Blog - Page 23 of 35 - Sustainable Sue

Distractions!

Let’s talk about creating a sustainable pace of life during quarantine. I have heard from friends who cry daily. Other friends are canning food and sewing supplies like it is end of times. Some friends are considered essential and work in a contagious disease hospital dedicated to COVID19 patients daily. Some friends have their head in the sand and are going on vacation.

I am none of these and a bit of each of these. I have cleaned out the junk drawer, napped on my lunch break, spent an hour writing one work email because words would not come, sewn masks, and zoned out with garbage media. All in the same day. And this is ok. I am not team “choose joy all the time” because sometimes it just sucks right now. Feel your feelings – even the yucky ones. If you keep shoving them down, they will come out in weird ways eventually.

So in this post I want you to bring you a few things that have been keeping me company / distracting me as I try to create a sustainably productive pandemic pace of life. I refuse to call this “new normal” because it won’t be like this forever. But I wanted to share a few things I am loving right now.

Watch – Tiger King

Like many people in the country, I cannot get enough of this train wreck. I watched the whole Netflix series in a day, then did a deep dive on John’s teeth. I was feeling sad I did not pace myself.

John Finlay Tiger King — Just a preview of the delight that is Tiger King

Then my favorite podcast announced that they were doing a recap of each episode. Full disclosure – I did have to become a Patreon supporter. This was not a huge barrier for me because I used to be a Patreon supporter, but cancelled when Patreon changed their financial structure. Plus this content is 100% worth ANY PRICE.

Read – Know My Name

This was a 5-star book I could not put down. I read this book as an audio-book. It is always a bonus for me when the book is read by author, which this one was.

Know My Name should be required reading for all high school and college students. Yes, kids should read it twice. The topic is this important.

“…when you cannot differentiate the statements of the President of the US and a 19 year old rapist…
Paraphrasing a sentence from the book that was like a kick in the gut for me.

This is not ok.

And the way the author was able to access, then verbalize, her experience is incredible. Especially for someone as young as she is.

Do – Cycling

I feel like I have been rehabbing my knee forever. Although I have been on my bike in the last 18 months, it has really just been in the neighborhood and the next street over. I wanted to stay close to home in case my knee wasn’t feeling as strong as I thought it was.

This week I finally ventured out onto the big, wide world. It was so great to do a familiar loop, and I felt strong. My average speed was higher than usual because I did not have to slow down for cul de sacs and so many stop signs. My route included a nice downhill too – I was able to spot over 33 mph on the computer at one point!

While going faster felt great, the best part was I out rode the crabbiness that hung over me all day that day. As much as a dream self-isolation is for this introvert, the uncertainty of the world today has been weighing heavily on me. How long will this last? What does it mean for my job? Why am I not learning a foreign language in all this “downtime?” I get bogged down and crabby.

These distractions have been great to alleviate some of the grumpies for me. I hope they help you too. Feel free to jump in with what is distracting you too!

By Susan Sanders|2020-04-13T18:57:56-04:00April 13th, 2020|Health & Fitness, Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Products I Love: The Renew Planner

After my mom died I was in a fog that I could not get out of. I had goals I wanted to accomplish, but it seemed so difficult to not just nap or watch garbage TV all day. I tried journaling but my mind was blank – just numb. I made a to do list each night of the exercise, writing, crafting, and other productive things I wanted to do the following day. The list that would “snap me out of it” or help me at least fake it.

Then the next day the list went directly into the recycle bin.

I was looking for structure to recover from my grief, but the planners I came across seemed harsh and hard driving. Until I found the Renew Planner. This tool is the softer, gentler way I needed to bring me back to life after the numbing pain of the months of grief.

The Renew Planner is designed to add structure, mindfulness, and gentle reminders to help you stay on track towards recovery.

There are separate sections of the planner that are dedicated to various parts of your planning. A weekly recap, monthly overview, and daily calendar as shown above. I used the weekly calendar snapshot to do a time tracker of how I was spending my days, not necessarily planning them out right now. Here are some of my favorite features:

It is beautiful to look at. Something about the color scheme is soothing to me, unlike other planners I considered that seemed too aggressive.
It lays flat. This makes it easier to keep open on my desk when I was doing the time tracker recording.
It is about more than what I am doing, it is about HOW I am doing. This is important as I am working through grief. I want to make sure I am not stuffing feelings or sitting and wallowing.

This planner can be used for any kind of recovery – addiction, eating disorders, life… A portion of the proceeds goes to organizations providing care and assistance to people in recovery.

Disclaimer – I am friends with the creator of the planner so I did get mine before they were available for sale. However, I paid for my planner. I strongly endorse this product because it is amazing. I may be biased, but I am not a paid endorser.

Second disclaimer – This was before social distancing was a thing.

By Susan Sanders|2020-04-28T09:24:21-04:00April 5th, 2020|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Analysis paralysis, decision fatigue, and toilet paper

There is a such things as too many choices. How can toilet paper help you learn to avoid analysis paralysis brought on my decision fatigue? What could these three things possibly have in common? They are all for shit. And it has nothing to do with COVID-19’s run on toilet paper. Let me explain.

