No kids means I must be so productive, right?

So, so wrong...

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

I don’t have kids, so I have eons of time to do exactly what I want, when I want. And, as I have so much time available, I get loads done. Right?

Well, not quite.

On Friday, a day when I’m usually my own boss, I needed to approach people to interview for an article, do some exercise, go food shopping, prepare dinner for a friend, write this, return an eBay purchase and pack for a night out in Brighton.

(Oh, and write some goals for the year and work out how I’m going to achieve them in 10 months. Maybe that’s more of a job for Sunday.)

And as I write, it’s 5.13pm on Friday and I haven’t got it all done yet. Grrr.

Even the daffodils and tulip shoots in my garden are a reminder of what I haven’t done.

I planted them last autumn to bring me joy right now, but looking at them reminds me that since they started growing several weeks ago, I haven’t moved the two piles of leaves I swept last year, shifted the hydrangea at the back of the garden into a pot at the front so I can give it more love or planted an acer that’s been sitting in a pot for about two years.

Neither have I made room to plant out a second peony from a friend or pruned the clematis (when does one prune a clematis, anyway?).

How do you fit in seeing friends and family, exercise, work, domestic stuff (Batch cooking! Gardening! Glueing back a bit of wood that half fell off the top of my blinds three years ago!) and brain-expanding things like doing a creative writing course?

And, why do I still have a pile of birthday cards on the chest of drawers in my bedroom? My birthday was in September!

As I’m self-employed, I also need to ‘reach out’ to contacts for work, persuade people to have coffee with me, make sure my LinkedIn profile is sparkling (it needs a polish) and generally not hide behind a bushel.

It’s bad enough to be unproductive, but on top of that I then have a go at myself for it – a double whammy. (But it’s not just me - I didn’t do the homework for my writing class last week and felt guilty when I announced it to the group, but then our teacher said no-one had done it.)

I had been having a go at myself for this lack of productivity, until I came across a theory from a clever man called Cyril Northcote Parkinson, who in 1955 identified a ‘rule’ that ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,’ as the BBC explained in a 2020 article.

I am very much hoping that ‘work’ includes leaving a box in my bedroom unpacked for the 6.5 years I have lived in my flat, because the time available for completing that task is basically until I move out, and I have no intention of doing that until HS2 is built (a controversial high-speed railway that will stop at a station near me but has been beset with problems), so that could mean infinity… or beyond.

Recently, I also heard a talk from writing productivity gurus Bec and Chris from the

Breakthroughs & Blocks

newsletter, who said that when someone comes to them saying they’ve cleared a whole month/several months of their diary for a book project they sometimes suggest that’s not the best way to get started, because writing needs time constraints.

I need time constraints. Last month I mentioned I was going to try the Pomodoro technique of doing something for 25-minute ‘sprints,’ then having a short break and repeating.

Well, I obviously forgot about that sort-of resolution and have been relying on what I’ll call the Spaghetti technique of starting multiple tasks at once, never finishing anything and hoping no-one notices because there’s such a delicious sauce involved. Or something.

What I have learned in all of this pontification is that there is room for self-acceptance here. If I write a short newsletter about being lazy one week then that’s OK. And if I don’t do my writing homework another time that’s all right too. The whole point of The Honesty Box is to try to be, er, honest about the bits of life that do and don’t work.

But I am going to try Pomodoro, and I have also got myself a mentor for the first time in my life, hence the need to write down some goals for the year (thank you very much to Women in Journalism for allowing a 46 year-old to take part in their mentoring scheme).

Are you good at getting shit done, whether you have offspring or not?