Life is Work

And Americans are lazy.

Or maybe just people, in general, are lazy?!

At the very least, I’m lazy, but I’m also pretty sure I’m not the only one!

My mom did her best raising me alone, and I’m so grateful for all that she taught me, but I still grew up lazy. I didn’t learn work ethic. I didn’t learn that life itself is work. Rather, I waited for everything to come to me. I never cleaned my room because I was happy to live in my own mess, I didn’t have to put in much effort to excel at school, and I didn’t even bother trying to get in shape though I was overweight from a pretty young age. In other words, I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, and played all the time, and never did anything that required effort unless I was literally forced into it.

EVERYTHING is Work

1. Cleaning
   Now I’m grown, and I’m no longer happy with messes, but I am often too lazy to do anything about them because – well, because it’s work! And it’s not just a little work here and there, like when I was little and cleaned my room once every few month (yes, I know, lucky me – you probably had to clean every week). No, it’s not just a now-and-then thing; it’s a daily effort.
2. Exercise
   I never exercised as a kid, despite being unhappy with my body. I never played sports, either. I just played with my friends once in a while and basically did what I wanted to do without worrying about whether I was active or not. And I didn’t know – that is, it never even occurred to me – that such a lifestyle wouldn’t be sufficient for my body. Even as a teenager, when I started to realize that some people may need to exercise to control their weight, I thought it was a last-ditch attempt, only to be really considered if dieting alone couldn’t fix the problem. I really thought I could continue my whole life this way! But God didn’t make our bodies to sit around inside all day on the computer! I believe He made our bodies to work and to play, and as our work becomes less and less active, we have to make an effort to exercise in order to stay healthy. Because it’s GOOD for us. It’s not a punishment, as I once believed. It’s not something you do because you have to in order to control your weight. It’s just a good, healthy habit that happens to require daily effort.
3. Eating
   When I was younger, food was very much an instant gratification kind of thing. My single, working mother rarely had time to prepare a meal from scratch, so we ate a lot of frozen pizza, instant macaroni and cheese, and other such things. Now, I’m ashamed of all the junk I’ve put into my body for over 20 years, but at the same time I realize that in order to eat well, I have to intentionally work at it! And not just once in a while, but every day! I have to think about what I’m eating as well and when and why I’m eating it, and I have to take time out of my day to prepare it.
4. Relationships
   Even my relationships take work! Who would have thought? In grade school, if you’re in my generation, you called your friends when you were bored, and you were allowed to talk, to maybe one of you would visit the other’s house – simple. The only potential problem was having one or the other set of parents say no for some reason. But as a grown-up, it’s not so simple any more. Friends all come with their own problems, and to have a good relationship, you can’t just call them when you’re bored; you have to be there for them when they need you. And sometimes you have to learn how to love people in spite of their flaws, or in spite of distance, or in spite of lack of time to “hang out!”

And the same is true for a relationship with God! As a child, my mom prayed with me before bed and before meals, and I went to Sunday school. As a teenager, I started to understand that it required more than that, and I started to try harder, but I still thought that it would be easy. Only now am I beginning to understand how much daily work has to be put into that relationship to keep it really strong.

Skills, and the maintaining of them, is the same way. Oy with the work already!

Teaching Work Ethic

How will I (eventually) teach my kids about work? How will I get them to understand good work ethic?

• Well, I guess the first step is learning it myself. And I’m trying to – really, I am. For the past few months, I’ve been working on building one good habit each month so that I learn to do the things that are good for me.
• And I think another part of it will be building good habits in them when they’re young. (I always thought that if I’d been made to play a sport when I was a kid, I would have had a much easier time learning a habit of daily exercise.) I can see it now… my kids will probably hate me for making them do things, and I will wish they could see how I’m doing it for their own good… and it’s probably going to be way harder than I anticipate. But hopefully I can help a little by teaching them healthy habits.
• Finally, if I can teach them what my friends and I learned in our study of Ecclesiastes last year. All is vanity. Too much work is no good, but neither is too much play. BALANCE is important. So, have one hand of toil and one hand of rest. I think I can help to teach my kids a healthy work ethic by helping them rest and enjoy play- and rest-time.

Just some thoughts…

Think about what goes into your body. Think about exercise. Think about your relationships. By not allowing play time to be all day, every day, it becomes more precious to me when I do get that time, and my quiet times are more able to fuel me for the work I know I must do for the rest of the time.

And the best part is that work doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Work is rewarding! And when I’m feeling lazy, that’s exactly what I try to remind myself of! lol

(An example of rewarding work: Me with my first-ever homemade bread!)

