Reflection - 30 days of balance
I've been bemoaning the complete lack of balance in my life during this activity, and the issue has not been resolved yet. I know that this will improve, as my project continues to roll along, it's just very frustrating and has been dragging on a little too long at this point in time. But this is the reflection post, so I need to talk about what I had hoped to achieve and how I went with it all.
The real aim of this activity was to consider a lot of the things I have learned and discovered during the project to design my perfect day. Since it is really about work/life balance then this was about designing a perfect work day. And since work has been a little crazy and overwhelming, I was certainly primed to identify the things that I needed to improve for my perfect day.
Learnings from other activities
As anyone who has been following this would know, during 30 days of slowing down I made the decision that I really needed to reduce my hours at work. This was always the aim in our move to Tasmania, that neither of us would have to work a full time office job, so we would have more hours for the things we really want to do. The issue is that I felt I could not reduce my hours because Derek is not in paid employment while he is building our house. But I successfully managed, with Derek's wonderful support, to drop one day a fortnight. This is important because I know that I don't want to work for someone else full time, there are too many other things I want to be able to do: write, design and create things that aren't related to my job for starters.From 30 days of drive and 30 days of choice I went through processes to attempt to better understand my purpose and how I really define success for myself. This has been important in helping me understand some of the things that really need to be included in my perfect day, or in my perfect week. So from these activities and other things that I have learned about myself, from starting my volunteer literacy tutoring and from things that I know I need to get into my life.
An outline of my perfect day and other things to improve my balance
Ok, so this is not my completely perfect day, but it is the perfect day for the foreseeable future. I had put thought into what I think I would want my ultimate perfect work day to look like, but I couldn't really articulate it. Maybe this is a lack of vision, maybe it is just indicative of how stressed I currently am and how that is impacting on my creativity. Either way, I felt that this was the best option at this point, to plan the next stage (the one that I can start moving towards now but can't achieve until after we are in the new house).
So how was the activity?
I think that I managed to get to the point I really wanted to reach, but I didn't get to spend as much time or energy on it as I had hoped. As the final activity to end of My Year of TED project I don't think I could have planned this any better. I will try to think about this a little more during the next couple of months and in the post-reflection on the last couple of activities we'll see whether I come up with anything else.Have you ever thought about your perfect day and what it would entail? It's an interesting activity and you may be surprised with the things you would include and exclude. Like most of the activities I have done this year, I would highly recommend taking the time to imagine it, you never know what you might discover.