It all started when I set out to clean the oven at our rental house. I had a joke from one of my clients: “Oven’s dirty, time to move!” I was starting to learn about “ask, don’t task” and realizing that it can be very useful to have an engineer around. I thought out how to reframe my problem of DIRTY OVEN.
That’s what I did. I outlined the problem. I reminded him that when he helped me move out of my apartment after two years of dating, it had taken me three hours to clean the oven. I estimated how much it would probably cost to hire a cleaning service, many of which will not clean ovens just as they won’t wash windows. I believed there had to be a better way. Take off the oven door, maybe? “Hold on,” he said. He went out to the garage, a promising sign. He came back out with... the cordless drill. He attached a scouring pad to it, an abrasive tool that was designed for shop use. He got some cleanser out from under the sink. He pulled out the oven racks. He pulled up the wooden step stool that I use to reach high kitchen shelves and he sat on it. He turned on the drill and started scouring the black volcanic mess that was our oven. Fourteen minutes later, that oven was showroom clean. “That should do it,” he said, and he took the drill back out to the garage. I was still standing there with my jaw hanging open when he came back. (Then I found a silicon oven liner for $20 and we’ve never looked back). We’ve spent a considerable amount of time since then (2010), talking about how engineering could solve so many scutwork problems, if only someone were to bring them to the attention of an engineer. In the years since, we’ve seen various solutions hit the market, and I own some of them. Drill attachments specifically for tough housework jobs Power scrubbers with extension poles for jobs like scrubbing bathtubs Window-cleaning robots in two types, suction and magnetic A robot vacuum that picks up pet hair (but not feathers, hint hint) A robot mop Robot lawnmower? A joke that I made in 2010, it’s now a reality I’m still holding out for a toilet-cleaning robot ($500, nowhere to store it) and a laundry-folding robot, once they become efficient enough to be worth the effort. We have a joke about “starting the robots” when we leave our apartment. We spend about five minutes crating our pets, picking up the dog dishes, and checking for charger cables on the floor. Then we turn on the countertop dishwasher and the Roomba. We also used to have a washer and dryer. We would go to the movies, laughing about how robots were doing our housework and speculating on what we could delegate next. There’s another thing that we do, something that feels like a total impossibility for most households. That is to live in a deliberately small space and own few material objects. Sing HEY! for minimalism! It doesn’t take us long to clean because there isn’t much to clean. You can almost reach every surface of our kitchen or bathroom by standing in one spot. We can’t keep a lot of stuff out on countertops because we don’t have much counter space. We can either preserve one square foot of countertop for cooking meals, or we could put one thing on it. Which one thing is more valuable than the ability to prepare meals? A stand mixer? A cookie jar? A pile of junk mail? I’ve found in my work with clutter clients that the more they wish for old-fashioned home cookin’, the more stuff they have in their kitchens, and the less they actually cook. Any professional chef would tell you that you can do it all with one good knife, a cutting board, a large bowl, a spatula, and a pan. My people keep more than that stacked up in their sink, much less the entire room. What crushes me about all of this is that almost all my people have a functional dishwasher. I grew up without one. In point of fact, my husband had to teach me how to load a dishwasher because I made it into my thirties without really knowing how they work. It takes four minutes to unload a clean dishwasher. Unload it once a day and spend 10 seconds put dirty dishes directly into it after each meal. It’s like a miracle! Yet you’re all out there weeping bitter tears about how much work it is. Are you kidding me with this??? The truth is that it’s entirely possible to cook nutritious, balanced meals in a microwave in under ten minutes and then spend about 90 seconds cleaning up afterward. I cannot cognitively fathom why there is so much angst over kitchen work. But then microwaves and dishwashers feel like the Star Trek future to me, and garbage disposals do, too. So much of this is about how we internalize what we perceive as social expectations, and how we react emotionally to those expectations. Breaking down these tasks as engineering problems is a way to distance them from the emotional landscape. Would I feel resentful and burdened about this if a robot was doing it? If it never even became a problem? The first time I shook off some blackened spilled pie filling from our $20 oven liner, I also shook off some mid-20th-century expectations. I’m ready for my 21st-century kitchen and wondering what else I can pawn off on household robots. I met an interesting character the other day. We struck up a conversation while waiting at a stoplight. By the time we had crossed the street and walked through the park, we had managed to interview each other and exchange some interesting ideas.
