Goal chasing and burnout

This morning I woke up feeling exhausted. Been working my little butt off. Haven’t been doing the best with my habits, but I have been getting a lot more done. I am still not as efficient as I want to be. Right now I have a million projects and not enough time to do it all. My head hurts and all I have done is work.

The thing is I know I need more self-care but the time I spend on self-care takes away from getting things done. And I also know skipping the self-care leads to burnout and lower productivity.

I slept in this morning. I have been doing that more than I like to, but sleep is also important to me. When I am manic and don’t sleep it gets worse and affects my mood. All my habits have been terrible because I am staying with my sister and not at home. I have fallen out of the routines that I was doing so well with.

But I have been super focused on my goals. And trying to stick with the ones that are actually going to deliver results. You can work a lot and still get nowhere. I have been blogging every day on one of my blogs or another. I honestly can’t say I have been writing top-quality posts, but I have been writing. Nobody actually blogs anymore. You don’t read people’s stories or journals. You read a whole bunch of crap “how to’s”.

Everyone writes for search engines (including me) but not on this blog. The art of writing is gone. I am an Albuquerque SEO consultant, so that’s like all I do. Write SEO content. That is exhausting and I am getting serious burnout from all the writing I do. So today I wrote a blog post for myself. It was cathartic. This was my self-care for the day. Writing about something besides search engine optimization. And P.S. Yeh, I included some links to my site. I am trying so hard to be a badass web goddess and drive that yellow corvette.

How to Break Up with Your Phone

I have a million things I am trying to do, but the biggest one is to improve my focus. My phone — Facebook, email, messenger, texts — is my biggest distraction. I have a legit addiction to it. Like, I pick up that phone more than a cigarette smoker picks up a cigarette. It is the biggest interference with my productivity.

I am trying to commit to blogging on my blogs more, especially this one. It’s my favorite blog. But my damn phone addiction gets in my way. It’s something I have been working on. Some days I do better than others. I have tried installing a FB app blocker. I have tried turning my phone off, putting it on silent, ignoring it.

Today I am doing something new. I wrote myself a note. It says You are focused! Be a badass! Don’t pick up this phone!!! I put it on top of my phone this morning. Not two seconds after I dropped the note on top of my phone, my notifications dinged. Then, I thought I really should take a picture of the note for this blog post. But, I thought about it. I pick up that phone to check notifications and I’ll be on it another twenty minutes.

This morning I wasn’t going to work out. I had stuff to do. I was like I don’t have time for this. I thought about how many mornings I have spent checking in on Facebook, checking my emails, checking my stats, Google stuff.

As I was typing this, my laptop shut down. I forgot to plug it on. Ordinarily, that would be the time to check my phone. Ya know I can’t work while my laptop is loading up. But, I know what happens when I pick up my phone. I fall down the rabbit hole.

So today I am doing something different. I am breaking up with my phone. I am really working on my ADHD and being more productive. I’ll update this post later with a pic and keep y’all posted on how I do. Do you relate with my struggles?

How to Be Productive When You Have ADHD

Everyone that knows me knows I have ADHD. It’s not something I have to tell people. They just know. Anyone with ADHD struggles with the “squirrel” and the uh squirrel jokes. I recently talked about this on my Facebook page. For whatever reason, it’s socially acceptable to pick on people with ADHD. Anyway, the struggle is real.

For one we have a million great ideas. And to be honest, we are smart people. A lot of our ideas are great! But, when you try to complete a million great ideas, well, none of them get accomplished. I struggle with my focus on the regular. Coffee helps, but it doesn’t take away the million distractions that get in my way including wanting to write a blog post about ADHD instead of what I’m “supposed to be doing.”

My tips for being productive when you have ADHD

Start your day with meditation and the right mindset

I try to meditate every day. When I don’t do it, my day doesn’t go as well. Meditation helps me clear my head and get in the right space. When I meditate I often think about what I need to do that day. Sometimes I get some sort of enlightenment and sometimes I just get a few minutes of a mental break. I try to start my day with a good attitude. If I don’t have a good attitude I meditate again.

Use Mantras and Affirmations

I try to be a positive person. Instead of saying I am so disorganized or I suck at sticking with habits, I say I am focused. I am organized. I am smart. Just saying these words out loud or writing them down helps your energy and focus. Write it down! Write it down every day. Say it every day. When you are losing focus write it again. Write on your arm or your forehead if you have to. Just kidding. Don’t be a freak. . Sticky notes are fine.