I arrived at Target and was cruising down the list. Tossing items in my cart right and left. Crossing things off the list and feeling like I could take over the world. Until I got to toilet paper. Have you been to the toilet paper aisle recently? It is worse than the yogurt aisle. Worse than the Jelly Belly section of a candy store. It is a ridiculous amount of choices. It felt like That Moment in the movie when the hero has to decide whether to cut the black or the red wire.

This toilet tissue issue has recently surfaced because of two reasons:

1 – We quit our Costco membership. With Costco there is no TP Gate. There are maybe 2 choices. But out in the real world there is a bench in the middle of the toilet paper aisle because the elderly were passing out before getting to the end of the aisle. People have to use a sports drink and energy gel just to get to the end of the aisle it takes so long.

2 – Now that the kids are teenagers, choices made by one person don’t usually impact us all.

Don’t like what I chose for us to have for dinner? Make your own.
Want make up? Buy your own – mine is off limits.
The Boy and I do use the same brand of razor blades. I am too cheap to buy a new razor so I use Bixby’s cast off men’s razor to shave my legs. When The Boy started shaving he just picked the one Bixby had. But that’s only 2 of the 4 of us agreeing on 1 decision.

But this? THIS was a choice I needed to make on behalf of my whole family and critical because it affects our behinds! And let me tell you, My People spend A LOT of time in the bathroom. When we were on vacation in Seattle last summer, I had to go to the lobby in my pajamas to use the bathroom because The Girl was in our hotel room bathroom so long. That is the last time I will ever share a bathroom with the kids – on vacation or otherwise. But I digress.

So there I was in Target with the bum wipe aisle looming large with a zillion choices. I knew that it had to be septic safe since we are outside the city limits and use a septic system. I preferred rolls that were not individually wrapped to cut down on the number of trees that were killed. But what was softest? What was worth paying more per roll in order to not have to spend money on cream to soothe an arse chafed by cheap TP. How do I translate the cost per sheet to a cost per foot and how does that compare to cost per roll?

Needless to say I had a meltdown and left without ANY toilet paper. It was decision fatigue at its best (worst?). This is where our story diverges into two levels.

The Hidden Level

You know the meltdown is not really about the toilet paper, right? Decision fatigue is a real thing. When I am off my game, it slides quickly into analysis paralysis and collapses into meltdown.

And Dear Reader, off my game is such an understatement for the last few months. Usually January and February I hibernate to recover from the Birthday-Christmas-Giving shenanigans of December. But 2020 decided to roundhouse kick me in the head in January and February. There was no hibernating for me, so if you saw an overtired, grumpy bear whose hibernation was cancelled lumbering through Target – chances are, that may have been me.

There was nothing to be done about the change of plans the Universe had for me. Sometimes you have to bear the unbearable. We refer to this as survival mode. Survival mode is not a sustainable pace of life. What we can do when this season hits is

Focus on the bare minimum of what needs to be done
Give yourself grace to let go of the rest
Notice what you want to tuck away as “lessons learned”

I have a few things tucked away to share with you in the coming months. I also tucked away that survival mode sucks just as much as I remember. Zero stars. Do not recommend.

The Practical Level

No matter how shitty life is (pun absolutely intended there), I still need to buy the dang toilet paper. Laura Vanderkam had a recent Before Breakfast podcast episode where she coached her listeners to have a default choice (Feb 26). This means that there is no “what toilet paper should I buy today” decision to make because there is a default choice already set for me. My husband and I took it one step further when a friend of mine suggested we set it up to be delivered to our house at a regular cadence.

I am lucky enough to have an Enneagram 5 husband who loves nothing better than to research the crap (PUN!) out of choices. He also just wants to be able to swoop in and fix things for me when he can. So when I came home almost in tears at the overwhelm of the TP aisle and begged him to set up a recurring delivery from an online service, he jumped into action.

I had only one parameter – I could not be the decision maker. If you think the Target aisle is overwhelming, do an Amazon search for toilet paper. I wailed so loudly the dog hid in the bedroom closet.

I don’t know how long it took him to figure it out, but he is cheaper and more concerned about the environment than I am. So if he is satisfied with the choice, then by God I am too. Now toilet paper shows up in a little grey van every month without me having to think about it. I don’t have to even go down that aisle at Target. And that frees up more time for me to peruse the Dollar Spot!

What do you need to automate? Have you made any default choices in your life? What about analysis paralysis – are there certain triggers that cause this for you?

By Susan Sanders|2020-03-30T19:10:04-04:00March 29th, 2020|Mental Well-being|1 Comment

Pandemic Productivity: Doing enough to get through trying times

COVID-19 is making for some weird times.

Teachers are delivering meals in buses. Parents who run board of director meetings are now having to teach Common Core math. Healthcare workers are wearing masks sewn by laid off retail and restaurant workers because there is a shortage of PPE. And then there are those of us quarantined with teenagers. Have you ever had to estimate how much a teenage boy will eat in a month? There are many households who are doing all of this in the same day during this COVID-19 pandemic!

