The Beauty of Routine

I’ve always thought routine was important. Even back when I was in grade school, during free time I’d be writing out my “Schedules of Time” trying to figure out how much time I had for reading and playing the in orange groves while still doing my homework and chores.

When I started working at home I wondered what would be the best routine for me. I’ve read many articles over the years about the best time of the day to do certain tasks. I also had to think about when my family would be home, when dinner needed to get into the oven, what kids I needed to run where.

Tame the Email Monster

I originally started the day by checking my email and seeing what needed to be done. The problem was I often got derailed and several hours later found that I hadn’t gotten to my to-do list for the day.

Then I read this article from Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/6-things-the-most-productive-people-do-every-day-2014-6 on things productive people do everyday. One was to NOT start your day by checking your email. I’ve been implementing this for a couple of weeks now and I actually find it very freeing. I do my “big rocks” (more on that later) then check my email, knowing that I have a time limit where I need to be moving on to my to-do list items.

So once I tamed my email I thought about what I needed to do each day to make me feel productive, even if I did get derailed.

Place the Big Rocks

I have six kids at home, teens and tweens. It’s summertime so they sleep late. I’m a morning person and I like quiet to do my reflective work. So I asked, “What are my most valuable skills? Where do I bring the most value to my clients?” and finally, “What do I need to do to create an environment that cultivates those things?”

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even have most of them. But I did decide that I needed to do my time in the Word, my exercises, and my creative time before noon. Those are my “big rocks” and I can get most of them done before the monsters—uh, kids—wake up.

Routine is Coffee’s Friend

The article above reinforced to me the value of routine. It frees your brain from having to think about what needs to be done next. It allows you to walk around like a zombie in the morning and still get something done before the coffee kicks in.

The best routine is one that works for you with your energy levels and life situation. There is no one-routine-fits-all I’m still experimenting with what makes sense for me, but I’m happy with what I’ve discovered so far.

Goals, God, and a Surprise Gift

Photo credit: Jennifer Vander Klipp

I’m a huge proponent of setting goals—short, medium, and long term. And revisiting them periodically to see how you’re progressing and to see if they still fit. Last year my life took a dramatic turn. I no longer was a single mom of two high-needs kids. I became a wife and added four stepchildren. Time to revisit my goals.

So while I’m working away at my company—Tandem Services—on a daily basis, I’m also thinking about my goals and how I want to go about achieving them. I have a lot of freedom in my day, what’s the best way to make use of that?

I like the acronym SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, reasonable, time-sensitive) for setting goals. A lot has been written about that and posted elsewhere so I’m not going to go into that. What I am going to do is reveal a secret I think many of us have.

I don’t know what my goals are right now.

Yep. I said it. No goals. I know there are some things I want to do (repaint most of the house, clean the garage, bake bread, yada yada yada), and I have projects for my company that need to be done, each with their own steps and goals. I had very specific reasons for wanting to leave my job and come home. But those are values, not goals.

For the past seven years my goal could have been boiled down to one thing: survival. I was a single mom. I had to jumpstart my career, keep food on the table, keep a roof over our heads. I battled Lyme disease, fought for my autistic son to get school services, schlepped my ailing daughter from doctor to specialist to the hospital trying desperately to discover why she was declining so quickly to the point of being unable to walk until we got a diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. I was in the Midwest; my family in California. I fought daily the push-pull tide of taking care of my kid and taking care of my job.

My daughter learned to walk again and got out of the hospital. I bought us a house. A project house, but something that a landlord couldn’t raise the rent on or put up for sale out from under us. I got married and had someone to share this crazy journey with, to shoulder the burdens with me and share in the delight and joy.

Even when survival was my only goal, I accomplished something I didn’t intentionally start out to do. I learned to trust God more fully, deeply, completely each day. My personality type is to complete things, check things off lists. Be the giver, not the receiver. And through that season of life, I could rarely do any of those things. I couldn’t set a goal, list the steps, and then set out to achieve it. I had to rely on God in a way I’d never had to before. To put food on our table, a roof over our heads. To provide me with a job that paid the bills and had the flexibility I needed to take care of my children. To put knowledgeable doctors in our path.

This is my secret bone to pick with goals: they are fine in their place, but they do have a place. Goals are not the solution to your life’s problems (oh, I wish they were!). They’re important. They provide order and structure and direction. They allow us to be good stewards of our time, gifts, and resources. Yet they all must remain in their place, subservient to God’s desires for my life and what He wants to accomplish in me in this season.

So in this next season of life (I’m not going to put a time limit on it, but I suspect it could take all summer) I’m going to allow myself to be goal-less, to think about possibilities, to be reasonable about what I can accomplish in this season of life, to dream and imagine and pray. At the end, if I only have one goal, that’s okay.

It’ll know its place.

Change, creativity, and coming home.

Photo credit: Jennifer Vander Klipp

Several months ago I made a pretty big change in our lives.

I came home.

For some reason, that’s how I’ve been characterizing the move I made to leave my managing editor job at one of the largest Christian publishers and work from home running my own business. For the past nine months I’ve been contemplating this, and in my head I kept saying, “I want to come home.”

I could probably fill many journal pages on the layers of meaning behind that phrase. And probably will. But the challenge I’ve been pondering lately is how to take this gift I’ve been given (and it truly is a gift to be able to run my own business from home) and use it to its best possible purpose. To not squander it. To get out of it all I hoped and dreamed it would be when I pictured the phrase, “I want to come home.”

In fact, the image that ran through my head with that phrase was of my dining room table with morning sunlight streaming in. Something like this.

Photo credit: Jennifer Vander Klipp

Though in reality, I rarely work at the dining room table, since it is the hub of all household activity. Most of my work takes place at my desk, pictured above, which has two windows with lovely views of trees and birds and all sorts of creatures. Possibly reason enough to leave my cubicle.