Living on the pier is a crossroads of humanity. There’s a constant flow of families, dog walkers, transients, drunks and drug users, tourists, musicians, joggers, skateboarders, cyclists, young couples, barefoot surfers in wetsuits, students on field trips, retirees, and also a few neighbors. It’s busy here. It’s also not unusual to bump into someone who is at leisure at 2:00 on a weekday afternoon. Wealthy people look different. It’s basically impossible to fake that posture, haircut, skincare regimen, wardrobe, and aura of prosperity, just like it would be pretty challenging to fake the hard-worn look of someone who has spent years sleeping rough. I’ve learned this through having lived in many different neighborhoods over the years. I don’t particularly prefer to live among the wealthy. They spend a lot of time talking about things that bore me senseless, like where they bought stuff, what their yapper dog is up to these days, and how “good help is so hard to find.” They also can’t usually relate to why my husband and I live in a studio apartment and don’t have a car. That’s what made this conversation so interesting. We discovered we were both strangers in a strange land. It basically went like this: “What a gorgeous place” “Another day in paradise” “I’m new in town” “Were you here for the butterfly migration?” Blah blah blah “I live on a sailboat” “Oh, are you a nomad?” “I don’t know what I am, what’s that?” “There are a lot of people who are financially independent, who travel around the world, it’s a thing” “Are you one of them?” “Well...” That’s when we started comparing strategies and a few numbers. “What’s your efficiency?” he asked. By that I understood that he meant what we call “the nut” or monthly overhead. “You should live on a sailboat,” he said. It costs him $1600 a month to stay at the marina (right next to our apartment complex) and apparently it comes with access to a gym and a steam room and stuff. He went over what it took to manage such a feat, how he learned to sail various types of boats, starting with the very smallest size and working his way up in complexity. I asked how old he was when he learned to sail, and he said he started about ten years ago, which both did and didn’t answer my question. I gather that he was at least in his thirties when he suddenly decided, Hey, I should learn to sail. That somehow turned into, Hey, I should live on a boat, sail from Canada to San Diego, and figure out where I want to settle down. Or not. I have my own opinions about all this, of course. I’m not a strong swimmer and I can only really manage myself in a canoe or a kayak. I have read quite a lot of nautical adventures, though, and that’s why I asked a few more questions. “What do you do in the winter? What about when it storms?” “I haven’t done this over the winter yet,” he admitted. Ugh. I told him I wanted to go to sea as a child, that my fantasy was to become a “cabin boy” and that I was very disappointed to learn that wasn’t a job anymore. At least, I was disappointed when I was nine. As a middle-aged woman, going through a tropical storm in a sailboat of any size sounds pretty darn dreadful. There are other factors, too. I don’t know this man’s story, or why he’s suddenly free to sail down the length of North America alone. Was he married before? Does he have kids? Is he retired? Is he actually F.I. or is he burning through cash reserves while he bounces back from divorce, getting fired, or losing a lawsuit? Who knows? Me, I live with a man, a dog, and a parrot. Noelle would probably love being on a sailboat and smooching kids at the marina, shaking out her nice red tail feathers. Our frail, ill, elderly dog would not enjoy himself at all. Could my husband and I deal with sharing a tiny ship cabin, a tiny ship stove, a tiny ship heater, and of course the tiny ship’s head, with the shower spraying on the toilet? Eh, maybe, maybe not. We actually are the type of married couple who could probably do well while living on a sailboat. We’re already minimalists. We’re good at what we call Pack-Fu, or the art of fitting objects carefully into a tight space. We’ve spent weeks backpacking and sharing a tent together. We’re both handy with tools and we have the kind of discipline that is needed to stay on top of leaks and mildew. We do, of course, also love money and the saving thereof. Paying an “efficiency” of $1600 a month sounds pretty great! It sounds great until we factor in the part about buying a small, used seafaring vessel. “It’s like an RV,” I say to this sailor/retiree I’ve just met, and he agrees. In my mind, that means it’s high maintenance, hungry for repairs, expensive to fuel, and hard to park. You’re stuck with it, like it or not, and it can be hard to find a buyer when you realize it isn’t your dream of an easy, relaxing retirement after all. What a great fantasy, though! If you don’t like your neighbors, you can simply sail away. Sail away from thoughts of trouble, sail south when storm clouds gather at the horizon. Sail away toward... toward what, exactly? This is the book to read if you’re burned out or planning a vacation, buried in work or preparing for summer, or really just any reason. In fact any of Laura Vanderkam’s books on time management would be a good idea. She is here on a mission of mercy to tell us that we have more time than we think we do, and we deserve to be spending more of it relaxing.
The title 168 Hours arises from the number of hours there are in one week. This is true for everyone. It’s true whether you have kids or don’t, whether you have a job or don’t, whether you’re married or single. Time is the only thing we all have in common. It’s our perception of where the time goes that is different. Vanderkam has built her writing career on studying people’s time logs. How do we actually spend our time? What are we doing and how do we feel about it? Core competencies are the things we’re best at, and that’s where Vanderkam recommends that we put our focus. One of the reasons to keep a time log is to find out what those are, because we don’t always realize there is something else that would be a good use of our time. I’ll toss one of mine out there, because at one point I was spending quite a lot of time on it and now I’m not. That thing is language study. I have a true knack for languages and I can read six writing systems. There are few things I find as exciting as learning to read and understand a new language, so it’s really a mystery why I keep prioritizing other things. The only time I would be likely to remember this is at the movie theater, where I’m surprised and delighted that I can understand, say, a sentence in Russian or Japanese. Would I remember to write something like that down on a time log? This is where the “List of 100 Dreams” of 168 Hours comes in. Ms. Vanderkam, if you’re reading this, I am writing exactly ten years after you wrote down your “List of 100 Dreams.” How did you do? How many of these dreams have you explored in the last decade? I know at least one has, which was to write a best-selling book. Congratulations! But we’re so busy! we cry. Working every minute! We work a hundred hours a week and more! Vanderkam doubts this and she has thousands of time logs to prove it. She also recommends that we find the time for our passions by ignoring, minimizing, or outsourcing the things that we don’t like as much. Two of the leading contenders would be housework and television. Yup, she went there. I looked into outsourcing our laundry, a popular choice, when we moved from a one-bedroom to a studio in our apartment complex. Our old apartment had a washer and dryer, and the new one does not. It turns out that the local laundry service has a thirty-pound minimum. Imagine sleeping within fifteen feet of a 28-pound pile of sweaty gym clothes. I don’t mind hauling our laundry to the laundry room twice a week. I do, on the other hand, outsource DRIVING because I hate it. Nothing makes me feel as relaxed as calling a ride share instead of having to fight traffic. We save $700 a month by not owning a vehicle, and that’s enough to outsource quite a lot of things. Personally, if I had more money I would spend it on shiatsu massage rather than a maid, because I can’t rub my own back and I don’t care about the forty minutes a week I spend cleaning house. This is also because I have a good idea of what I love to do versus what I find annoying. And that’s because I’ve had the good sense to read all of Laura Vanderkam’s books. That’s what I call time well spent. Favorite quotes: ...happy people are more productive and successful than unhappy people. It is possible to ratchet up your career while investing in other parts of your life as well. What would the next level look like for you? Picture it as vividly as possible. We don’t spend much time thinking about what we’d like to do with our free time, even though no one would take a 30-hour-per-week job without clarifying the job description. Use bits of time for bits of joy This post is a favor.
