, I expected it to be a lot less work than it became. I've been fairly relaxed about waiting for other people’s feedback and contributions – someone told me I was far too nice in this regard – and I don’t like to ask for what I need even if, by failing to do so, I inconvenience myself. I’d rather put myself out than someone else. It takes me quite a while to settle into the flow of a project and get really focused. And I’m a very good procrastinator.

Fingers crossed that the worst of this is now over. There is still more work to be done, but I’m quietly confident that the craziness that was the last few weeks has passed. And what I have to do once all this is over is to make an effort to sit down, not in judgement of myself, but in a self-compassionate sort of way, and work out where I went wrong and come up with ways I can learn from this.

I also need to take some time off. I think a week away somewhere in the mountains with no phone, no internet, a stack of books, pens and paper and some yoga DVDs would be just what I need right now.

Me-two is nodding furiously.

P365 - Day 356 - on the bus (again) (and year in review 3/12)

One of the lucky door prizes at our BBQ today was for someone who could prove they came to work on public transport or by means other than their car.

This was my effort.

It was a random draw, and I won.

Yay!

2011 in review: month 3/12

Since my Project 365 is rapidly coming to an end, I’m going post a link to my favourite post from each month this year over the last 12 days of the year.

March: Gone Fishing

http://sleepydwarf.blogspot.com/2011/03/p365-day-72-gone-fishing.html

P365 - Day 346 - stairs

One of the things ‘they’ say you can do to increase your fitness is to take the stairs at work instead of the lift.

I have several flights of stairs to get to my workplace. I’ve climbed up all of them a few times. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Last week decided to start doing it again. Just three flights to start with. The only trouble is that I’m so used to taking the lift, I kept forgetting to take the stairs.

Today I remembered.

P365 - Day 341 - meeting

Work day meetings. We have a lot of stuff to do in the coming months.

P365 - Day 334 - red carpet (30/11/2011)

I spent a lot of time this afternoon looking at this carpet.

P365 - Day 320 - road trip

My boss and I travelled to Launceston today for a meeting that we expected to run for about an hour and a half. It turned into more than three hours.

Then on the way back we were stuck on the highway for over half an hour following a crash. Apparently one of the drivers was trapped in their vehicle and was flown to hospital by chopper.

 I haven't heard any more about that, so I hope everyone involved is ok.

We were supposed to be back at 4.00. In the end we didn't get back until 6.00.

It was a long day.

P365 - Day 318 - photocopier

We're getting ready for a Big Event at work.

Preparing for the Big Event today involved spending a lot of time using this machine.

P365 - Day 304 - work shoes

Apparently I have three pairs of work pants.

I say apparently, because this morning when I got up at stupid o'clock to get ready for work I couldn't find any of them. Not a single pair of work pants. Out of three pairs!

I could have worn a skirt instead . . .

. . . not bloody likely!

So I wore jeans.

I keep my rather flash shoes with the highest heels I own at work because I'm never going to wear them at home. So when I got to work I put them on to show that I wasn't doing Casual Friday on a Monday.

I'm not sure that the hole in my jeans went any way to convincing anyone of this.

But I had my Work Shoes on.

Therefore, I was wearing a Work Outfit.

End of story.

P365 - Day 297 - stationery stash

Waiting for me at the Post Office this morning was my latest stationery order from the lovely people at NoteMaker.

My diaries for 2012 and a mini Delfonics pen. I am totally in love with these pens. I want more!

I have a vague plan for keeping myself more organised, and these particular two diaries fit the bill for what I think I need to do.

Fortunately they both start in October 2011, so I have time to get used to them and work out exactly how I want to use them before next year. And really, if I already know what I want to do, why wait two more months before putting the sort-of plan into action if I have the tools all ready to use now?

Just get on with it!

While I'm on the subject of stationery, several weeks after breaking my ruler at work by running my chair over it, I decided it was time to get another one. I thought rulers would be in plentiful supply in the stationery cupboard, but how wrong I was.