So for the near future I’m going to be exploring the various ways my life has changed. New goals, new routines, new ways to figure out how to be productive, how to even define productive. Plus I have some pictures to share of remodeling my house, turning ugly into beauty, and of the creatures—my new coworkers—that share my day.

It’ll be an adventure!

The Hills Are Alive... Like You've Never Heard Them Before

How would Maria from the Sound of Music have sung "The Hills Are Alive" if she was sitting in front of a radio instead of a guitar?

That's the question Peter Kiesewalter, the leader, producer, and keyboard player for Brooklyn Rundfunk Orkestrata asked himself when he brought the soundtrack from The Sound of Music to life for a new generation on their album The Hills Are Alive. Climb E'vry Mountain becomes a hip-hop song and "You are Sixteen Going on Seventeen" gets a modern twist.

Read more and listen to a sample here. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

You Tube in B Flat

Ever tried to play more than one You Tube video at a time? Me neither. But in the quirky way art works, Darren Solomon tried it and it spawned his experiment into intentionally creating music videos that could be layered and actually sound good. Read the story here. Check out his project, In B Flat, here, and see what kind of music you can make with You Tube.

Battle Resistance by turning Pro.

Last time I talked about this great book I've been reading, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield.

We left off talking about Resistance, that great force that keeps us from doing anything better with our lives. I've only touched the surface here. The book gave me a lot to think about. As a creative type, I'm always trying to further understand the creative process and what I can do to help it along and what I need to do to protect it from withering up and blowing away.

I've picked up a couple of other books lately on the subject and I'll share my thoughts about them, too, in another post.

What impressed me most about Pressfield's solution to Resistance is that you best battle it by what we as writers have been told over and over to do: show up. Put your rear in the chair and write. Pressfield calls it turning Pro.

When you pick up on what your particular susceptibility to Resistance is, then you can be aware of it. When you finally figure out what "turning Pro" means to you, then you can fight the battle.

Pressfield has ten items that would characterize most of our income-earning daily jobs. He then says we need to apply those same items to our creative life. Things like showing up every day whether we feel like it or not, staying all day whether we feel inspired or not. These kinds of things seem like no-brainers when we apply them to our income-earning jobs, but why don't we take the same approach to our creative work?

I suspect you'll find some item on the this that will make you go "Duh! Why didn't I think of that?" This part of the book particularly fascinated me. Chip MacGregor talked on his blog recently about being a professional writer and how the turning point came for him when he began treating his writing like a business. Much of his advice lines up with Pressfield's.

Why don't we treat our writing or whatever creative or self-improvement endeavor the same way we do a job? What is it in our minds that makes it different or an exception to the rules that we apply to other kinds of work? These are the questions that I find interesting to ponder.

And if I ponder them too long, become just another path for Resistance to attack.

Next, more books on the process of creativity.

My Artist

Ever wonder about the power of genetics in your family? Nurture versus nature? I do often because my son is so much like my youngest brother. And they haven't spent an overly lot amount of time together.

But this picture above drawn by my 7-year-old Calvin (not his real name) reminds me eerily of the drawing of my youngest brother when we were in church (back in the dark ages before there was children's church and we had to sit in big church).

My brother, Jason, used to draw "Jack Youngblud" and the Rams (back when they were in LA) complete with spikes on the cleats. What amazed me back then (and even now with Calvin) are the details, like spikes or yard lines numbers on the field that they chose to include.

Just as I posted this, Calvin handed me another drawing, this one of "baskitboll." The guy is flying through the air (complete with sound waves)as he dunks into the net with a big smile on his face.

We saw High School Musical 3 this weekend (practically de rigure viewing for the tween set). My daughter is involved in two drama productions and choir. Calvin is also in drama. I think about the options for kids now to express their creativity, much more than was available when I was a kid. I often feel like I'm having to reach back and relearn creativity. I hope my kids never lose it.

Youngest bro is now a cop in LA and doesn't do too much drawing any more (that I'm aware of). However, I'm enrolling Josh in a kids' art class on Saturdays to encourage his creativity. It's just as important to nurture the arts as it is book learning. Maybe even more so.

Happy April Fools!

While I’d love to play some sort of April Fool’s Joke on you all, I don’t have the brain power. However, if someone has a good one to relate, from this year or years past, please tell us about it in the comment.

I did get my Mac back. It now has a new hard drive. And I have the arduous task of sticking all the stuff back on it. But I’ve been busy with a couple of writing projects, namely a novella proposal I was asked to be part of and getting one of my novels ready for the Genesis. And since the restore process is time consuming and doesn’t allow any other applications to be open while it’s running, I have to wait until I’m not working on something to start restoring. Sigh.

On another topic, I ran across this article by Neil Gaiman in my RWA eNotes. In it he talks about the question he gets asked the most: where do your ideas come from? It’s a great short discussion on the creative process and makes the point that ideas aren’t really what make a book. Something writers get but normals don’t.

Also I was gratified to see he had the same experience in his child’s classroom that I did in my daughter’s last year.

But then there was this awesome quote near the end of the article.

My idea of hell is a blank sheet of paper. Or a blank screen. And me, staring at it, unable to think of a single thing worth saying, a single character that people could believe in, a single story that hasn't been told before.

Staring at a blank sheet of paper.

Forever.

Reminds me of Mike Snyder’s post at the Master’s Artist last Thursday.

Which was kind of timely for me because for the novella project I was given a location, a date, and a character. That was it. And I had two weeks to come up with a synopsis and a first chapter. It was a new experience for me. And because I like to plan and plot before I write, it was pretty scary to just write. But I came to the same conclusion Gaiman did: the ideas are there and I don't have to worry about running out of them. That was pretty freeing.