Someone tracked me down somehow and pitched for me to be her accountability coach. I’m not in that business anymore, and I posted on this blog about a year ago why I quit. It’s not for lack of clients; I believe that accountability coaching doesn’t scale. I also believe it doesn’t work. I believe it’s nothing more than a frustrating dead end, an illusion that will discourage the client and burn through money with no results. That’s why I’m writing about accountability again, in hopes that it can help more than my personalized handholding might. Now, I coach people every single day. I even do it for free! I hold a volunteer leadership position that includes six clubs, thirty-five officers, over a hundred members, and four protégés. I have absolutely no shame or guilt about how much of my high-value time I give away. I’ve always worked with pro bono clients as well. I don’t use “accountability” to do it, though. What I do is to help people tap into what they want and then help them refine their vision of what success looks and feels like. Sometimes they discover that they aren’t really as into that particular goal as they had thought. For instance, I dropped my goal of owning an electric vehicle when I realized how much I despise driving. I also dropped my goal of learning to play guitar when I realized my real problem was being a terrible singer, a situation too hopeless to resolve. A lot of people believe they have a goal when it’s really just one possibility among many. There are two types of goals, prevention-focused and promotion-focused. Either someone is trying to avoid or stop doing something, or they’re trying to start or initiate something. Examples in the first group include quitting smoking, getting off medication, clearing clutter, paying off debt, losing weight, or getting out of a toxic relationship. Examples in the second group include getting fit, going back to school, changing careers, buying a new home, finding love, or starting a family. What I’ve found through coaching is that people have a much easier time achieving promotion-focused goals. It’s quick and easy to let go of what isn’t serving you if it gets in the way of something you want. When a recruiter calls you about your dream job, it’s easier to let go of office gossip. When you have ten days to relocate to your dream home, it’s easier to clear your clutter. When you fall in love with distance running, it’s easier to drop smoking. When you fall in love with your life, it’s easier to let go of anything that doesn’t serve you. My dog has a bit of trouble with this, though: If you give him a ball, he’ll hold it in his mouth. If you give him a second ball, he’ll continue to hold the first ball while trying to control the second ball. When the third ball comes out, he runs outside, catastrophically overwhelmed. Too many choices! He’ll drop all the balls in a hot second if he is instead offered a dog treat. Another example of this comes from Sesame Street: You gotta put down the ducky if you want to play the saxophone. What happens with most people, though, is that they lack a compelling enough vision to step out of their comfort zone. They see the things they do as treats, rather than specific obstacles that hold them back. They see their default as juicier and more valuable than any of the alternatives. They don’t want “it” enough because they aren’t even sure exactly what “it” is. Or getting “it” is too hard, and they aren’t willing to do what “it” takes. I can share about my life, and see if you agree with what I mean: I’m married to my dream man, who travels half-time. We’ve relocated to new cities four times in ten years, starting over each time. I live at the beach, in a studio apartment with no washer or dryer. We save half our income, and we don’t have a car. We go on a pretty fabulous vacation every year, paid for by almost never dining out or shopping. I wear a “size two” and I never drink alcohol or soda, or eat dairy products, breakfast cereal, or fast food. I virtually never eat chips, crackers, pizza, or desserts. Instead I eat a lot of cabbage, kale, cauliflower, and collard greens. BECAUSE I LIKE TO so sue me. See what I mean? It’s not zero-sum. Anyone can save tons of money, eat tons of vegetables, or make drastic changes toward the benefit of a goal. Plenty of people have lost a hundred pounds in a year, paid off $100,000 in debt, or cleared out their entire house over a busy, sweaty weekend. Basically any goal you can think of is a standard goal, a catalogue goal that millions of people have done, and continue to do every day. They want to, and they know how. It’s not accountability that gets things done. Accountability means abdicating your responsibilities to someone, anyone else. It means “I know I will never, ever, never never do this alone.” So why is it someone else’s job? How is any other person going to make you want something you don’t want? How is any other person going to make you do something that you won’t make yourself do? Just admit that if there are no consequences to your not achieving your goal, then it literally does not matter to you or to anyone whether you do or don’t. Just admit that you don’t really want it and you won’t ever do it. Sometimes that moment can provoke a crisis. I have walked my students through this. Imagine that you ARE NOT ALLOWED to do this or to reach this goal. It’s illegal. Now how do you feel? A lot of people are relieved that they no longer feel pressured to do something that wasn’t their idea. Others feel a wash of regret or frustration. It helps to clarify, is this a heck yes or a heck no? A “meh” is not a goal. A “whatever” is not a goal. If it doesn’t spark massive emotion inside of you, then the goal is not going to be enough to motivate you. I have a “heck no” about surfing. I have a “meh” about learning to bake bread. I have a “heck yes” about getting more sleep. Sometimes the problem with lack of accountability is general lack of energy. Anyone who is in poor health, who is not staying hydrated or eating well or getting enough sleep or exercise, is simply not going to be able to drum up enough energy to move forward. On the other hand, a magnetically attractive major goal will pull someone forward even in spite of exhaustion, debt, or illness! I’ve limped my way to the finish line enough times, and seen enough other people do the same, to know that this is true. It’s not you, it’s not the goal, it’s how much YOU WANT that goal that matters. You’d move awfully fast if the building was on fire. You’d move awfully fast if your favorite celebrity was outside right now. You’d move awfully fast to grab a $100 bill blowing past you. Can you make yourself move that fast for anything else? Anything less tangible, anything currently invisible? Can you tell yourself a story that makes your own goal more valuable and interesting to you? You can, if you want to. I have great faith in you. Now get out there and impress me. ^^^ copy and paste into a text bubble and pretend you paid me to say that ^^^ Not everyone realizes this, but it’s not okay to change your fitness routine. It’s not okay - it’s MANDATORY. First of all, doing the same routine over and over can eventually lead to stress injuries. Second, it’s boring. Third, the body adjusts and the law of diminishing returns sets in. Perhaps most importantly, any single routine may neglect entire areas of the body. This is why it’s so vital - and fun - to occasionally pause and pivot.