Oh, and remember to take advantage of this “downtime.” Learn a new craft! Finally lose the baby weight! Cook up a freezer full of meals! As Balkie used to say: Get out of the city. Folks, this pace is not sustainable. Nor is it productive. This post is about none of that – its about doing the best you can today.

In the field of IT project management we have a concept call Minimum Viable Product. It means completing the smallest piece of the request in a designated amount of time in order to please the client. With this design, customers can give feedback early and often. This allows you to make sure you don’t get three months down the road at go live or product launch and realize the client didn’t want it to go quite like that.

This is different than half-assing it. Half-assing is a Ron Swanson term, not an IT project management term. I would like to suggest that you are actually whole-assing sustainability during difficult times.

MVP can help you go all in on what can help you get through COVID-19. What would a MVP look like in different areas of your life right now?

1 – Educating kids at home

I am not going to call this “homeschooling” because that would be an insult to homeschooling parents everywhere. But keep the learning going in whatever this might look like. I have social media posts about outdoor classrooms, Home Ec lessons while making dinner, friends doing virtual art classes together through FaceTime, and siblings helping each other with lessons.

Many schools sent home packets. What if you didn’t set a hard goal of time or pages or strict timing of doing math from 9:00 am – 10:00 am? Think about widening the guardrails. My sister has set a 90 minute window of school time with no screens in the morning and school time with screens allowed in the afternoon. This gives my nieces opportunities to choose how they will complete their work and set up their day. In times of chaos having control over something can alleviate the pressure and stress.

One of my nieces took this a step further and asked if she could complete her blocks of work in a different order. She wanted to have outdoor “recess” and craft time back to back instead of breaking it up with working on packets and assignments. My sister is smart enough to throw out the rigid schedule and knock out the MVP – learning.

Reading while on exercise ball — Let learning happen naturally – like Avery combining her indoor physical activity time with reading.

2 – Earning your paycheck from home

This can be a tricky one because no one wants to be a slacker just because they are at home. What I want to suggest is that you could possibly break your projects or tasks into smaller bits to complete. This could allow forward progress as well as giving grace to colleagues who might be 1) pulled into COVID-19 priorities and not able to address your request, 2) reeling from world wide events, or 3) struggling up the technology curve as they transition home.

I have a project scheduled to go live April 1. The trainers that we need to do the one last thing before go live are tied up revising critical education modules to be online and rescheduling training locations to meet 6-feet distance minimums. My training is not critical so we shelved it until after this passes.

My MVP is to back off. Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. And when it is the right thing for you, it is automatically the right thing for everyone. When we pulled the plug on the April 1 go live, a couple people send me a nice message telling me they appreciated the space to focus on more critical items.

No one wants to feel like we are letting someone else down. But on a good day, doing all the things is not sustainably productive, let alone during a pandemic! Let me say it this way – my MVP, the least amount I can do, is to give someone else the grace I would want to be given in their shoes.

3 – Staying healthy

Here is what our dinner MVP was earlier this week – meat, cheese, crackers on a tray. Followed by ice cream. We ate in front of the TV. This is not ideal, nor sustainable. This is not our usual MO for dinner, but sometimes it is just about getting by, doing just enough. Minimum Viable Product. What is the least amount I can do to get food in front of my people.

Same with exercise. I cannot even with these people who are using this time to lose weight. I am lucky to have a dog who requires a walk and a husband who has set that walk to be first thing in the morning. This week I dragged myself along a few times – no bra because that was one more hurdle I could not clear. No contacts or glasses to see anyone judging me for not wearing a bra. Headphones to prevent anyone talking to me – including my husband. In better times I would gear up and walk aggressively and use this time for meaningful conversations with my partner. Not with MVP – I just want to move my body for 20 minutes. Even if that means some body parts moved more than others.

Determine your MVP

This could be an exercise you complete as a family or as a “leadership team” with your spouse. You can be formal and write it out. You can also ask on the fly with each situation, “What is the least amount I can do and still deliver something towards the goal?”

What is important
- Getting SOME learning done
- Basic hygiene
- Being kind to each other
What has to be done?
- You have to eat, can you make them easy
- Work if your business is still running
What would feel soothing in this moment
- Instead of listening to a book on double speed, would it be more soothing to have silence while you clean the surfaces with bleach for the 10th time that day
- Bras are never soothing. Wear whatever is comfortable. Adopt the Teleconference Mullet – business on top, sweatpants on bottom

To paraphrase all the Frozen movies in one cliche: Let it go and do the next right thing. Right after we wash our hands.

By Susan Sanders|2020-06-17T17:32:50-04:00March 22nd, 2020|Mental Well-being|1 Comment

Filling My Tank at the Well

In January my mother died. In February I was working 12 + hour days / 7 days a week on a project for work. Needless to say this was not a sustainable pace for me. My tank ran dry, and I ran on empty for longer than I care to admit. I wasn’t sleeping. A rash spread over my eyelids. Shoot – I even skipped lunch a few times!

Once the smoke cleared, I needed something extra to find my equilibrium again. I was able to fill my tank with a stay at the Well of Mercy.

