Time Management for People With Bad Boundaries

And even worse decision-making skills!

This morning, I was excited not to go to the beach.

That is not my normal response to a cancelled beach trip. I love the beach. I need to be rolled in sand and doused with salt water at least once a week in the summer to irrigate my pores and wash away my bitchiness. One of my favorite benefits of being a freelancer is that I can go to the beach whenever I want (within reason, but without asking for permission). Plus, during the pandemic, our local beach is one of the few places where we can relax outside our house, but far away from other people.

But this week, I had over-committed in every single area of my life and when I woke up and saw the overcast sky, I rejoiced.

“I think we should cancel the beach trip,” I told my husband. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”

“Really?” he said, frowning at the sky outside our dining room slider. “It looks like it might clear up.”

“No,” I said. “Too cloudy. Feels like rain. We can’t possibly go.”

My husband is a nurse and is always short on sleep, so it wasn’t too hard to convince him to go back to bed. Which meant that I got to look like a hero wife and still do three extra hours of work once he got up. Maybe more — about all I’m fit for after the beach is a beer and a nap, so really, I won a whole workday.

Lately, it seems like I never get a whole workday, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why. I can usually dissect any individual week and find the problem. This week, for example, I had to go to the MVA (Maryland’s DMV). Between the drive and the wait and the minor panic attack after being close to so many people in an enclosed space, I lost all of Monday.

But lately, I often look back at the week from the vantage point of Friday afternoon and truly have no idea what happened to my time. Sure, my husband worked three days, but that’s normal for his schedule. (Nurses often work three 12-hour days per week.) And OK, there was one day where maybe I decided to go for a drive with my Mom instead of buckling down to researching an article, but that was just one day.

Last week, my therapist suggested to me that maybe not was not the time to worry about productivity. “Maybe just listen to your body and rest if you need it,” she said.

I did not ask her, “BUT HOW WILL EVERYONE KNOW THAT I’M THE BEST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD?” That is because I know the answer I’d give myself, and it begins with, “You could always start by being 44 years old.”

Anyway, it turns out that pandemics are not a good time for getting stuff done, but they are a good time for examining your boundary issues and getting in a little practice drawing the line. I’ll let you know how that goes.

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