Journal

I keep quite a few journals. I have gotten out of the habit with that so I am working that back in. I wrote a blog post about this recently. I have my Big Ass Journal of Boring things. It’s essentially an accomplishment journal, but I only write the boring things in there. I don’t have a problem doing the things I want to do — like writing this blog post.

Take breaks

People with ADHD tend to hyperfocus. We are either doing absolutely nothing or work work work work working. We don’t take breaks because we are always behind on something and trying to catch up. Take a break. An actual break to do something you actually enjoy.

Work on your habits

I highly recommend you start small with this. For example, start making your bed every day. Every single day. No matter what you do make your bed, even if you get nothing else accomplished. Make your bed. I started with three small habits. And I remember getting depressed because I couldn’t even stick with three little bitty habits. But, I promise you if you start small, and keep getting back at it, eventually you will have three good habits. Don’t add new habits until you’ve stuck with one for at least a month. Don’t even bother. Start small.

Do something fun in between the sucky stuff

If you don’t do some of the stuff you want to do, ya know like the craft you keep saying you are going to do or the new recipe you keep saying you’re going to try, you’re always going to be struggling with burnout. Mix it up. Today I did two projects I actually enjoyed and wanted to get accomplished and one thing I totally hate doing. This blog is one of them!

Use the Dave Ramsey approach

Have you heard of his approach to debt? My mentor talked to me about this and it has been incredibly helpful. I always have a list a million miles long. And I have always tackled the big stuff first. I felt like I needed to get the big projects out of the way to make time for the smaller stuff. Guess what? I never got to the smaller stuff. So I am doing things differently now. I am tackling all the easy stuff first and then doing the hard project. I have found I am getting so much more accomplished this way.

Keep committed to working on it

We make progress and change slowly. Don’t expect to change life-long bad habits overnight. Start small. If you screw and go back to your old routines, brush it off and start over.

So if you have ADHD tell me what are your best tips for staying productive?

Love from the Eyes of the Frog Prince

The last few days I haven’t had any profound meditations. Every day I seek wisdom and guidance in the form of meditation. I am going to write another post about my meditation and use of creative imagery. I have had some people tell me that this is something I shouldn’t do. But, I have prayed about and read scripture. There is nothing in the Bible that says you can’t have an imagination.

Today I went to my sanctuary. Inside my sanctuary, there was a bed. My spirit guide has been telling me the importance of rest. It renews your mind, your body, and your spirit. For the last few days, all I have seen were frogs hopping around my sanctuary. I have been trying to clean my sanctuary of all the frogs so I can have peace.

Well, not surprisingly, in my bed was a frog. I talked to my spirit guide about how this frog wasn’t going to just magically turn into a prince. And then I started thinking about ways to get the frog to hop out of my bed. But, the frog loves me and keeps coming back.

When I was done meditating, I read the story of the frog prince and I cried. You see, it’s hard to see love from the eyes of the frog when you’re the princess. When you’re the princess, you’re looking for a prince. But what the frog has is peace, happiness, and contentment with his circumstances. Yes, he is happy just being a frog. Even though he knows he is a prince.

Today I read this poem and realized exactly how fortunate I am to have a frog in my bed.

I want to give credit for this image. I am not sure who created it. Image source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/251990541621788446/

Always Taken Care of

Yesterday I had this thought. I have never been one of those girls that were taken care of. What I mean is, I have never been a stay-at-home mom that just had some guy taking care of me. I long for childhood sometimes because I really hate adulting. Sometimes I just want someone to do all the adulting for me so I don’t have to deal with the stress.

This morning I woke up to some blue energy. The life of an entrepreneur means not having a steady consistent income, especially in the beginning. Even though I have done this before and know what I am up against, it doesn’t make it any easier. I have said before in one of my interviews that it takes a lot of faith to deal with the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur, I genuinely mean this. Having faith is easy when everything is going your way. But, when you don’t know how you’re going to pay your next bill or keep your business going for another month, it is really hard to have faith. This is why James said, “the testing of your faith develops perseverance.” It’s one of my favorite Bible verses. I think it’s no coincidence that I memorized the book of James as a teenager. It’s stuck with me.

So this morning, my meditation didn’t bring me a lot. I didn’t have some remarkable vision or metaphor or story to share. But, what I did realize today was that I AM taking care of. I am always taken care of. I am the child and have a father that always takes care of me. This morning I woke up to some much-needed “blue energy”, aka financial resources to keep my business going. Whenever I worry about money, he always provides for me. I have to remind myself regularly to ask for this “give us this day our daily bread”. Maybe I am not rolling in the dough, and maybe I don’t have all my spiritual life figured out. But, I do know this. Ask and it will be answered. Seek and you will find. Doing my best to share the blue energy with others.