Saturday I got out early in the 35 degree morning and walked the Prayer Path. The Prayer Path is a 1.25 mile trail with meditation stations of various themes. There is a chair or swing at each station so you can pause for as long as is needed. The path winds down near a river at one point with a few stations there before circling back to a Sacred Circle.

I forgot my journal for this trip – that must somehow be Fruedian. Did I not want to dig into any feelings or capture their fallout? HA! The gift shop has mini journals with beautiful drawings on the cover and are titled by the stations on the Prayer Path. I bought Grieve for capturing snippets for my mom’s eulogy that I had planned to write wile I was there.

I got a strong start on the eulogy while walking the Prayer Path and pausing at many stations. Real talk – I did not sit and contemplate at the last 4 because I had to go to the bathroom. So there I am back in my room and was going to gather thoughts in the Grieve journal.

My pen ran out of ink. The only pen I brought with me. So I opened the computer and started typing. Here is what I discovered:

A friend of mine told me about this place after she visited in the wake of her husband leaving. When I told her I had plans to visit this weekend she said to remain open to what the surroundings would tell me.

I was listening hard. When I left on my walk that morning I felt much resistance to staying any longer. I was doing the same things I did at home – napping, nature, books, writing. But I am also a cheapskate so I was going to take advantage of all the things the Well could offer before I left. Begrudgingly, I set off on the Prayer Path.

After sitting at the Grieve station for awhile, then the Forgive station longer than that, I got clarity on what the surroundings were telling me. I was doing the same things I did at home. The translation is that I am doing the right things to grieve and heal. Now I need to keep doing them.

I want to share these things with you for accountability for myself and in hopes it may help you find sustainable productivity also.

Slow Down

Now that my massive work project has gone live, things have normalized in my day job. This means I can sleep in a little longer, take more time with the written correspondence to really say what I mean. Or better yet, I skip the email and wait until the meeting tomorrow to cover it. This gives the person on the other end of the email a break from me too.

Slowing down helps me notice the little things and be the person I want to be, not just the person I have time to be.

Get Moving

The exception to sleeping in is to get up for 6:00 am hot yoga. There is something wonderful about the dawn of the day and the dawn of my physical self synching up. Plus, I am less likely to let life get in the way because life is not awake yet that early.

Another plus is that most other people at exercise class feel the same way – we are there for a similar purpose. In classes later in the day there are those who spend pre-class meditation time chit chatting, which DRIVES ME NUTS.

Get Outside

Nature is my jam. She always delivers, even if it is not in my favorite of ways. I have always been afraid of severe weather. But am learning that thunderstorms are just as magnificent as a sunrise, just in a different way.

Although it is colder than I prefer this time of year, getting outside is always a healing mood boost for me.

But wait! There’s more!

The one thing I do want to change is TV consumption. Bixby and I have slipped back into a bad habit of hours of mindless TV at the end of the day. This was fine when I had big feelings or chaos all day. An escape is sometimes necessary. But I feel myself coming out of this season and needing more structured activity. Time to write, craft, or even weed the already overgrown flower beds.

I don’t want to shame myself for adopting the TV coping mechanism. More like check to see if it is a crutch I need anymore. Even reading would be a better choice than TV. I finished ZERO BOOKS in February. This has to be a first for me in about a decade.

What is working for you to find your groove? What do you think you need to give up to create the life you want?

By Susan Sanders|2020-06-17T17:33:55-04:00March 16th, 2020|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Composting – Sometimes sustainability is about sustainability

When I refer to sustainability on this blog, most of the time I am referring to your energy and the activities that fill or drain you. We recycle, save water, telecommute or carpool and much more to make the environment sustainable. Why not explore ways to make our lives more energetically sustainable as well? But sometimes sustainability is about sustainability – today we will focus on composting.

Ironically, one of the things that puts wind in my sails is environmental sustainability. A hobby that sustains me is making dirt. I know, I am a barrel of laughs, for sure.

For those of you about to roll your eyes and hit unsubscribe, please hear this – for you, the point of this post is to hear that we each have our own quirks that put wind in our sails. Find out how to spend more time doing yours. If you don’t know what yours is, keep coming back – we will work together to find out what it is for you.

For those of you who are all in on homemade dirt, let’s DIG IN! (Dig in? See what I did there?! I ALWAYS intend my puns).

Where this came from

Like all kids, I blame my parents. We had a compost pile when I was growing up. It was somewhat less trendy back then, but my mom was a middle school science teacher so weirdo experiments were status quo around our house.

We had an amazing backyard of landscaping my parents developed over the years and a gorgeous garden. The compost we created nurtured both.

Fast forward a zilliion years, and I am my parents age. I have reverted to using paper bags from the grocery store. Yes, we have reusable grocery sacks. However, we are also human and forget them sometimes. I also HATE to grocery shop, so I lean heavily on the shop-for-you service that does not have reusable bags. Paper it is.

But I have a ton of them. Yes, I could take them back to the store for recycling. But I decided to use them to make more compost. Because real talk – the dirt in North Carolina in TERRIBLE. And by dirt I mean clay. We need amendments for DAYS. This gave me a way to get more amendments for free!

