Breaking the spiral

We aren't travelling for Christmas, and my husband and I are barely celebrating any kind of December holiday this year, and yet I'm getting chased by the stress monster. (Resisting the temptation to digress and describe what a stress monster might look like if drawn by various animators.) It seems unfair. Wasn't one of the ideas behind staying home this year to foster a stress-free holiday atmosphere? But there I was last night -- we were out eating, and shopping for a new cell phone, and so forth, and I kept remembering that I had a deadline. I had a freelance article that was due Tuesday morning, and I didn't want to be up until midnight, so I essentially ruined the non-working part of the evening for myself. And was pretty much up until midnight anyway, being unhappy about that.

How do other people do this? I mean, there are tons of people in the world with a lot more to do than I have. I'm balancing a 40-plus hour week (plus long-ish commute) with freelance writing work, plus I like to spend time with my husband and occasionally play with the cat. We don't have kids, we don't have other big obligations. We have Holidailies this month, which is always more of a time suck than I remember, but still. It shouldn't be difficult to work a couple of movie reviews and feature articles into a schedule, should it? It was easier when I worked a 30-hour week, but I decided I would rather work a job I genuinely liked even if it took up more time.

I probably certainly need to be a better time manager, but I don't like too much regimentation in my scheduling. I hate to say, okay, at exactly 8 pm you have to start this article, and it has to be done at 10 pm. That's not so bad, actually. It might be smart to decide that I have downtime/fun time during this timeslot, and worktime during that one there. It would work okay during the week, at least. The difficulty is that on the weekends, there's still some crazy part of me that doesn't want to have to organize weekend time into little blocks, and insist that I write here and clean there, because I'm tired and I really want to curl up on the bed and read something. Or snuggle on the couch with my husband and the cat and watch Six Feet Under on DVD, except we finally finished the series and now we need a new TV series on DVD to work out way through.

I have a movie review due Thursday, and a review due Saturday for a DVD that I haven't yet watched, and another DVD review that was due earlier but the deadline slipped and I haven't had an answer yet on what to do about that one. And a food mini-review that no one seems to notice is a bit overdue, but I should probably finish soon. I keep telling myself that this is a manageable amount of work. But it feels like some part of my brain or my body is wired to start freaking out when I think about multiple impending freelance deadlines.

I used to work for someone who said it was possible to have a sort of addiction to adrenaline, and therefore to the sensation of being stressed out. You had to break yourself of the habit of feeling that way. I tried. I keep trying. I will write down a little list of things to do, and prioritize them, and maybe I'll include the consequences of being late, to demonstrate that the world will not crumble into pieces if I don't write about that restaurant this week.

Maybe I'll look at my Day-Timer (I'm still keeping my calendar mostly on paper, which is one reason why we were looking at new phones last night, including smart phones) and figure out how much time it takes to write about Sweeney Todd, and mark out that time, so the rest of the evening time this week can be for the seriously important stuff. Like figuring out whether we want to pick Weeds or House for our next TV to watch, and discussing what we will do for fun during my long winter-break holiday next week, and finding the cat's favorite mouse toy. And not worrying about other stuff while I enjoy these things.

Posted at December 18, 2007 08:44 AM