When I have to go a few weeks without seeing friends, I sometimes chuckle on the inside when they explain on our next meeting how much they’ve missed me, while I feel that hardly any time at all has passed. What’s the big deal? Next to having to wait a year to see my other half again, to feel him and look into his eyes… Well, let’s just say it makes all these little gaps of weeks and months feel like nothing.

I can’t really imagine what it is like for God to be outside of time, but if the (global) church is his passion, his love, his other half, so to speak, and he is separated from her for… well, a long, long time… Well, I can imagine that feeling now. She fell away from him, and he won’t be reunited with her until basically the end of this world. Like a year’s separation for me, and how impossible and horrible it seems to a normal married couple, God’s separated from his bride the church for… thousands, if not millions of years. How insignificant must other, shorter increments of time feel to Him? To me it gives new meaning to the verse that says a thousand years is like a day to the Lord.

I’m trying to apply this understanding to my prayer life. See, I’ve been getting frustrated with God for not answering my prayers. Sometimes I pray specifically for the same things for weeks on end, and sometimes I begin to lose hope that he’ll ever hear me and answer. But I have felt like he’s saying to me, “Just because I haven’t answered in a week, you think I’m not listening at all? Trust me! I hear you, and I will answer you. I will meet all your needs. Have patience.”

Sometimes, I’m afraid time won’t ever slow back down. If weeks feel like no time at all, will it still feel like nothing when Hubby is home for two weeks of R&R? Will I have trouble soaking in his presence and enjoying our time together? Will my life speed by too quickly, with this perception of time? I have hope because I’ve known women who have been through deployments with their husbands before who still ached terribly at their husbands’ absence for a week or two of training. So things must eventually return to normal. But hopefully when that happens, I’ll still be able to remember the lesson I learned. Mostly – the patience.

If these things don’t happen, I have nothing/no one to blame. There is no excuse for not taking a few minutes each day to read a chapter from the Bible. There is no reason I have to let other things – things I don’t even care about – come before things I really want. I let it happen, and I have no excuse for it.

Am I not perfectly capable of choosing to do one thing instead of another? I am. I believe in myself at least that much.

There’s no reason for you or me to not do the things we want to do. I want to be a writer, so I choose to write. Just write! I don’t want to be the kind of person who sleeps till 10-11 every day; I do it because it’s easy. But I can choose to get up earlier, so I will!

Get More Out of Life

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. I guess it’s something along the lines of this:

If you want good things in life, stop   and think for a moment about whether these are things you’re capable of. Singing, dancing, running, music-ing, writing, cooking, reading, sewing… Is there really anything stopping you from doing those things? Don’t you have a spare 10 minutes? Do the things you want to do when you can… I think that’s how we’ll get more out of life. Not really a profound thought, but oh well. It’s what I was thinking. Now you know.

Starting Off

It wasn’t what I expected. The way my upline manager met with me, in my home and face-to-face, but still with an impersonal feeling, left me kinda feeling like… huh? What just happened? I had expected simply to meet with her and discuss what would be involved in the process, since she had pushed me to have that meeting, but I ended up going ahead and signing up that day. After my initial appointment with my upline Doris, I spoke to her only one other time, when she called a week later to check in on me.

There are good and bad upline managers. Some help you get going, maybe help you throw your first Avon party and get you started with some supplies. Some, on the other hand, do the bare minimum, sign you up with your initial “kit,” and expect you do go at it. Mine was one from the latter group, and so I was really on my own from the beginning.

Learning the Ropes

To supplement my lack of instruction from my upline, I turned to online resources. Avon supplies a very nice training section of their website which any representative can access. The Beauty of Knowledge courses go over how to make sales, how to enter your orders, understanding how much you’ll make off of your sales, et cetera. It was very useful. I also made use of the official forums to ask more experienced representatives for advice.

I knew I would run into one problem with selling Avon: I’m not an outgoing, pushy, make-the-sale type of person. I’d learned to be firm when talking to insurance companies at my former job, but talking to potential customers is a whole different kind of firmness. Still, I was ready to try, and so I started going out with my few brochures and doing what I could.

The first couple campaigns went well enough that I decided to start ordering more brochures. After all, I was mostly breaking even, so it was worth the risk to try and actually make some profit. Instead of 10 brochures per campaign, I pushed it to 20 and then to 30. Things got fairly busy at that point – on my end but not with incoming orders. I still received maybe two or three orders each campaign, but I was keeping myself busy with running around trying to take brochures to various places (and trying to share one car with Hubby).

Doing the Work

After a few more campaigns of this workload, I began to feel worn out. I seemed to only have time for Avon and blogging, and I wasn’t happy with it. I was stressed, feeling pressured to do more, and yet I was disappointed that I was not seeing any positive results from how hard I was already working. Around this time, also, my husband was having to spend weeks at a time doing field training, and I was getting lonely and somewhat depressed. I started to think that Avon just wasn’t for me.