How I do it

I combine a few composting methods and incorporate the recycling of the shredded paper into that.

1 – Shredded paper

You can use any black and white printed mail (plus those paper grocery bags) in composting, plus those paper grocery bags. I shred on a weekly basis and when the bag is full I put it in gardening shed or garage for use in composting. I add a layer of paper shreds to both my Bokashi bucket and compost bins in regular intervals.

2 – Bokashi bucket

Bokashi is an anaerobic method of composting – a little different from the pile outside that we will get to next. We have a bucket with a lid in the garage that holds scraps. ALL of the scraps, even things that don’t go in the traditional pile. Think cheese, meat, fish skins… even bones. After I add scraps for the day, I sprinkle bokashi bran and press it down with a paper towel to get out any air. When the bucket is full, it sits for 2 weeks. During that two weeks I pour off “bokashi tea.” More on that in another post – you know how I like a cliffhanger story. After two weeks, I dump the contents of the bokashi bucket into the regular compost bin. Once the bucket is washed out, it is ready for the next round of scraps.

3 – Composting bins

The bin outside is where the magic happens. There we have two bins that have traditional kitchen scraps and yard waste. Joe Lamp’l has a great resource on his website if you are just getting started with composting. Adding the bokashi bucket to our bins massively accelerates the breakdown that gets my homemade dirt to me faster. Patience is not my jam so I was super excited when I saw how much faster the decomp happened.

Compost bins — You cannot see them but there are hundreds of fat and happy maggots wiggling around in this bin.

I turn and water the compost weekly. It is neat to see all the rolly pollys and maggots in there getting their work done. Apparently the weird science experiments don’t fall far from the tree. I am my mother’s daughter.

After about 4-6 weeks (depending on which season we are in, compost breaks down faster in heat), the dirt is ready.

What do I do with it

The dirt that is made is really pretty. Like the dirt I grew up with in Indiana.

Side note: For those of you keeping score at home, here is a list of the things I mentioned in this post being excited about:

Making dirt
Shredding paper
Fast decomposition
Rolly pollys
Maggots
Pretty dirt

I am such a catch. Bixby is a really lucky guy.

Basically from here the last step is distributing it around the yard. A thin layer of compost goes around bushes, in the garden and over areas I want to develop for planting in future years.

I love that garbage we were going to throw out anyway can be made useful again. This can be morphed into a metaphor in life too. What garbage are you carrying around? If you set it down and occasionally turned it over to consider it, would it eventually be benign enough for you to use in a productive way?

By Susan Sanders|2020-06-17T17:46:33-04:00January 13th, 2020|Environmental Surroundings|0 Comments

Habit Change in 3 steps – In a Sustainably Productive Way

As part of their morning routine, Lucille and Bixby have a super fun game that we like to call Staircase Catch. She stands at the top of the stairs and drops her ball, which plunks down each step like a slinky. Bixby catches it at the bottom and tosses it back up to her. She catches it in her mouth, then repeats the process again. For hours if we let her.

One morning the two of them played a bit, Bixby and I had coffee, then we all started our day as usual. Later that morning, I took a break from work to go downstairs and get a Diet Coke. This is the view.

Now, to Lucille, this looks like so much fun. To me, this looks like a trip to the emergency room. The same scene can be interpreted different ways. The decision to leave the ball on the stairs can have significantly different outcomes.

The same can be said about choices in our own lives. I agonize over decisions so that I can make the best choice because there could be so many different outcomes. I consider the pros and the cons, the return vs. the investment. “Analysis paralysis” is the pithy saying used to describe this. Ironically, often there is not a “best choice” when it comes to the decisions about our habits and routines. As long as we take any action at all – that is what matters.

Let’s take a look at three ways to get moving on habit change.

Start Small

It is hard to completely revamp habits all in one go. Start small. Instead of setting a goal to go to the gym every day, go once a week. Instead of writing 2,000 words every weekday, if you have more time on the weekend, do your 2,000 words on Saturdays and Sundays.

Sure it will take you longer to get to your end goal, but this is where we apply the idea of sustainability. We are not talking about fad diets and get rich quick schemes. I want to you to create sustainably productive habits. If you cannot stomach the idea of getting up at 5:00 am to go to yoga every morning – don’t do it!

But you do need to do something. Make it small.

Nope – smaller than that. It is hard, I understand. Sometimes it is hard to break it down smaller. How do I eat healthy smaller? If you would like to see a few examples, you can download what small sample changes I have been working on lately. I really do mean SMALL changes. But these are going to be sustainable changes for me.

Once you decide on what, set your cadence. How many times a week do you want to do it? Great, start with half that amount of days. SMALL CHANGES. You can adjust later.

Speaking of later – we need to pick a start date and an evaluation date. Not start and end dates – a start date and an evaluation date.

Set Deadline

Let’s say your goal is to paint 3 days a week after work. You have made the goal smaller and picked 2 days to paint once you get home. Well done, you. Now set an evaluation date for 30 days from now.

Go ahead – add it to your calendar, “Evaluate painting schedule.”