I first started switching up my workout because my college gym had strict 30-minute cardio sessions. If you tried to stay on the machine longer, a bouncer would come over with a clipboard and evict you. I used the cardio equipment while I read my homework, and a half hour wasn’t enough. I learned that I could get a better/longer workout if I signed up for adjacent time slots and simply moved from one machine to another. I also learned that more than five minutes on the stair climber made me want to barf. Sometimes all the cardio machines would be booked. That’s when I started learning to use the weight machines. I was getting over a bad breakup, so my girlfriends would spot me and encourage me and keep me company. That boy was no gym rat and it was one place on campus where I could sulk in peace. I started to see the gym as a place of refuge, a solace, and a mood adjuster. Over the next fifteen years, I learned that Gym Me had high energy and a good mood, while Default Me was mopey and got sick a lot. I also had to change what I was doing many times due to relocation, job change, injury, or forgetting who Gym Me was. For a while. Being fit has a tendency to reveal mysterious superpowers that weren’t even what you were training for. I’ve astonished myself with the suddenly revealed ability to climb a rope, do a headstand, or whip out a new hula hoop trick after watching someone else do it for a few seconds. The fun stuff! The fun stuff, like toppling a 250-pound huge dude with a jiu jitsu throw. I’m doing a pause and pivot right now. It’s been really emotional and difficult, because I’m stubborn as all-get-out, but it has to be done. I recognize this. It’s my own idea and my own plan, and still I’m struggling with my traitorous emotions. My feelings, always getting in my way and trying to ruin my strategic vision. I’ve been enrolled in a martial arts school for nearly a year and a half. I convinced my husband to join, and we’ve been going to kickboxing classes together, a lot of the time at least. There have been problems, though. On his end, he’s lost nearly twenty pounds. His neck mobility has vastly improved and his chronic back pain is almost completely gone. He revels in fighting and he’s been getting the blue belts to teach him higher level secrets. He’s in the best shape of the fourteen years I’ve known him. He’s as happy and excited as a little kid with his first skateboard. On my end, I’ve been going through several months of health struggles. I got a bad cold in the beginning of August, and that somehow turned into being sick 40% of the time between August and January. I missed (and paid for) weeks of classes, which unfortunately cost 25% more because I had just leveled up to the advanced classes. I went to the doctor to find out why I kept getting sick, fearing the worst, and she said she had known a fellow doctor who had the same problem. She wasn’t getting enough sleep during her residency, her stress level was high, and she could never quite recover fully before she was exposed to another cold. This doctor told me I would probably keep getting sick until the end of this year’s cold and flu season. Wow. Neat. I mean, at least my blood work is good. I did some research on my own end. It turns out that intense exercise can lead to being more vulnerable to colds and flu. Yeah. It makes sense. I would keep pushing myself a little too hard and trying to get back into classes a little too soon. I’d start going out and trying to work out at my normal intensity every time I reached 80% recovery. It was like trying to shut a door and having a mosquito fly in. Again and again and again. After literally the twelfth time I got sick in eight months, I finally realized I had had enough. I need to give myself a break before I wind up on an inhaler. I paused my gym membership and told everyone I’d be back in six months or so. This has nothing to do with grit or perseverance or fortitude. Those are the qualities that got me into this mess. This also has nothing to do with abdicating on my body and burrowing into a recliner. I know I can’t do that because sedentary behavior impacts my thyroid, and I feel far, far worse when I sit around all the time. This is a sabbatical, a pause and a pivot. The first thing I’m going to do is to get over this most recent cold. I’ve been organizing my digital files, catching up on email, reading, and sleeping as much as I can between my neighbors’ centaur races or whatever they’re doing up there. My pivot is to focus more on cardio over the summer. My husband and I talked it out, and remembered that when I was training for my marathon, I felt great all the time and I never got sick. I didn’t get sick that entire year! The only reason I quit was that I overtrained my ankle and wound up in physical therapy for six months. I know more about stretching and cross-training now. I also know the warning signs. There’s no way I’ll do that to myself again. The other thing is that I gained fifteen pounds in my shift from endurance running to boxing. Granted, some of it is muscle, but it doesn’t seem to be doing me many favors. My weight regain is perfectly correlated with the return of my night terrors, migraines, and vulnerability to seemingly every passing airborne virus. It’s gotta go. The great thing about testing weight gain or loss as a variable is that it’s temporary. If you don’t like the results, you can always go back in the other direction. If I lose “too much weight” I can just eat more and put it back on over the weekend. *shrug* The most important factor in a pause and pivot is the feeling of returning to center, of fully inhabiting one’s physical vessel. I am my body and my body is me. High energy is my birthright. I’ll do whatever I need to do to take care of myself and give myself the utmost strength and mobility. Secrets to getting things done:
