Extraordinarily Ordinary, pt. 5
Extraordinarily Ordinary, pt. 5
The epic tale wraps up! ...or does it????
Welcome to All the Tasks Fit to Print, my weekly newsletter on all issues productivity-related for authors (and other solopreneurs)!
Welcome back to my backstory! This is the final part of a five-part series explaining how I got where I am today as an author and productivity expert. The rocky road continues…
When we left off in part four (insert dramatic intro montage!) I had applied project management principles to start the long, slow slog of post-breakdown recovery and recuperation. I got divorced, started grad school, and published a novel! I was on my way!
…sorta. While my amazing progress was undeniable, forces were at work that put some of my goals into question. I was at the proverbial fork in the road.
…making a choice, far from representing some kind of defeat, becomes an affirmation. ~ Oliver Burkeman
In his book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, journalist Oliver Burkeman goes into a philosophical deep dive about what it means to choose one option over another, whether on a menu at dinner or on a partner to start a family with. Making a choice of one thing leaves others on the table, and sometimes that decision is very, very difficult.
One of the reasons I bring this up is because I often deal with clients who really are trying to “do it all.” Sometimes they get away with doing most of “all” at least for a while, but often it is just a way for them to flagellate themselves over their perceived shortcomings right up until everything falls apart.
Making the choices of who we are and what we do is a large part of Personal Projects Management, to be honest.
As Seth Godin says, “People like us do things like this.” That requires committing to “things like this,” even if that choice leaves other very good options unrealized. Whether those are personal decisions like how to raise your child or business decisions such as how to expand your services, committing to the path is often an emotionally fraught course of action. Using the principles of project management might help you understand the bigger picture of what that decision is requiring of you, but that doesn’t mean the choice will be easy to make.
The most infamous fork in the road I faced was in the spring of 2012, when I was suffering from whooping cough.
Pertussis is a dangerous bacteria that infects the respiratory track, and in the era before vaccines was a significant cause of childhood deaths (even now, 1 in 100 children who catch it die). In adults like me, a severe case can lead to paroxysms (rapid, violent coughing fits) which in turn can lead to broken ribs or, in my case, an injured spine. The disease is often called “the three month cough” but in my experience was so much more than that.
My symptoms hit at the start of January, right at the beginning art of my final semester of grad school, and I injured my back on the 17th of that month. It was a Tuesday. I’ll never forget that day because it was the most excruciating pain I’ve ever felt in my entire life, requiring nearly three days before I was able to even walk around the house instead of crawling.
Unfortunately, it was just the painful start of my whooping cough ordeal. The impact it took on my life was that I was severely sick and in pain for six weeks, followed by six whole months of incremental recovery before I returned to a status of being somewhat healthy. Even then, deep breathing remained difficult and my back injury persisted, and as I mentioned earlier, I walked with a cane for several years after that.
A significant difficulty of living with whooping cough (aside from being bedridden with violent coughing fits) is that when you can’t breathe, you can’t think. Brains need oxygen and when that is difficult to supply adequately, cognition is severely impacted. I could tell that my brain was not functioning even close to 100%, more like 60% on better days.
Which leads us back to the choice I had to make in the spring of 2012:
Finish grad school with a master’s degree and a slightly dinged GPA;
Finish writing the book my publisher was waiting on.
Those look like fairly straight-forward decisions, but the repercussions were dire.
“Drop out of grad school with one semester to go” seems like the obviously bad choice, after all, I was so close to graduating! Then I would have a master’s degree and be employable! …well, maybe? I had no jobs lined up and waiting, though, and I knew the jobs I wanted most were hard to get. I figured focusing on graduating was committing to one to two years of unemployment/underemployment.
“Put off writing the book” seems like the obvious best decision, after all, I could just go back and finish it later! …well, sure, but it would delay publication by a year or more, resulting in a critical hit to my career as an author which was just then starting to swing up. I had just gotten my first four-figure check from my publisher! The iron was hot! Nothing is guaranteed in publishing fiction, of course, but chances were good that I would earn enough off my next book to live on, a dream most authors never realize at all.
What seems obvious on the surface is not really that clear cut when laid out like that, is it? Of course my original plan was to do both. Prior to catching whooping cough, doing both was feasible and was, in fact, what I had been doing: writing and publishing novels while completing grad school (and also holding down a part-time job on campus).
That era was over, through no fault of my own. I simply could not do that anymore, definitely in the short term and maybe even forever.
A decision had to be made.
I stayed in school and got my degree.
My GPA really did take a hit, and I remained underemployed for over a year just as I had anticipated, but I got that degree and I eventually got a professional job in higher-ed. (Not the job I wanted but eh, that’s a story for a different time!) And, as I also anticipated, the resulting 2+ years without writing or publishing crashed my nascent career as an author.
Nowadays I go back and armchair quarterback that endlessly (I am only human!), but in the heat of the moment and with my mental faculties already impaired, I did the best I could.
My point is that an underacknowledged part of making a plan is making choices. Sometimes a plan we expected to follow for a while gets derailed by random life happenings, like mine did. Sometimes we get down the track a-ways and decide it is not the direction we want to go.
The reason I felt confident enough to make that (at the time) monumental decision was because of how I used project management principles to understand the cost, effects, and results of those decisions.
Project management is not about making a list of things to do, nor is it about cramming your calendar full of tasks to accomplish. The core benefit of project management is that it gives you a clear picture of what you are doing and how it needs to be done. No single to-do list can provide that insight. My choices, good and bad, got me to where I am today with all those accomplishments under my belt.
And yes, finally, I am rebooting my authorial dreams!
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. ~ Albert Einstein
I am a long way from that 2007 vision of my life as an endless, pointless, fetid swamp. I did not get where I am now because I used the perfect paper planner or the perfect task app or made the most beautiful bullet journal.
Honestly, the most important factor to my success has been the help and support I received from friends and family and, yes, my therapists!
But Personal Projects Management is a close second. Using that approach to my goals was critical to achieving as much as I have.
I want to stress that I am not unique or special when it comes to my time and talents. Like you, I’m good at some things and terrible at others. For instance, I had several advantages in my youth that played heavily in my later options (such has getting my B.A. degree in 1992), but I also suffer ongoing complex grief and PTSD due to my parents’ illnesses and early deaths which also directly led to me living at the poverty level for over a decade. I really enjoy public speaking but on the other hand I’m very introverted and prefer spending the majority of my time alone (and by “alone” I mean “me and my dog!”). I’ve done what I’ve done both because of and in spite of my background.
I am the first to admit that I’m not where I expected to be when I first decided to take charge of my life, but eh, I think that is not uncommon. Once you start a journey as big and all-encompassing as I have been on, it feels natural to shift the course around sometimes because of unexpected hurdles or changes in priorities. In my case it was a lot of both.
Yet, I have arrived at a point where I have a lot to live for. Not just dreams for the future, but also my dog, my friends, the stories I’m writing, my love of dancing, and last but not least: my job as The Task Mistress. It’s a business and comes with the usual stress and work of being a solopreneur, but I’m excited by the idea that I can provide people with the tools that helped me so much during so many hard times.