Then let fly your inner Picasso. For 30 days. No judgement, no changes. Paint for 2 days a week for 30 days – you have 8 opportunities!

After 30 days it is time to ask some questions. Keep this informal and short. Sit down for 5-10 minutes and ask yourself these simple questions

Of the 8 times I planned to paint, how many did I complete?
What worked about this plan?
What did not work about this plan?

Don’t expect magic unicorns to shit rainbows. You may not have knocked it out of the park this month. Creating and changing habits – that’s hard work. You will probably need to make adjustments. Maybe during your evaluation, you identified that you only painted for 3 of the potential 8 days. Asking what worked and what didn’t will help modify your plan.

Do not automatically declare that your goal was wrong or you are a failure. Stay flexible, make modifications based on what you learned.

Stay Flexible

This is where folks will give up or water down their dream instead of staying flexible to meet the overall intention of what they were trying to do. Remember sustainable productivity is about finding what puts wind in your sails and doing it in a way that fits into your life today. In a way that you can repeat for the foreseeable future. You may need to make some changes in order to meet that sustainable productivity goal.

Here are some ways to do that:

Start

Once you have identified what tweaks to make in your process, decide what change you want to start. Just one – keep is small and sustainable. Maybe you planned to paint for 1 hour after work 2 days per week. After 30 days you have identified what is not working about this plan is that you spend 25 minutes of your precious 60 minutes setting up your supplies and work space.

What you may choose to start is to set up in the morning of painting day. Then all you have to do when you come home is paint – which is the whole goal.

Stop

Perhaps during your evaluation you found that by the time you came home, fed the dog, checked the mail, and changed clothes you lost your painting mojo. What you may choose to stop doing is checking the mail and changing clothes. Stopping those 2 things will streamline the process – feed the dog and paint. You can get an apron or old button down shirt to put over your clothes to protect them if needed. Maybe you change into painting clothes before you even leave the office!

Continue

This is often a hard one for people. We have to admit that maybe we are doing some things right. If you cannot identify one single thing you are doing right and need to continue, I will offer you a gimme. Continue the schedule. Until you hit the goal 100% for 3 cycles (90 days), continue your cadence. In this example that means painting 1 hour a day for 8 days will be the target for cycle 2. Set your next evaluation date for 30 days from now.

Don’t automatically declare that you are lazy and have no willpower because Netflix lured you to the couch on 5 of your 8 painting days. Maybe you sat down to check the mail and inertia just took over. It happens. You may need to alter your surroundings or order of operations to fit this new lifestyle you have. This Start – Stop – Continue exercise will help you identify and make those alterations.

Now, I hear what some of you are thinking: That’s all well and good if you know what you want to do! I get it. You might be feeling like you are living in black and white and an overall feeling of blah, but don’t know what is causing it. If this is you, I would like to invite you to use the Sustainability Checklist for a few days to help identify what is and is not working for you.

Let me know how these tools are working for you. Were you able to identify your start, stop and continue? What surprises did you find when you used the Sustainability Checklist for a few days?

By Susan Sanders|2020-06-19T16:54:21-04:00January 6th, 2020|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Meh. I reached my goals: the truth about setting goals

I met my goal, and I am not ok with it.

I love December because I can look back on my goals and the way I spent my year. Then I can celebrate the victories and plan for changes to what I wasn’t celebrating so much. In a future post I will share my celebrations. This post is about what I want to change because I ~~met~~ crushed my goals, and I am not ok with it.

For the last five years I have set reading goals through Goodreads. Every year I bump up the number of books a little more. Some years I do a reading challenge to try to expand my reading list. I scour lists of Best Reads to add to my To Be Read list and try to keep up with what everyone else had read and loved. Then at the end of the year, Goodreads summarizes the number of books and pages I have completed this year.

2018 reading goals — Last year I **started** 188 books, but **finished** 163 books. I keep a separate list of books I abandoned so I don’t accidentally try them again. More on that in this post.

There are a couple reasons why I am not excited about crushing this goal. While reading may not be your thing, I wonder if some of these reasons will resonate with how you are feeling about your goals. Don’t just consider the goals you hit – maybe you sabotaged your goals because you saw some of this sooner than I did. Either way, I want to talk about a different way to think about goal-setting, or the lack thereof. Let’s dig into it.

1 – Now I have to raise the goal

We are all familiar with the idea of fear of failure. Most likely we are experienced at fear of failure. That cold clammy feeling when we think about everyone we are letting down when we cannot come through on the expectation or promise. But what about its wicked step-sister, Fear of Success.

The idea behind fear of success is that when we reach a goal we have to immediately keep improving. I was a varsity athlete in college. At the end of my freshman year I was handed a list of goals I was to reach before returning to campus in the fall.

A certain time for the mile run.
A number to hit for body weight and a more strict number for body fat.
Several targets for lifts in the weight room (bench press, squat, etc.).

I worked my ass off that summer. Before going to my maintenance crew job, I lifted every day at 5:00 am. I got off at 3:30 pm and played basketball or ran or both until 8:00 pm more days than not. Weekends were filled with various tournaments or working a second job in a sporting goods store. I carefully planned meals and ditched my favorite Dairy Queen M&M Blizzards. Alcohol was not even an option.

