It’s Monday morning, day fourteen of 2019. After an initial wobble on day one, this New Year has been pretty good for me. I don’t mean to say that the past two weeks have been completely plain sailing, because there have been a couple of health-related blips, but I’ve been feeling pretty positive aside from them.

At least until I hit this past weekend.

After ten days of being on top of my game and managing to stay in super-productive-mode, I got up very late on Friday (the eleventh). It was to be date night for my husband and I and we’d pre-booked tickets to go see Collette at Queen’s Film Theatre. We were both pretty tired and, I’ll be honest, the fact that we’d already paid was the only thing that stopped us going back to bed immediately after breakfast.

We went, we saw, we enjoyed. Then we went for dinner at a Chinese buffet restaurant where I overate and ended up in very intense pain on the walk back to the bus. I think I triggered one of my food allergies but, regardless of the cause, I was left feeling pretty rough. I went home and slept. I slept for most of Saturday, and most of Sunday, though not restfully.

Last night, I took a look at my commitments for the rest of the month and freaked out a little. Here I was with so much to do and I’d wasted a whole weekend!

One of the things I’m continually trying to fine tune is how to pace myself; to not do too much and find a balance between home and work. I wanted to make a resolution about it for the year but found that A-I already had more than enough to try and achieve by the time I wrote all my necessary tasks out and B- I couldn’t quite put my need for balance into any better words than that.

‘Do more but not too much’ isn’t a very helpful goal to try and strive toward. It’s not specific. It’s not measurable. It didn’t make it onto the list. And yet here I am, striving for it anyway. Because as much as I’ve resisted following a routine for most of my life, I’ve come to a point where I’m finally willing to admit I might need one. 

It’s difficult to build a routine for myself when I don’t know how many spoons I will have in any one day, but I’m going to try anyway; see how it goes.

My plan as it currently stands is this — at least four days out of seven, I am going to:

• Get up before noon
• Complete any mindless household tasks that need doing — dishes, laundry, etc — while my mind gets going
• Have breakfast and catch up on YouTube videos
• Sit at my desk and complete at least a couple of hours of admin work for either myself or my voluntary positions (depending on what’s pressing)
• Break for lunch
• Get out of the house for a walk (no matter how brief)
• Spend another couple of hours at my desk either writing or editing
• Read and/or chill out in the evening

This all might be too much for me to commit to. I’m dubious before I even really begin but, like I said, we’ll see. I might surprise myself.

Edited to acknowledge that, yes, for most people the routine I have outlined seems fairly undemanding and completely do-able. I, however, am not most people. I take being a night owl to the extreme, often getting most of my computer-based work done in the hours post-midnight. I also have aforementioned health concerns and caring responsibilities. This is what I am trying to do, personally. It’s not a reflection of what I think anyone else should be doing. Just in case that wasn’t clear.