Nobody likes to be micro-managed, and it should be obvious why. The time that the micro-manager spends leaning over someone’s shoulder is time that they could be doing something at a much higher level. Example: a top-level manager literally leaning over my shoulder and watching me update page number formatting on a document while paying me overtime and making me miss the gym. If anyone had bothered to delegate the task to me days or weeks earlier, it would have taken me ten minutes and never hit this person’s radar. Instead, the company winds up paying this taskmaster to do nothing more than annoy me. How much does this guy make per minute, and why is he wasting his time on this? That happened fifteen years ago and it still annoys me. Asking someone to do some something specific is a task. That’s true whether it’s your employee, your kid, your roommate, your romantic partner, or yourself. I tried asking my dog to bring me some tea but honestly he’s not very good at that kind of thing. CLEAN YOUR ROOM STOP THAT BARKING LEARN TO DRIVE, LOSER Asking someone to do a task is always going to generate a power struggle. If this person (or animal) had any desire to do that task, they would have done it already without your input. They probably have a violent desire to NEVER do that task, and they’ll fight it with every last fiber of their being. Just like my clients do when I suggest that maybe they consider possibly letting go of some of their expired food. DEATH FIRST! Try it another way, maybe? Reframing a task as “a problem” or “a situation” is completely different. I’ll offer some examples. Sitting on my porch, I want to charge my phone and my tablet. There are no electric outlets outside like there have been in previous places we’ve lived. I don’t want to leave the door open for an extension cord because we have a mosquito problem. What am I going to do? I could: Complain Use a back-up battery Do only non-electronic things outside Charge one device at a time inside, and go back and forth retrieving them Relocate Install a power outlet outdoors Ask my husband to apply his engineering expertise to my problem My husband and I have a running joke, dating back to our backpacking trip to Iceland. It goes like this: “YOU’RE the man, FIX THIS!” The truth is that if I asked him to do something very specific, like “save me from this hornet,” I know he would drop everything and rush to my aid. In the case of the missing power outlet, I don’t know what to ask for. If I had a solution, I most likely would have done it myself. I’m not going to TASK my husband, I’m going to ASK my husband. What I mean by this is that I’m going to pose the problem to him and see what he would do. I believe that he will find a different way to solve the problem, something I would not have thought of, and I believe this because he’s done it a thousand times. Part of why we got married is that we have a lot of non-overlapping skills. Rather than berate him for not being good at the same things I am, I praise him for being good at all the things that I am not. “Hey babe?” The vocal tones and facial expressions involved in asking someone for their opinion and advice are extremely different than those of someone who is demanding that someone else complete a task. I tell my husband how much I love working on the porch. I point out what a beautiful day it is and how happy our pets are, dozing in the sun. I say I wish I had a way to charge my devices. I suggest digging out the dog door insert and setting it up so I can run a cord through the dog door. Approximately four minutes later, he pops up with an extension cord. He rocks the screen door up slightly on its little roller wheels and slides the extension cord under it, then settles it back in position. IT WORKS! I’m so happy I surprise myself by bursting into tears, which completely freaks him out. I then have to explain exactly how much this means to me. I’ll be able to work outdoors all day, all spring and summer long! His solution to my problem is the ergonomic equivalent of adding an entire room to our apartment, a very nice one. He nods and shrugs and goes back to reading his robotics textbook. Another example: I want to celebrate my brother’s fortieth birthday. I task him with telling me when he is going to have his party so I can buy my plane tickets. This does not work. Back to the drawing board. I ask our other brother to talk to him. This does work, because they have different planning styles, but it does not result in firm plans. I change the task to an ask. I tell my brother that he deserves to do something fun and special for his birthday. He says he is fun and special every day. I ask if he would be willing to cooperate with a surprise party, if we plan something for him and just tell him what to wear and what to pack. He’s fine with that. I figured he would be. Then I ask our other brother to help with something mutually fun and weather-appropriate. We work out in about 20 minutes what I couldn’t make happen in three months by tasking someone. Notice the difference between “MAKE PLANS AND TELL ME ASAP” and “How can we make your birthday something fun and special?” It’s just like the difference between “STOP NAPPING AND GET YOUR TOOLS” and “Can you help me make this area into a lifestyle upgrade?” I’ve found this method really useful in motivating volunteers, also. Rather than ask people to do something specific, explain what it is that you’re trying to do. Every single time, without fail, people will step up with better, quicker, and easier ways to get stuff done. Often they’ll enlist other people you didn’t even know and get them to help. Sometimes they’ll point out that the job has already been done and share materials with you. This is why telling people what to do is pointless: your way is probably the worst way! There are lots of ways to solve persistent problems if you “ask, don’t task.” Get your kids to clean up: Plan a party or game night and say you want to make it special. Rather than nagging everyone to pick up after themselves, set a timer, put on some music, and race to “get ready.” What does “get ready” mean? More than you thought, probably! My mom used to do this and I would do extra stuff like making hand-drawn place cards. I still associate parties and housework. Get your partner to help with yard work: Find out their vision for their ultimate dream yard and get them talking about it. Hammock for napping? Yard parties? Climbing roses? Wood-fired hot tub? Vegetable garden? Home roller coaster? Walk them out to the yard and stand there together while they get rolling. What’s going on here is a shared vision that is communicated clearly. If other people dislike your vision, they will reject it, and they will fight you til the bitter end. If nobody is on board with your vision, why is that? Are you willing to do the work yourself if you have to? Have you given thought to other approaches? Are you simply in the habit of feeling stressed out, resentful, and irritated? What would it take to turn the energy around this from “WHY WILL NOBODY DO MY BIDDING” to “hey, you know what would be fun?” Ask, don’t task, and see if you can find out. We saved 48% of our income last year.