The only one I could find was this one.

I have no idea how it got there, since we are not a Commonwealth Government department, but it looks like it's been around for quite a while. An antique in the world of government office supplies.

I think it goes pretty well with this handy little device.

P365 - Day 276 - bye bye Mum

When I was leaving the house this morning to go to work, I went into Juniordwarf’s room to say goodbye to him. As usual he was awake, so we said goodbye and I told him he could wave to me out of his window if he wanted to.

He’s done it a couple of times, and I love seeing his little face looking out the window as I’m leaving. 

Today was no exception.

It was very sweet, and gave me a great feeling that made going to work so early that bit more bearable.

P365 - Day 269 - photos

Now I’m into my last 100 days of the photo project, it’s another post about my blog, and why I’m doing it. This post is a follow-up post to this one. There will be a couple more in weeks to come.

In terms of the purpose of my blog, I don’t think anything has changed from when I started. I want to keep a pictorial record of 2011, and to try and improve my photography skills – which, using an iPhone camera, is proving to be a bit of a challenge. However, since I changed my approach and started processing the photos using the different camera apps on my phone, and converting everything to a square format, this part of the project has become a lot more fun.

At first I wasn’t very keen on the square format, which I first used in Instagram and thought was very artificial to start with. But since I started using Instagram more often and found some other square format apps, I’ve found it to be an interesting challenge. 

Most of my photos can be made to work in that format easily, a few have to be really forced into it, and a few don’t work at all. It brings back memories of my old 126 camera that I used when I was a kid, with the square photos and the fixed focal length lens (and very harsh flash), but obviously I can do so much more with these photos than I could with the old ones.

So the focus of my blog is on the photos. If you’re interested in the stories behind them – which I hope some people are – then that’s great. But if you’re not, then that’s fine too. I don’t expect everything I say to be interesting to everyone who reads it. 

I hope you like at least some of the photos.

P365 - Day 241 - Dear Inner Critic,

I think we need to have a talk, you and me.

Until recently I’ve been letting you get away with being pretty mean to me. I’ve let you undermine my confidence in my ability to do things. I’ve let you set ridiculously high standards and then beat me up when I haven’t met them. I’ve let you have a go at my appearance, my intelligence and my social skills.

I’ve even let you have a go at me for letting you do all this stuff to me.

All this has been happening without me taking much notice. You’ve been going on and on at me for so long that your words have become ingrained in my mind, are part of my everyday thinking and influence the way I behave.

But now I’ve started to become aware of you, and I’m starting to understand why you’re doing this. I’m catching you in the act. I’m telling you to shut up, and I'm making some progress in counteracting what you say, and you don’t like it one little bit.

Today you started to fight back.

You knew I was nervous about the briefing today. You knew I was worried I’d screw it up and make a fool of myself. And you didn’t like me telling you that I was going to be fine. That I knew my stuff and that the person I was meeting with wasn’t going to attack me or make fun of me.

And I didn’t screw up, and they didn’t make fun of me or attack me.

But what did you do? You chose to focus on the one time I said something that wasn’t appropriate, and to make a judgement that the whole briefing went badly because of that one thing I said.

And I battled with you for hours on this. You tried to make me feel bad about it. I tried to block you out and focus on the things I did well, which there were a lot of, thank you very much. You continued to beat me up about it.

I didn’t have to do this briefing. I could have said no, but I wanted to test myself in a situation that was outside my comfort zone, but was still safe. I knew I could handle it, or I wouldn’t have agreed to do it.

I told you that the briefing went fine and that the screw-up didn’t matter. I told you that I was going to focus on the things that went well and not blow that one sentence out of proportion. I told you that I was going to consider it a success, and a learning experience, and that it wasn’t the end of the world.

And you told me that you always knew it would go badly, that I can’t think on my feet and that I always say stupid things in the heat of the moment. You told me that little things like that incident can ruin even the best of meetings. You told me that I should have done better, that yet again I failed to live up to expectations.

