Just one thing

(I’m going through old drafts and publishing them. This one is from June 25.)

I’ve always had little things that are important to do but feel kind of scary or unpleasant so I just put off doing them. What I’m doing right now, and it’s surprisingly effective, is I set a timer for 1 pm every weekday (I’ve almost always eaten one meal by then; if I woke up late I might not have eaten lunch yet) and I pick one thing I’ve been putting off and I just do it. Sometimes it takes about two minutes; if it’s a longer thing I tend to cap it at half an hour because hey, I have CFS, I can’t do any one thing for that long. Also, I want to make it an overall pleasant experience.

My alarm is set to play a song I enjoy, so in theory (not always in practice) I just spend three minutes or so enjoying the song, maybe dancing around to it, before I start the Thing, and after I get to do something I enjoy, like play a game on my tablet. This lets me get pumped up enough that if the Thing is scary I sort of get a running start on it, and if I feel more stressed because there’s more things to be done than I feel relieved or accomplished, then at least I have something fun after. I’ve been pretty consistent about it in the few weeks I’ve been doing it. I give myself the weekends off. The alarm is helpful because that means I can’t just keep putting it off later and later, although occasionally I’ll notice it’s getting close to 1 pm and get started early. (October update: this is still on my daily schedule, and I still do it most weekdays. I don’t use the alarm any more, and I often don’t do the ramp-up song but I probably should. It’s particularly good for making phone calls.)

Actually it’s been so effective that I’ve been also setting an alarm for 2 pm to make sure I get my PT in. I think setting an alarm is most helpful for establishing a new or not fully established habit; I think it would be annoying to have a whole bunch of alarms throughout the day, but I can tolerate two (and it helps that they happen at the early end of my productive zone. I’ve pretty much given up on doing anything remotely challenging in the morning, although these days I am doing pranayama and chanting or singing first thing and a bit of journaling, which is pretty good given that I often don’t wake up before 10:30. Then my first rest is at about 11:30. If I get up earlier in theory I listen to a dharma-talk type podcast and color or knit or something. In practice I tend to just do random web-surfing. It’s a work in progress.

Today I cleared up some papers, magazines, old mail etc that had piled up on the breakfast table. It felt really good. I’m usually super disorganized when it comes to that sort of thing, I can have mail that hasn’t been looked at for months. So this is kind of a big deal for me. And it feels sustainable.

In other news, I have been getting a bigger “energy envelope” with the new medications, although I had a sort of regress a couple weeks ago that I think was due to stress. This past week I had two days, Wednesday and Friday, with an unusual amount of activity (walking, standing, social) and while there was some aftereffect, it wasn’t that bad. I don’t want to get too complacent about this but it does seem like I have more of a buffer against crashing/relapsing than I’m used to.

Of course, last year June was a really good month too and then things completely fell apart in the fall, so who knows.

I’ve also been keeping track of my to-do list in colorful mini post-it note form. Not very transportable, but since I make most of my “what do I do next?” decisions on the couch at home anyways, it’s working pretty well and it’s making me happy. The downside is sometimes I have more thoughts about what to do than I really have room for, so I may need to start having a sort of reserve area when I have more ideas about what I want to do than things I can reasonably focus on. (October update: I’m still doing that, and the pruning/delaying concept is still a problem. I should do a separate post about my health, mostly I’ve been keeping health updates in my personal journal.)