What that means, specifically, is that 48% of our net base salary went into our retirement accounts. Net = after taxes and any other non-retirement withholdings. Base salary = the amount in the employment contract. This does not include money that went toward paying down debt. For example, I finally managed to pay off my student loan. How is this possible? I’m going to write a somewhat abstract post because I don’t want to just baldly state our actual income. Some people do that, but *shrug* I’m not going to. The point is to focus on STRATEGY for those who will find it helpful. Posting actual numbers, Money Diary style, tends to draw doubters and naysayers. That’s not my audience. Big hair, don’t care. How is it possible to save half your income? Two ways: offense and defense. My husband taught me this. I’m an extremely hardcore full austerity frugalite. I play D. I can casually do a Buy Nothing Month and barely notice, because I’ll just spend the time reading library books and journaling. I’ll cheerfully serve up lentil soup, darn my socks for a third time, and dilute my laundry detergent to 80%. The trouble with this scrimping method is that you can only get your expenses down to zero dollars and zero cents. There’s a finite limit to how much you can save by playing defense. I married a strategic thinker. He plays O. There is an infinite amount of money that someone can earn. There is no top level to how much you can escalate your income. In his mind, it’s a lot easier to find a way to EARN ten thousand dollars than it is to SAVE ten thousand dollars. That’s why he quit his job as a logger to go back to school and become an aerospace engineer. We’ve learned to respect each other’s mutual styles and use them to work together. He appreciates my sincere desire to cooperate toward financial independence and stay on plan. I appreciate his ludicrous ability to read textbooks for fun, design things that go to space, and accrue patents. We take turns suggesting lifestyle pivots and talking each other through the pitch. That’s how we’ve wound up in this bizarre, outlier situation of banking half our income. Step One: Cooperate and tell the truth about your life. We have a breakfast meeting every single week where we talk about our finances, among other things. We’re able to do this without blame and recrimination because we share the goals of early retirement and excellent vacations. We’re allies. Wealthy celebrities go bankrupt and get expensively divorced all the time because they don’t know how to work as a team, and this is why cooperation comes first. Step Two: Focus on career direction and earning potential. We’ve relocated for jobs four times in our ten-year marriage. We don’t have a mortgage but we both work at our dream job. The goals here should be, how do we do the most fascinating possible thing all day while mentoring younger people and also making it rain money? Step Three: Lifestyle design. The tricky part. The most valuable parts of anyone’s lifestyle are usually outside the cash dimension. Love and friendship. Self-expression. Connection to the natural world. Developing a personal philosophy. Sleep quality, cooking skills, having a home filled with laughter and conversation. Put a price on any of that. We build our feeling of home and being entertained around the intangibles, and that’s what makes it relatively easy for us to chop expenses. Okay, seriously though, how do we save half our income? The lifestyle: We live in a studio apartment close enough for my husband to take the bus to work. I work at home. We got rid of our car two years ago because all they do is eat money 90% of the time. We cook at home, only going out to eat maybe once a week because we’re really too busy. We’ve only had pizza delivery ONCE in our entire thirteen-year relationship, and it wasn’t very good either. We don’t drink alcohol or indulge in any other recreational substances such as pay cable. We don’t “shop” as an activity, and that’s no sacrifice, because we both hate wandering around in stores. Also, we live in a 612-square-foot studio, so where would we put anything? Our default weekday is to work all day, go to kickboxing class together, bike home, shower, eat dinner, hang out with our pets for a while, and go to bed. The money: Base salary. See above. We’ve prioritized earnings over our own lifestyle throughout our marriage. That has meant moving away from family and friends over and over again. It has also meant getting rid of at least 80% of our possessions and living in a quarter of the space we had as newlyweds, because we’re nomads now. Overtime earnings. Many jobs don’t have this as an option, and not everyone is in a position to take advantage of it. My family’s perspective is that working overtime helps take the pressure off of all the colleagues with young families or other caretaking responsibilities. Take one for the team, ka-CHING. Bonuses. My husband has this terrible habit of winning awards at work. Unfortunately he might also wind up making money off his patents at some point, too. It’s dreadful. Non-cash perquisites. One feature of frequent business travel is that it racks up a lot of points and miles. Another is that a lot of passthrough expenses go through our credit cards, building up yet more points and miles. We typically don’t have to “pay” for plane tickets, hotel rooms, or rental cars anymore. Side hustle money. Everything we make on the side goes toward things like electronics upgrades, vacation, or vet bills. It used to go toward debt payments. There’s something highly motivating about thinking, “I’m going to earn myself a brand new Mac” or “this will buy our dog another year” as opposed to abstract numerals with a dollar sign in front. The treats: Part of why our lifestyle works for us is that we’re both motivated by the same major goals, one of which is financial independence and the other of which is travel. We splurge on vacation, as well as a few other things: Our phones, robotics textbooks, spoiling our pets, hanging out at Starbucks, and going to our boutique gym. Since we save half our income, we feel entitled to indulge ourselves in the ways that matter to us, as opposed to things that don’t, such as owning two vehicles, eating snacks and drive-thru food, watching cable TV, or living in an average-size house. We moved into a studio apartment so we could get a year ahead on our retirement savings, instead of a year behind. (Scrambling to pay 2015’s IRA contribution in spring of 2016, whereas now we’re already saving for 2020 in 2019). It worked! Saving crazy amounts of money has been fun for us and it’s helped us to build a stronger marriage. The stress of debt is so, so much harder than the stress of sharing a tiny living space and basically living like college students. The $1000 Project is a new, exciting approach to earning and saving money. Canna Campbell decided to turn her finances around. Her story starts as a single mom who had experienced postpartum depression. Other people mentioned in the book have various challenges, making this strategy feel accessible.