Rather than giving up, I decided to cut back on what I was doing. I lowered my brochure orders to 20, then 10, and my orders stayed around 1-2 per campaign. The truth is, for the last month or two, I haven’t been trying very hard at all. There are so many things important to me, so many things to spend time on, and this just hasn’t been one of them.

I’ve enjoyed selling Avon, though. I really have. I got to meet new people and try something new, something I never pictured myself doing. I got to try Avon products for the first time for less than I would have paid if I hadn’t been a representative. And I like them a lot! I got to experience the fun of running my own business and organizing my time and my supplies the way I wanted them. And I really liked being able to provide people with products they love. That was the best part.

But I’m feeling now like I’d rather use my time and energy on writing, drawing, housekeeping, reading, and studying. And I’m starting to feel like my organizational skills would be of more use in running my website and my home. I guess I just feel like I’ve given it a good run, but it’s just not my thing. And, besides, I’m losing money at it.

Moving Forward

So here’s my plan. Unfortunately, it starts with dropping the online store and my status as an E-representative. The cost of maintaining that is not worth the one-per-month order that it gets. I apologize for the inconvenience to those of you who have been using my online store from time to time.

The second part of my plan is to stop ordering brochures. I have to pay for them, and I have to spend the time handing them out when I get them, and it’s just not something that I can keep up with financially or otherwise.

The third part of my plan, however, is to maintain my status as an Avon Independent Sales Representative, at least for now. Customers will still be able to email or call me with their orders, and I will still be able to submit orders and get products to deliver to them. They just won’t get their own personal copy of the current brochure with their order.

Why doesn’t budgeting time work like budgeting money? If I know I have so much money coming in every month, I can put each dollar in a category, even if one category is “extra” or “spending money.” But with my time-chart, no matter what, I never seem to have enough time. By my estimation, I need about 35-40 hours a day to live comfortably. But I can’t just go adding hours to the day, can I? I mean, maybe if I change my sleep schedule up. It would be pretty difficult, though.

I think it’s good to have ambitions and goals for using your time that you might not actually reach, but it’s hard to be content with not reaching your goals! The truth is there just aren’t enough hours in the day. So what should we do?

Remember to Be

Let me remind both you and me again of the Importance of Being. We need to savor life, not rush through it. Be happy about each thing you accomplish, and think about the benefits of having done that.

So far today, I’ve:

1. …made the bed. This is a new habit I’m trying to develop. It feels really good to walk into our bedroom throughout the day and see a neat bed. It is complete with the decorative pillows that came with our set of bedding (a wedding present from some lovely friends of ours – who I am reminded of when I look at the bedding, all neatly made). It also makes me feel like Hubby will be better able to see my effort to take care of the house, and it is nice to pull back the covers on a neat bed at night and slip between unwrinkled sheets.

2. …started another load of laundry. We aren’t going to run out of clean undergarments, tshirts, or uniforms today. And now that I’m doing a little bit of laundry every day (almost), it’s a lot more manageable to keep up with the chore.

3. …loaded the dishwasher. The sink is empty, available for washing things, filling glasses with water, or whatever else we need. No stinky, dirty dishes in our noses.

4. …wrote 750 words. I’m on a 13-day streak, and I feel pride in that accomplishment. My thoughts also feel more organized.

Don’t Budget Every Minute

Don’t be like me and try to account for 1440 minutes each day. Even if you could squeeze everything you want to do into those 24 hours in theory, you very likely wouldn’t be able to do it in actuality. It takes time to move from one task to the next. Things can happen that you didn’t include in your plan, such as phone calls or spontaneous conversations. You just can’t account for what might happen. You can’t plan it in. And unlike with finances, you can’t keep a separate emergency fund of a few extra hours in case something comes up. It doesn’t work that way.

We should enjoy a slower pace, in my opinion.

My advice is to alternate which tasks are important on which days. For instance, I would like to have time to write on my novel, draw, crochet, deep-clean my house, and hang out with my friends every day. But since I know I’d run out of time trying to do all of it on one day, I can choose to spend Monday’s free hours on writing, Tuesday’s free hours on art, etc. If you’re like me and trying to figure out how to fit it all in, that’s the only advice I have.

Any Advice is Welcome

Time Management has never been one of my strong points. I’d like for it to be, but usually I… well, fail. I fail.

When I was younger, my time was always eaten by the TV. Then it was eaten by AIM and MSN Messenger. Now it’s eaten by Facebook, reading blogs, and reading novels. Is that ok? I don’t know. Don’t I look back fondly on those times I spent hours and hours on AIM? At least it’s a good memory.

