After a year of taking time off, consulting and becoming a coach, and 2.5 years working from home, I returned to work full time this month.
While I know that I’ll settle into a routine and get used to it again, the first few weeks have included a couple of panicked moments. In one I wrote a friend an email with the same title as this post. Since then I’ve been thinking about how people balance their responsibilities, goals and dreams in daily life. Especially since there are plenty of people with more responsibility/ more taxing situations than mine. The friend I reached out to in my moment of overwhelm has a long commute and a small child for whom she is an incredibly present and attentive mother.
There are plenty of articles/ blog posts about balance and top 10 lists of things to create balance in your life; I’m more interested in the individual, creative and personalized things people actually do than the ones we all know we should do.
Here are a handful of things that are helping me so far, quirky/ obvious/ mundane as they may be…
30 min in the morning
I got used to a flexible schedule where I could decide my main project for the day was to organize my finances/ finally get my health insurance sorted. With less flexibility now, I still want to deal with those not-so-fun tasks so I’ve been taking 15-25 minutes each morning to make 1 step forward on whatever’s on my mind. Progress is slow but it feels better than setting those aside completely.
“Slowing down on the inside”
Yes this is mindfulness, deep breathing, etc. It’s nothing new but the distinction that I can be busy externally and not let that change my internal state has been serving as an important reminder.
Establishing new rituals
I’m keeping the first ½ hour when I arrive at work open to settle in and take a moment to mentally prepare for the day. I make a cup of tea and think about where I want to focus my energy for the day.
“What’s a treat about this?”
In one of my coaching courses, a classmate helped me see that despite doing work I love, I was approaching my work with tension and stress. I wanted to enjoy the work while I was doing it so we did an exercise to try out different perspectives. The one I landed on was “every task is a treat”.
Even before returning to work, I’d started a habit: every time I noticed myself getting tense about a project, I would write a list of ways it was a treat. This is not about forcing myself to enjoy something I don’t. It’s more like brushing away the sand to find treasures that are already there.
What works for you to keep focused and sane amidst a busy schedule?
Life in the Tiny Moments 