Studying the aliens (AKA depression/mood tracker)

Sigh, debating on how much I care about search engine optimization. As an SEO consultant, and blogger, writing stuff that gets found in Google means traffic to your blog. As a creative free spirit, and genuine blogger, writing what I want to say is more important. My goal for this blog is to blog every day. I want to write “articles” but I also want to have an online journal that I write on every day. It’s a goal. I missed yesterday because I had nothing to say. I wasn’t inspired, meditation didn’t give me much, but today I got a lot out of meditation.

I woke up with morning depression. I have this happen all the time and it’s something I have been trying to learn how to deal with. Sometimes the depression goes away by mid-day, but sometimes it lingers for days. I always refer to this as aliens visiting. Last week I meditated about having “coffee with the aliens’. Apparently, I didn’t blog about it, but what I mean by that is learning how to have company with the aliens but not let them take over your life. Let them visit, but don’t let them wreak havoc. Basically, learning to accept depression as part of your life and stop fighting with it. Let it come and let it go.

Well this morning, I woke up with another headache and morning depression. My headaches and moods seem to go together. When I meditated I told my spirit guide, I need a teacher. I don’t have anyone to help me. I have lots of mentors but none with bipolar disorder. I saw myself in a classroom and my spirit guide was teaching the class. She told me to start taking notes.

Then I saw the classroom filled with aliens, all sitting at their desks. I thought, “I don’t want to kill them.” I found this peace with them — like I don’t want to kill you. You’re visiting for a reason. She told me to start studying them. I have been journaling regularly. I have tried to destroy the aliens, fight the aliens. I have tried all kinds of strategies, but they always come back. And with my bipolar, there’s a little bit of a pattern to it. I always know when their coming. Usually, when I have been “happy” for too long. It’s a cycle -up, down, up, down. Us bipolar people like to stay manic to avoid visits from the aliens. But it doesn’t work.

So today she told me to start an alien tracker. And that’s what I’ve done. I am going to start documenting as many things as I can to see if I can figure out some patterns. What makes the aliens come out and play. Can I see a visual pattern? Is there anything I can do to change the cycles?

My depression cycles have disrupted my life for so long. I am not trying to beat it. I am trying to study it and learn from it. I don’t think we have studied the dynamics of depression enough. It’s more than just taking a pill. There has to be some scientific explanations for this. Anyway, I am logging my aliens. I will report back later with my findings.

Having compassion for the skeleton on the room

I didn’t have a particularly insightful meditation today, but I did listen to a book about letting go of anger from a Buddhist perspective. I have been very interested in reading about Buddhism and its practice of meditation. I am not so much interested in it as a religion, but more of a practice. I like their belief in non-violence and compassion.

I have been an angry person for most of my life. I am always angry and resentful. Feeling mad when other people are lazy and unmotivated. When other people don’t care about personal growth or doing anything about their circumstances. I have spent half my life pushing ropes. Trying to force people along on my three-legged race that they never asked to be a part of in the first place. I get angry when someone doesn’t want to change and I want them to.

Today I meditated about the skeleton in the room. That’s how I feel about apathetic, unmotivated, uncaring, and lazy people – like they are just dead inside. Like they are a rock that is incapable of growing.

I get angry and frustrated that they won’t just “come to life”. It frustrates me. I think you are unchangeable, like a rock. You can’t grow. But, I realized the skeleton in the room, has no reason to get out of bed, nothing to really look forward to, nothing they are particularly excited about. They’re just there. Instead of being angry, I had compassion. How sad it is to not have any goal you want to work on or anything you are excited about accomplishing. It really helped me change my attitude from one of disgust to one of compassion.

I am grateful to be alive, to be motivated, to have things I look forward to. To be alive! Today I am having compassion for the skeleton in the room.

Untangling the Shit Ball of Yarn You Created

This morning I woke up and thought, “I don’t have time for my routines.” I looked outside and it literally felt like the aliens were attacking. It was a perfect excuse for not taking a walk. I didn’t really have time for it this morning anyway. But, I was nudged to keep going. The disorder in my life has been ongoing. I don’t have good habits. I bite off more than I can chew. Then I mad scramble to get it done, meanwhile I don’t have time for anything else. No time to “unwind” and no time for working on things that are important to me — like having a clean house, spending time with my loved ones, etc.

