Today was a very windy, somewhat showery day. There have been wind warnings and 21,000 homes in our area have lost power. I had no need to leave the house and thought I’d spend the time on a variety of activities, many of them overdue. One thing about re-wirement is you have more time to be an observer of life’s ordinary moments. Here are my observations of a day of being housebound. Fair to say there were 6 or 7 things I thought I’d get done today. How could the day be summarized?
Everything takes longer than you think.
- A planned 30 minute DVD on exercise takes almost 60 minutes when I can’t get the DVD to play immediately. It may be a generational thing (i.e. I am, as some might say, getting long in the tooth). where remotes are not intuitive. I’d like to think it’s a technical problem, not of my making.
- A plan to fill out a form online, a PDF form, ends up taking a looooooong time when I wasn’t able to enter any characters into the form. Off I go to Google to search what the problem might be. Look at the tool bar, look at the settings, look at things I didn’t know existed and in the end I gave up. Convert it to text…or was it Word and muddle through it.
I fell far short of the things I thought I’d get done today. I did a number of things that I hadn’t planned as one thing lead to another. A day is sometimes like picking up a thread and following it around corners and down stairs and into nooks and crannies when you should have just left that thread untouched on the floor.
Now that I think of it, this day is not all that terribly different from days in the workplace. At the start of the day you have great plans to accomplish a number of things but by the end of the day you realize a number of things will be carried over to another time. The beauty of today is I didn’t have to go out in the howling wind to be inefficient. I could do that without stepping out our front door.
Do you have advice for me on how to be more productive? Some tips and tricks you use in your daily routine?
Barb's True Stories 
I try not to make lists but I’m lost without one – sooo just write on the list the things you get DONE and walla you have a productive day, (minus the guilt of jobs you would have put on the list and didn’t get to)!!!.
It’s a positive way of looking at things. I don’t take the step of writing what I did do that wasn’t on the list. I’ve give it a try. Keeping abreast of public affairs makes you an informed citizen so today i could mark down reading the Saturday Globe and Mail. I feel better already- thanks for the advice!
My biggest adjustment to “retirement life” was accepting that I don’t have to be as productive on a daily basis as I was before I retired! Daily routine aside (including 30-60 min of exercise of some sort), I only set myself ONE major task each day. By the time I finish pulling on all the associated threads you referred to, I generally end up completing several tasks that weren’t on the list for that day!!! I must confess that I too sometimes add the unscheduled things I completed to my “To Do List” just so I can cross them off and feel good about being so productive!! Don’t worry about being productive Barb – focus on being happy and content 🙂
Now that sounds like a very balanced approach to a day. Good ideas and you are so right on what our focus should be.