Reorganising

I have a small pile of posts in various stages of being written sitting in my drafts folder and a todo list for things I want to add to this website as long as my arm on top of a pile of other, much larger todo lists for everything else I want to do. This is, frankly, a problem. I am very burnt out. Ellie dying is just the straw that broke the camel’s back; I have been trending towards this for some time. I do not know how to relax, especially when I’m by myself. I had fallen into watching television so much with Ellie I think in part because it was one of the few ways that I did allow myself to relax.

I am trying to do better with this. To take time to relax on my own time. To watch stuff, to read, to play games again. I still have that feeling gnawing on me, though. That I should be doing something. Something useful, something productive. Again, I knew this was a problem even before Ellie died. My two podcasts have been on hiatus for a long time now because I couldn’t keep up with them, but I end up filling that space with more projects, or often just sitting at my computer cycling through Discord channels constantly making sure I am reading every update on every channel with my todo open in another monitor thinking that I should be working through stuff from it. Not relaxing, not getting anything done, but a secret, third, worse thing that serves only to slowly wear away at myself.

One of the things I am trying to do now is reorient myself so that sitting at my desktop is not my default state of being as it has been for a very long time. I work from home and I organise myself based around todo lists and notes that I keep as basic text files. I broadly like having my notes like this, I have ADHD and tend to forget things quickly unless I have them somewhere and text files are simple, easy to search and portable. Though I prefer to use my desktop they are also synced to my phone if needs be.

But I just fall into these habits that are not good for me. If I don’t know what to do I go to my desktop. I open Discord. I open my todo lists. I open my RSS reader. I bounce between things rapidly trying to work through my endless ideas while feeding myself constant little updates to quiet the ADHD ants in my brain and keep going.

I am trying to break these habits and reorganising my house a bit to make my living room more of an actual living room, as a place where I spend time and organise myself even when I do not have people over. Defining my space and using it to make my life easier and more pleasant is something I am very keen on. I have a lot of decorations around my house, many of which I made myself. I keep things, as much as I can, in a series of labelled drawers, because I will never be able to find things otherwise. I have gotten a lot of complements on my giant tower of labelled drawers. Things move between them and get reorganised and relabelled pretty frequently as I adjust things to myself.

My house is also quite small and I sought to optimise the space. I have downsized kitchen appliances, a kitchen table that folds down up to take up as much space as needed in a given moment, a sofa-bed that folds out to not take up much extra space in a narrow living room and a pull-down Murphy bed so that I can pack it up during the day and have extra space in my bedroom that is also my home office. At one point I bought a whiteboard that I intended to use for organising and mounted it on the outside of the Murphy bed cabinet, mostly because I thought that was a cool place for it. But this means I could not actually use the whiteboard when the bed was down and, quite frankly, I often do not have the spare spoons to pack away all the bedclothes and put the bed up.

I have now moved that whiteboard into my living room. Instead of rolling out of bed directly into my office chair to start my day I going downstairs, making breakfast and eating it at my dining table (and not at my desk!), taking my meds and trying to plan things out down there rather than on my computer. I have some daily checklists on there, I have my shopping list on there and add things to it as I notice I’ve run out, I plan out my highest priority todos.

This is still a work in progress and I am trying to figure out what does and doesn’t work for me. The checkboxes in that photo have already been whipped clean and rewritten somewhat. Maybe I will move away from this too and figure something else out. I still feel the pull of habit and dopamine sources pulling back to the computer constantly.

Outside of being “productive” I am also trying to get into the habit of watching TV on my actual TV again, or reading on my sofa rather than in bed (or more often, not at all). I should probably also get out of the house more too but I am pretty bad at that still (and there are a lack of third spaces around here that do not cost money to be in).

I need to slow down and recover. I hope this helps me with that. If not, we keep looking.