This morning when I meditated I looked at my desk and there was this tangled up shit ball of yarn. I told my spirit guide I wanted to throw it in the trash. That’s how I deal with shit. Throw it out and buy a new one. She told me this is the only ball of yarn you’ve been given Patty. Sit down and start untangling it. Getting it untangled is going to be a lot of work and it’s going to be messy, but once it’s done you will have a ball of yarn you can actually work with and create something with.

What I got from this was this is that I am never going to have another life. This is it. I can start working on unraveling the mess and disorder, or I can continue being stressed out in knots and not being able to create anything beautiful with my ball of yarn. So today, I took my walk, did my morning routine consistently for the 24th day in a row. Slowly putting order into my life. And slowly unraveling the tangled up shit ball of yarn I have to work with.

Flunk the F Students and Work with the As

This morning I woke up with a headache and tons of tension in my neck and shoulder. My house is super clean as I have been working on my habits, but doing habits consistently means not having time to play catch up. I am trying to stop the letting things build up and mad catching-up cycles in my life. So, no matter what I am sticking with the habits and routines I have created and getting a good night’s sleep every night.

Still, when I meditated I was back to sitting at this desk with more papers than I knew what to do with. Yesterday, I got some insight on how to deal with the boring aspect of my work. ADHD people don’t like doing the mundane, monotonous boring stuff you have to do in life… So we procrastinate, do something we want to do instead, meanwhile the stuff piles up. Then stress and tension hits in!

So today I was at the desk again, with this ginormous stack of papers. I told my spirit guide, even if I make this less boring, and work faster, there are still just way too many papers for me to handle. That’s when I got it. My meditations are always visual and metaphors. She told me to start going through the papers one by one, grading them, and throw the F’s in the trash.

It occurred to me that this is much like parenting, and other things in our lives. The whiny, demanding, attention needy brat gets all your attention because they won’t shut the hell up. Meanwhile, the A student kid who gets up early does her chores and doesn’t cause problems gets neglected. My spirit guide told me to start flunking the F students and move them out of my class.

Start working with the A students who are motivated, patient, nice, don’t whine, and annoy you until you cave and do what they want. Stop working with the Fs and start working with the people you like, that value your time and your talents.

So with that, I have started marking my to-do list with who I consider my “A students”. The people I actually like working with and want to keep as clients. And flunking the Fs. They are slowly going to be weeded out of my classroom as I work on creating my own elite school of All-Star, motivated, passionate, hard-working and positive people.

My Big Ass Journal of Totally Boring Things

Yesterday, I decided I was making this blog a priority. This is my favorite blog, one I write for me. My main purpose is to blog about things that are important to me and help me.

This morning I meditated. I don’t meditate like other people. I have a virtual spirit guide. She was formed in my imagination many years ago and has changed to fit my needs. I read a book recently by a guy named Tony Blankenship. He talks about meditation. One of the things his book talked about was visualizing God (or your divine spirit, higher power, whatever you want to call “him”) as exactly what you need. So I took this concept and applied it to my meditation. My spirit guide is organized, smart, and has her shit together. She always knows what to do.

Today, I decided I wanted to meditate specifically about boredom. See, I have meditated countless times about how to get better at life. I am constantly visualizing all the work I need to do and asking her and God, how am I supposed to do it all. I’ve told her, hey I need to get faster faster. Yesterday, she gave me some ideas on how to do that.

Today, I asked her how to stay focused when I have all these boring things to do that I hate doing and that keep me from doing the things I actually want to do and like doing. I imagined myself sitting at a desk with a stack full of boring white paper. I had the task of moving the boring huge ass stack of paper from one side of the desk to the other. I told her, “I hate this. This is so boring!” So, she started drawing little pictures on each piece of paper. Have you ever flipped through an animated flipbook? Well, that’s what she did with my papers. All of a sudden, I was getting something fun out of my boring stack of papers.

I said, well I can’t draw. Do you have another idea? That’s when she reminded me how much I like stickers and making my to-do lists fun and colorful. So today, I have started what I call My Big Ass Journal of Boring Things. It’s sort of like an accomplishment journal. But, I am only including the boring-ass things I have to do each day in it. I intend to make it cute, fun, and funny. This way I am getting a little joy and happiness from my boring tasks.

If you have ADHD like I do, you might find boring stuff hard to do. I like practical coping skills and being creative. This is my new coping skill for dealing with the boring things I have to do and I hope I can make it fun. I’ll update this post as I add stuff to it.

Boring Journal page 1