The premise of the $1000 Project is to save money in small increments. This can help to make even huge goals seem more approachable. The wins are closer and more frequent. This is an Australian book, so the dollar amounts are Australian dollars. I looked it up, and at time of writing, $1000 AU is about $700 US. On the one hand, that makes the $1000 Project simpler and more obtainable. On the other hand, I think it’s more exciting and motivating to keep that $1000 figure in mind! There are also details about investing that are specific to Australia. As an American investor, I can say that the overall strategy still makes sense and that the terminology is not that different. Don’t let this single chapter hold you back from benefiting from the overall message. Looking back, I wish I had paid more attention to the investing chapters in all the personal finance books I read; if I’d started even a year sooner it would have paid off by at least $10,000 more than I have now. The book offers dozens of ideas for earning extra money. Some are suitable for even the most entry-level young person, such as dog-walking. Others are somewhat surprising, like leading tours or teaching surfing to tourists. There are also plenty of ideas on how to save money, most of which people tend to know, though they aren’t willing to put them into practice. This is why it’s so helpful to have a goal like the $1000 Project, because mobilizing every possible strategy leads to much quicker results. Campbell dedicates an entire chapter to reader stories. They are inspiring, motivating, and also detailed, including specific dollar amounts. Readers based their $1000 Projects around such goals as IVF, paying off credit card debt, paying for their wedding, or getting reconstructive surgery. Campbell herself wanted to get out of debt, learn about investing, set a good example for her son, have a better career, and be able to give to charity in a significant way. The $1000 Project led her to reach all those goals, and more: It set her up as a realistic example for so many other people to reach their goals, too. You could be next! Favorite quotes: ...I learnt never to underestimate the power of consciously taking action in small ways to make a big difference. Start by asking yourself these questions: What do you love doing? What do you dream about? What would make you feel better? Once you’ve managed to move off the debt repayment treadmill, you can turn your mind to creating more wealth and stability for yourself! We can choose to be well prepared for obstacles, emergencies, and challenges. I could put my hand on my heart at the end of the twelve-month period and say with authenticity and contentment that I’d given this project everything I had. Married men are more attractive, let’s face it. The reason for that is that they’ve spent years in a relationship with someone, and it’s taught them a lot about communication, compromise, and contentment. Marriage is a specialized education. The marriage partner of someone else has been customized over time to fit with that specific person, like an old boot. Better to get your own! There are, though, candidates who will make better or worse marriage partners.
Take the advice of a happily married woman. Recognizing the undervalued man will give you a better shot at a better marriage. (A heteronormative, monogamous marriage, anyway, for whatever that’s worth). There are plenty of single and discouraged people in the world. Some of them are still processing whatever happened in their last relationship, and they’re not really emotionally available yet. Others are super busy, or they have a weird schedule, and they like it that way because it gives them a reason to not get back out there. Others are ready and can’t figure out why they aren’t meeting anyone. There are yet others who believe they aren’t desirable, and they’ve quit trying. All of these are potentially going to make an excellent partner for someone, maybe even in a short period of time! One of the best things you can offer to anyone - a friend, a colleague, your seat mate on a plane, a kid, a new date - one of the best things you can offer is validation of their good qualities. People often don’t recognize when they’re good at something. We’ve all been taught to beat up on ourselves. Some of us are, at least temporarily, cast down by life. It often takes the kind insights of another person to change our perspective. If you can do this for anyone, you can do it for a gentleman, and that’s part of your strategy for finding and claiming an undervalued man. Encourage everything you’d like to see more of. This is generally going to be the opposite of whatever their ex did. Relationships are killed by neglect and coldness. They can also be killed by constant criticism, and that’s more common than it should be. This is part of what keeps people in dissatisfying relationships - they start believing their bad press and buying into their disappointed partner’s negative views. Ah, but the things that annoyed that person might not bother you at all. They might be perks! Someone else might have undervalued your man due to his taste in music, how he cuts his hair, his clothes, his food preferences, his job, his friends, his height, his family, whether he likes the radio on/off at night, or the fact that he does/doesn’t want kids one day. I once broke up with a guy partly because he chewed gum in the shower. If that doesn’t bother you, well, he might be available today... Spouses are like siblings, which is to say that anyone you live with is a roommate. If you meet someone inconsiderate, they’re not giving you much to work with. No matter how attractive they are or how much money they have, it’s hard to live with a slob. A clean freak might not be that much better of a choice, though; do you really want a man nagging after you about streaks on the mirror or asking you to iron your socks? Consideration is not the same thing as housework. The quality you’re looking for is whether you can relax with this person. Does he make you smile? Does he seek to please you? Does he remember your likes and dislikes, is he willing to let you choose the movie or the radio station or the restaurant at least sometimes? If this man is fun and easygoing, he probably has a history with a couple of exes. How does he talk about them? Who is the villain in his stories? If it’s always HER, be suspicious. Does he listen to you attentively when you tell a story? Not when you vent, when you tell a story. Does he remember the names of your friends, family, and coworkers? Does he remember details from one week to the next? Does he basically seem to find you interesting? Does he like you? (Look around and start noticing how many couples seem not to like each other. It’s a lot). Something you can do with an undervalued man is to read The Five Love Languages with him. Men really like this book. It may be the first time in their lives that someone has recognized their attempts to show affection and caring toward someone. That book gives them permission to be doting and giving in the ways that work for them, and actually get a little credit. More of what works, less of what doesn’t work. Personally, I am very touched by acts of service, and let me tell you, there is something great about a man who prefers to show affection that way. My husband is constantly