I returned to campus, crushed all of my goals. OK, not the mile time – I squeaked by on that bad boy. But I reached it. To this day I still remember how proud of myself I was that fall.

I met with my coach at the end of the pre-season expecting celebrations. Instead I hear: Good, now we know what you are capable of so we can set some real goals.

That summer schedule took everything I had. And it was deemed not “real goals.” Crushing my goals crushed me. I had an intense schedule that I could barely sustain and now I was asked to significantly add to it.

Now, upping my reading game is not as soul crushing as sitting in that office hearing about my “good start,” but as I was looking ahead to my 2020 reading goals I started getting that familiar voice in my head.

What will I give up to make this happen?
How will I fit it all in?
What can I drop off the life schedule to get this done?

Its READING, guys! I refuse to let one of my favorite things in the world become something that squeezes out life. I will not be bumping up 2020 expectations just because I hit my 2019 goal.

But there is another reason I am not increasing my goal.

2019 reading goals — This year I **started** 168 books, but **finished** 143 books.

2 – What does this goal cost me?

If we return to our Young Susan basketball player analogy, it becomes clear what I exchanged. When I was a sophomore my boyfriend was so mad that I missed him playing baseball in semi-state playoffs that he cheated on me with one of my biggest rivals from our school’s biggest opponent, then dumped me while I was playing in a national tournament. Then my senior year I skipped all graduation parties and many friends’ open houses to travel to tournaments out of state.

It may not seem like a big deal now, but to a teenage girl it was devastating.

The parallel for me now is what am I not doing so that I can read for the sake of raising my goal. And this one was the clencher for me. When I read I am in the zone. Checked. Out. I am in Three Pines. Or playing Quidditch. I am right there with the gone girl on the train in the window.

What I am not doing is:

Connecting with my people
Crafting something of my own
Writing words that might resonate with you
Engaging with nature to restore my own soul

I have decided I am not ok with this trade. While it may seem productive – read more, nature will always be there! It is not sustainably productive. I cannot maintain this every increasing number while abandoning other interests and passions.

For a couple years I have needed to check out and numb to difficulties to get through a rough patch, but I feel myself coming out of that and into a new season. Reading is not going to go away AT ALL. Now reading will find its right sized place for this new phase of life for me. It is going to get to become a hobby that is sustainably productive instead of a competitive obsession that I have to hard charge forward with, consequences of what I am leaving behind be damned!

Do you have a goal that just feels tiring to keep expanding on? What would it feel like to maintain, reduce, or even abandoned it? What if you deemed yourself good enough – just as you are today?

By Susan Sanders|2020-06-17T17:16:05-04:00December 30th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Morning Routines – Learn from My Top Four Mistakes

One of the questions I get most often is about morning routines. Which makes sense because you can’t swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting someone promoting their morning routine. Side note: Yes, this is the WORST idiom in English, yet I cannot stop myself from using it more often that I would like to admit.

Anyway, this question about morning routines also makes sense in ways that are less harmful to felines. In society these days the pace of our mornings is unsustainable and research shows that so goes our morning, goes our whole day. If you have an unsustainable pace of morning, this leads to an overall unsustainable you.

I want to share my early morning routine misses with you with the intention of helping you avoid these landmines. In the following weeks, we will take a closer look at each of the mistakes I made and how I corrected them to be a sustainable part of my day. But first we need to look at what went wrong.

Lessons Learned from My Morning Routine Attempts

1 – Our morning routine

In my head my morning routine morphed into OUR MORNING ROUTINE. For example, part of my morning routine was to make the bed. I ran into issues when it was time to do this part of my routine (see #4 about rigidity), and Bixby was still in the bed. My solution was to make a rule: Last one out makes the bed.

This happened about three times. Over the course of a year. And man was I GRUMPY about that success rate. Did he not understand the rule? Did he not hear me? Turns out part of the problem is that he scores as a Rebel within Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies framework, but generally he just didn’t care about the made bed.

He also saw the making of the bed as my thing. When I get out of a bed, it looks like a tornado hit it. When he gets out of the bed, he can grab the corner of the covers with 2 fingers and daintily fold the cover back into place. He considered the whole thing my problem.

unmade bed — I bet you can figure out which side is mine!

2 – Sweeping changes

When I first started working out my morning routine, I made all kinds of declarations and moratoriums. I made a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish in my Dream Morning. Then I time boxed it, clearly not having read my own post about what a mistake that was going to be. Then I completed the whole list exactly once. Ever.

3 – Everything is a priority

One of the main reasons I only completed the whole routine once is that is was LONG – like almost two hours. Mama ain’t got time for that! I gotta go bring home the bacon! The problem is that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. The trap I fell into is that I approached building my morning routine with Internet’s advice to “Think about your ideal day because that is what you are creating.” While I do enjoy my day job, going to an office every day for half of my waking hours in not my ideal day. I needed to consider my priorities in today’s schedule, not my post lottery winning schedule.