I know what you’re doing.

You’re trying to prepare me from the fallout from the briefing, so that when something happens as a result of what I said, I’ll be prepared for it. I’ll be expecting punishment and, as you’ve already tried to beat me up about it, anything that anyone else says won’t be so bad.

Strange as it seems, you think that by having a go at me, you're actually trying to protect me.

But I can see right through you and I don’t like it.

What you’re really doing is setting me up to fail. You are holding me back and you’re making me afraid to live my life.

It’s taken me a long time to realise the true cost of giving you such free reign over my thoughts and my life, and it’s going to take a long time to wind you back in, but you’ve forgotten one thing. In amongst all the things you hold up as my ‘weaknesses’, I know there are some strengths, and one of them is determination.

I won’t give up until something is done. Perfectly. You know that because you insist on it.

So guess what? I intend to overcome you. It will take time. There will be days like today when I’m fighting with you tooth and nail. But that’s good, because the more I do this, the better I’ll get at it and the easier it will be to shut you up.

I will overcome you. Not perfectly, because I suspect you’ll always be there. But this hold you have on me, I’ve started to prise it loose and I’m not going to give up.

P365 - Day 231 - at work (19/08/2011)

I couldn’t go through a whole year of ‘a photo a day’ without including a photo of me hard at work.

In the past when I’ve wanted a picture of myself doing something, I’ve just set the camera up somewhere close by, set the self-timer, then quickly tried to look like I was doing whatever I wanted the picture to be of.

Easy.

Except iPhone cameras don’t have self timer buttons do they?

Enter SoundSnap, a neat little app that takes a photo when you make a noise. It does have a self-timer, so all I needed to do was set a vey low trigger level, so that almost any noise would set it off, set the self-timer, arrange my phone on a fairly dodgy looking pile of folders, files and a business card holder, then make a noise distinct enough to set it off. That started the timer and gave me enough time to get back to work so that the photo would look sort of authentic.

It took a few attempts to figure out where to put the phone and what noise I needed to make to set it off. (I started by coughing, but then realised a fairly hard press of the ‘enter’ key on the keyboard would work just as well).

For 99 cents, it’s a handy app for situations like this.

P365 -Day 221 - five years (9/8/2011)

Tonight is officially Census Night. The Census is taken every five years, and the last Census was in August 2006.

So much has changed in my life – our lives – since then.

In the last five years we have lost some loved family members, and have also welcomed new people into our extended families.

This time five years ago we didn’t have Juniordwarf. I was 34 weeks pregnant, and he was called Peanut. According to the measurements the doctor made that day, Peanut was going to be about 3.4 kilos (7½ pounds) and he was going to have short legs ‘like its mother’. We hadn’t found out whether it was a boy or a girl, but Slabs said he thought if it had short legs, the baby would have to be a girl, because he said no men in his family had short legs. At least on his father’s side. Wrong!

I was looking pretty huge by this stage (that is, I was at the point where the caption on a photo in a newspaper might describe me as being ‘very pregnant’ – as if there is such a thing as a degree of pregnancy).

This time five years ago I was counting down the days to when I would start maternity leave. I was really tired, not able to get comfortable during the night and waking up constantly. I felt like I was functioning on autopilot. I kept wondering whether this was training for what it would be like when the baby came, and whether, despite the expected night wakings, actually having the baby might be better for my sleep patterns, because I might actually be able to get comfortable during the night.

What a lot I’ve learned since then.

So we have a little boy, and we had to answer questions about him on the Census form so that he can be counted as an official statistic in Australia for the first time.

The Census form also asks you what your address was five years ago. This year, our previous address is the same as it is now.

But this time five years ago, when my ‘very pregnant’ self was filling out the 2006 Census form, our address five years previously had been in another state – almost another world away. 