making me smoothies, fixing my sunglasses, doing my bike maintenance, and remembering not to put my sweaters through the dryer. Did he do that kind of thing for his ex-wife? I have no idea, I sort of doubt it, but they were younger then and I don’t think she was an “acts of service” person. My hubby and I reciprocate for each other because we’re on the same wavelength. I’ve probably disappointed more than one “gifts” man over the years, neither giving nor appreciating that sort of thing in the way he would want. After my divorce, I made a checklist of what I wanted in a man, the way we do. I put a lot of stuff on it that turned out to be irrelevant to what actually makes me happy. I thought I wanted a man who could beat me at Scrabble, when hey, I have my brother for that! I thought I wanted a poet/musician/artsy type when hey, I have myself for that! It never occurred to me to want an older engineer with a kid. What I got was a kind, generous, reliable man who was much smarter and funnier (and a better cook and dancer) than I thought possible. What ought to be on our checklists are personal qualities and behaviors. We have a tendency to typecast a romantic male lead, when what we’re really searching for is someone who can create a certain type and color of romantic bubble with us. We’re looking for something that can really only be made with one other specific individual. We’re more likely to get that irreplaceable bit of magic with someone who may have been overlooked by others. That’s how we lay claim to someone who will be delighted to be our perfect fit. Diogenes used to walk around Ancient Greece with a lit lantern in the daytime. People would ask him, “Hey, Diogenes, what’s up with the lantern?” He’d say, “I’m looking for an honest man!” I dig this right now, except instead of an honest man I’m in search of a decent night’s sleep. This is SleepQuest 2019, one woman’s journey to stop being tired all the time. The week of the New Year, I realized that my (current) sleep issues might have something to do with my ten-year dependency on melatonin. I quit taking it. That was a very hard week, but I did start sleeping better soon after. Three months in, I’m still not taking melatonin or any other sleep aid, and I’m finding that I can usually drop off to sleep in under twenty minutes. IS THAT GREAT, OR WHAT? I started wearing an older-model Fitbit at night as a sleep tracker. According to my metrics, I often fall asleep in 5-7 minutes. That honestly surprises me. It could be that I just quit shifting around in bed and lie still at that point. Maybe one day there will be a brain scanner that will give better data. Who knows? I had been waking up in the middle of the night a lot, sometimes 3-4 times per night. I usually sleep through the night now. These are the things that are going well. Unfortunately, I think one of the reasons I’m falling asleep more quickly and staying down through the night is that I am just so tired lately. We have upstairs neighbors. They are loud. They keep late hours. They also get up early. First it’s the man getting ready for work. He has a HEAVY TREAD which is very noticeable above your head at 5:00 AM. Then, just as he’s leaving, his wife comes down. She stays at home. That’s why it’s such a mystery why she feels that she needs to do all her housework before 9:00 AM. She probably thinks that mopping at 7:00 is a quiet and respectful thing to do, not realizing that it sounds like squirrels are digging their way through our ceiling. Then there are the middle school daughter and the family dog, everyone waking up and tromping down the stairs in their own sweet time. Sigh. Essentially 90% of the noise in our apartment complex happens between 5:00 AM and 9:00 AM. Another 5% is the period between 11:30 PM and 12:30 AM. Someone walks around and does things in the kitchen. I think it might be the kid. Anyway, enough about that. The point is that I am preoccupied with the doings of these people because THEY KEEP WAKING ME UP and I don’t have a lot of options. They just aren’t quiet for an 8-hour stretch. Whenever I confront a persistent problem, I go at it in multiple ways. The first is to strategize and try to reframe the problem. Next step is to ask for advice. After that I try to solve the problem with money. First wave: Do we have recourse about the noise? We went to the property manager back when these neighbors were doing their laundry at 6:00 AM, and that got dealt with. We had a couple of challenges when they kept trying to push back to more like 7:30. The real issue is that the simple act of walking to the bathroom and taking a shower is louder in our apartment than it is in theirs. It’s not unreasonable for them to get ready in the morning. We could probably talk to a lawyer and get out of our lease early, but then we’d have to move. (Another way to reframe the problem). Second wave: What are other people doing? Talk to the landlord, fix your nutrition, etc. I have the most screwed-up sleep of anyone I know, so for this topic I am reading up on sleep research. Third wave: Solve the problem with money. Eye masks, a white noise generator, fan, air filter, ear plugs, new sheets, a new pillow, etc. In the past I’ve tried essential oils, lotions, teas, herbal supplements, meditation, progressive relaxation, yoga, hot baths, and basically everything else on the market. I’ve even tried prescription pharmaceuticals, which is replacing one problem for another. At this point on the SleepQuest journey, I am ready to say that my main sleep problem is external. It’s disruptive noise. That’s actually amazing. As an optimist, I have to remind myself that this is a good thing. As soon as I can move somewhere with our own roof, and no longer have heavy booted footsteps walking six feet over my head early each morning, I’ll have a chance of sleeping like a normal person. Taking 90 minutes to fall asleep? Gone. Waking up with stomach cramps? Gone. Waking up 3-4 times a night? Gone. Restless leg? Gone. On the other hand, since I started SleepQuest 2019 I have had a couple instances of night terrors. I’ve also had a couple of migraines. I’ve been down with a cold three times. While my sleep quality is nowhere near as bad as it was back in November and December, it’s certainly not as good as it could be. Overall strategy is to put a small amount of focus in several things, rather than concentrate on only one thing. What I’ve found with complicated problems (like migraine, weight loss, and parasomnia) is that fixing one input is never enough. One percent improvement in ten things is ten percent improvement, right? I already know a bunch of things that work, so for the rest of the year I will methodically make sure that I am putting as much effort into those proven areas as I can. I’ll also continue to do more research. What have I done that works? Wear the eye mask Find the right distance and noise setting for air filter and fan Quit taking melatonin and suffer through a week of very poor sleep Adjust my hydration and make sure I’m drinking my full quota before 8:00 PM DO NOT EAT or drink any non-water fluids close to bedtime, preserving a three-hour gap between last food and sleep initiation Try to go to bed earlier and wish neighbors would, too. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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