What about you? Do you have any advice for managing time? Techniques? Thoughts? Or do you just sympathize with me? Leave a comment and let me know!

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Our days are often so consumed with doing, it can be easy to miss the importance of being.

What Do You Need to Do?

Today, I need to write at least two blogs, edit three videos, wash, dry, and put away two loads of laundry, wash the counters, sweep the floor, plant flowers, and get hamburger patties ready for grilling at the park. And that list doesn’t include the other things that I’d want to do if I thought I’d have the time. What do you need to do today?

Why?

An Attitude Thing

I’m not suggesting that you don’t have legitimate reasons for all the things you need to do. I certainly have reasons behind everything on my list.

But similar to Zen Habits’ suggestion to find beauty in doing what you’re doing without worrying about distractions, I would suggest that one’s attitude can determine whether you’re constantly doing, almost like never-ending busy work, or whether you’re enjoying being – living life.

“Stop to our routines that aren’t working. To the way we’ve “always” done things. To the way people expect us to do things…
…Be still in a busy, busy world. Eat slow food instead of fast food. Make time for things that truly matter and eliminate (or minimize) the rest.”
– Melissa, Peace & Projects

I think we might find more satisfaction in our lives if we stop trying to get through our to-do lists so quickly. My chores aren’t taking away time from my life. They are part of my life. Maybe one day, when my body is too worn out to go outside and garden or walk to the laundry room, I will be able to spend all day reading, playing games, and writing novels. But that won’t be a fuller life than what I already have, right now.

Today I need to…

• Enjoy taking care of the house I’m grateful to have so that my husband and I will enjoy a clean, fresh environment – which will make it much easier to de-stress after the day’s work.
• Savor the flavors in my foods, and try to make tasty hamburger patties that will impress my hubby.
• Write blogs, not because I have to, but because it’s something I chose to commit to, something I enjoy, and something I get fulfillment from doing.
• Edit videos and post vlogs to YouTube so that my family out of town can feel a little closer to us, among many other reasons.
• Breathe deeply and thank God continually for life, friends, food, and all the little things. Oh, and for the fact that today, at least, I won’t be bored.

I keep lists everywhere. To-do lists, shopping lists, pro-con lists, and the list of lists goes on!

The Pros and Cons of Listing

Let me list you the pros of list-making.

• Organizing Thoughts – Use lists to help you organize your thoughts. This is best done with a Pro-Con list, in which you name the positive and negative aspects of a certain subject. One of my good friends once found a (private!!) pro-con list I had made upon first meeting a boy in school. I was attracted, but I didn’t know if I’d want to date him. So I made a list. By the way, that was about ten years ago, and now we’re married. No pressure or anything, I know not all lists can be as productive as mine.
• Memory – Use lists to help you remember things you might otherwise forget. Is your cupboard looking bare? Shopping lists for the store fall in this category. I even have lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see. I started a list of movies I’ve already seen, but I didn’t keep up with that one very well. I guess I’ll just have to accept that I may not remember all of the movies I’ve seen.
• Productivity – Use lists to make sure you (or your spouse) get things done! This is one of my favorite uses for lists, as I hate remembering weeks later that I meant to do something, only to realize that it never got done because I had forgotten about it. I use to-do lists all the time.

The cons?

• If you lose your list, you might be out of luck, especially if your memory is as poor as mine.
• You will find that you have a lot of random scrap-paper-lists to throw away, and they will pop up when least expected.
• You can still forget to put something on your list to begin with, in which case your memory won’t be very helped.

How To-Do It

You can do it however you want! I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way. I’ll go over my favorites, though, just for fun.

• I keep a big and little to-do list. I keep a big list on my fridge for both my husband and myself, so that we remember the big things that need to be done. I change it out about once a month, though often there are things still on the list that must be transferred to the next list. The big list contains things such as fixing the dryer, when the cat is next due for his shots, registering the car, etc. I also try to keep a little to-do list just for myself, and I make a new one every day, trying to list only things I know I can accomplish within that one day. The little list says things like write blogs, call customers, change cat litter, do dishes.
• I keep digital notes when it comes to notes serving my memory. To-do lists I keep on paper so that I can cross out items (this is more fulfilling to me than simply deleting it from my digital list), but lists of other types are safely stored in my documents on the computer. Easy to modify and organize!
• I keep lists on sticky notes. If I don’t do digital lists, I use sticky notes. They get lost less frequently! You can put them on mirrors, computer monitors, bedside tables, foreheads… And you can always fold over the sticky part later if it’s bothering you.

Do You Do Lists?

This has been a kind of goofy post, but no less legit. What do you think about lists? Do you use than as much as Rory and I? Leave your list in the comments!