4 – Rigidity

This is a bit of a corollary to number three. Even when I did have a somewhat pared down idea of what was important, if my day did not align perfectly I did not do ANY of my morning routine. We talked about this some in when we talked about babies and bath water.

But even when I had time to complete parts of my morning routine, I got irritated when they could not go in the order they were “supposed to.”

Whew – this seems like morning routines are not sustainable at all! No, just the way I was trying to do it was not. In a future post we are going to talk about a sustainably productive morning routine, but I want you to think about what IS NOT working first. It seems painful and frustrating, but that is when we make changes. When pain becomes great enough, we change our behaviors.

Can you relate? What seems to be going wrong in your morning routine? Where are your morning routine pain points? Be sure to subscribe to keep getting posts sent to your email so you don’t miss out on learning to build a sustainably productive morning routine.

By Susan Sanders|2019-12-12T10:32:14-05:00December 12th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Two Lies and a Truth – My Unsustainably Productive Life

I cried the whole way to work. And back. An hour and fifty minutes round trip, most of which was spent at hurtling down the highway at 75 miles per hour with tear-blurred vision.This was when I decided life as I knew it was no longer productive nor sustainable.

Physically Unsustainable

Each day I worked around 10 hours in the office, commuted close to 2 hours, and went to night school for my MBA. To exercise I had to get up at 4:00 am, so I did. To spend time with my boyfriend I had to see him after 9:00 pm, so I did. Needless to say I was exhausted. My stomach was in knots, my head hurt, and I often cried before, during or after work.

Mentally Unsustainable

Because I was stretched so thin, I was hurrying and making mistakes. And let me tell you – the only thing a perfectionist hates more than making mistakes is other people noticing them. So I spent an increasing amount of time checking and rechecking work. Mine and my direct reports. I micromanaged people into the ground and was a nightmare to work for. Honestly, a nightmare to be around in general. I was crabby and short tempered. I was moody and unpredictable.

Environmentally Unsustainable

Another byproduct of this season of my life was my house was a dump. Not hoarder level, but I was not comfortable in my own space. A giant pile of papers needed to be filed. I had clothes to iron and put away. I never ate at home because I was always too rushed to spend time to wash dishes. My garden was weedier than I preferred, and my yard was taller than both my neighbors and I preferred. I could not catch up. And this cluttered environment prevented me from seeing my home as my refuge.

Life was not sustainable, but my belief system was preventing me from making changes. I wonder if that might be where you find yourself right now too. So we are going to play a game. Let’s play Two Lies and a Truth. But with a twist – I am going to tell you upfront which is which.

Lie 1: I should be able to do this.

Should, schmould. Several years ago my sister and I tried to make a list of all the “shoulds” we hear on a regular basis: 20 minutes of cardio, 10 minutes of stretching, 5 minute face cleansing routine, 20 minutes of reading to your kids, 1 hour of personal time, 1 hour of couple time, 8 hours of sleep… The list went ON AND ON – it totaled about 42 hours per day of shoulds. Friend, I would like to suggest you reconsider the things you do just because you think you should. What in your life are you doing out of obligation or expectation? Stop “shoulding” on yourself and make space for the things that sustain you.

Lie 2: I am a horrible person because I cannot keep up

Once you start realizing how much you do out of obligation, please do not berate yourself. You are not a terrible person because you are not keeping up with expectations. Similarly, you are not a terrible person because you are not keeping up with other people. Do not judge your insides by other people’s outsides. For example, baking is not my jam so if there is a baked goods request for my kids, I am the add-it-to-the-online-grocery-order Mom.

I want to spend my time crafting or biking or reading – activities that bring me joy. Newsflash: our worth as a person is not measured by baked goods. But if baking is your thing – you do you! I have a friend who enjoys cooking and makes extraordinary baked creations that belong on The Great British Baking Show. That is her thing, she does not do it to show up the other moms (as she has been accused of). Let’s stay in our own lane and focus on what brings us each joy.

Truth: You can’t un-know this

Have you ever been shopping for a red sweater, then all of a sudden all you see in ads or crowds are red sweaters? Once something comes into your consciousness, you cannot be unaware of it. I invite you to consider that you may start to become more aware of your limits after reading this post. You are allowed to have limits and not feel ashamed of them. I invite you to become aware of what is soothing you and what feels like an itchy sweater on a hot day.

The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.
M. Scott Peck

Celebrate that awareness. You don’t even need to act on anything, just be aware. What people, places and things feel unsustainable for you in this season of life? What seems to put a little wind in your sails? And know this – it is just a season. This too shall pass. Things will look different in a year or so and you can make other choices then. Consider today and what feels like it is draining your energy.

If this resonates with you, but you are not sure what in your life is causing these feelings I want to help you. I have created The Sustainability Checklist to help you identify patterns in your own choices that might help you find clarity on what is and is not sustainable. Let’s work together to help create a Sustainable You!

By Susan Sanders|2020-06-19T16:57:19-04:00December 4th, 2019|Environmental Surroundings, Health & Fitness, Mental Well-being|0 Comments

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