Slabs and I were both working in full time jobs. I was supervising staff and had even spent some time in an acting Manager’s position, something I was keen to get away from, and got my chance when we moved to Tasmania. We had over an hour’s travel every day to and from work, between our peaceful country cottage and the city. It was great, because it felt like every weekend was a weekend away, but it had started to be a grind doing the trips on a daily basis.

Now we’re both working part time, with a much shorter commute. We’re living in a bigger town, which has advantages because we’re a lot closer to shops and services – important when you have a young child – but we still miss the peace and quiet of our former life and the scarcity of neighbours. (Also, I don’t miss the freezing cold winters of our former residence.)

In some ways it’s hard to believe that so much has changed, and that we have an almost five year old son. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday that we were talking about how we might do up our old cottage to make it more like our dream house, and that having a family was not on the immediate radar.

At other times it’s hard to remember life before Juniordwarf, and what we used to do when we were child-free.

Either way, it brings home the truth of the statement ‘the days are long, but the years are short’, and I know it won’t be long before we’re filling out the 2016 Census form, reflecting on all that’s changed since today.

P365 - Day 220 - office supplies

I can’t remember how long I have had this historical relic for. I picked it up in one of my public service jobs several years ago, and it has moved around with me from job to job since then.

It doesn't get much use these days.

P365 - Day 215 - massage

Just what my sore back and neck have been needing for the last few weeks.

What a shame I had to go back to work afterwards, to do . . . um, what is it I do again?

P365 - Day 185 - winter trees

It's winter. The trees have lost their leaves.

I feel I should write some evocative words about winter and bare trees and overcast days, but after another day of trawling through files for answers I don't think I'm going to find, the words aren't there.

Maybe I need to take more time to go to the park, to sit and look at the trees, notice the colours, and forget about the grey building I spend a lot of my life in.

No pressure, just sit and be for a few moments. If some words come, then great.

If not, it won't matter. One day, when I'm least expecting it, they will.

P365 - Day 182 - closeup #5 - files

One of the things I'm doing at work is looking through some old files to see if I can find out how and why we got to the position we are now in. There's some interesting stuff in there.

P365 - Day 171 the clean desk policy (um, what?)

This is the sight that greeted me when I walked into work this morning.

Just as I left it on Friday afternoon. 

Two projects in progress scattered around, a letter I was supposed to have started last week, left over papers from something I finished a couple of weeks ago.

It’s really a bit of a mess (you don’t say). It’s actually worse than in the picture because the mess extends on both sides to the edges of the desk (and the drawer unit on the left hand side). The only thing that’s constraining the mess on the right hand side is the partition.

A long time ago, in another job in another town, I participated in a program called the Personal Efficiency Program. (I know what you’re thinking . . . ) Some of that program has stuck in my mind, and one of its principles was that you only have on your desk whatever you’re working on at the time. You keep things you reference regularly in easy reach and the rest of the stuff should be out of the way, off your desk.

The idea always sounded good to me, but I’ve never managed to stick to doing it. I tend just to leave things where they are because chances are I’ll need them in the next day or so and if I put them away I might forget about them.

The PEP has lots of other tools so that you don’t forget things that aren’t immediately in front of you, but that’s all about time management.

I don’t have the luxury of a lot of off the desk storage, which is a bit of a limiting factor, but I do have those handy desktop step file holders so I can at least keep things in manilla folders, labelled and still visible. But even so, I still have trouble storing things in them. It’s just easier to dump them on the desk.

So the first thing I did this morning when I got in to work (after getting my coffee), was to put everything back into its folder, put the folders into the desk file and throw out all the stuff I didn’t need any more.

It felt good and I had a productive day.

Unfortunately by the end of the day, my desk looked similar to the way it looked this morning – although the things I put away that I hadn’t used today were still in their handy storage spot, so there wasn’t quite as much mess.

But it got me thinking that if I have a commitment at home to tidy my kitchen surfaces at the end of the day, so that I don’t feel so overwhelmed at the start of each day, maybe I should try the same thing at work.

It’s worth considering.