Notes from Chic Blogging Challenge over Paris’s CoVid-19 Lockdown (2)

 June 5, 2020

For the Paris Spring 2020 CoVid-19 Lockdown, I followed Fiona Ferris’s 2 books (30 Chic Days and 30 More Chic Days) day-by-day and tried to implement each day’s recommendation. For the next several posts, I will write about what I learned through my 60-day assignment:

Day 20 in 30 More Chic Days is titled “Have a daily success plan.” Fiona writes about how she created a structure for her days that was both flexible enough to allow her to make use of creative time and supportive enough to help her accomplish important tasks in a timely manner. She didn’t find traditional to-do lists to be that effective for her. What she did find effective was creating a rhythm to her day that incorporated times for her high priority tasks like writing and crafting as well as a set-aside time for lunch (& lunch prep) and time for the daily/weekly tasks that go with living. I review Day 20 and added some other notes and approaches that I find helpful here.

I found that my daily blogging challenge provided a nice amount of scaffolding to my daily structure. Even though life during Paris’ CoVid-19 lockdown (all 8 weeks of it) had definitely changed due to not being allowed out to freely wander (and most things were closed anyway), I still had a family to feed, an apartment to take care of and a short blog post to write & post each day. Somehow, each of these responsibilities kept me moving throughout my day working on the tasks that I wanted to accomplish. In the past two and a half weeks since I finished the blogging challenge of 30 More Chic Days, my sense of productivity has plummeted. Evidently, I’m a train wreck of procrastination and distractibility without a “scaffolding” of over-arching objectives to guide (& steady) my focus.

Tim Urban of WaitButWhy.com writes a hilarious and frighteningly descriptive 3-part series on procrastination and procrastinators here. (I spent an entire day reading the series and then scrolling around his blog last week – when I should have been getting a few last pieces of tax-related information together to send to the accountant.)

Fiona’s idea of a “chic success plan” is clearly needed. I’m still working on the bare bones of a “scaffold.” I have the early morning part pretty much developed: Get up, go for a gratitude walk/jog, breakfast, make-up – now ready to face … whatever comes next. The evening is also pretty much scripted at this point in my life: after school – check homework, get dinner started, dinner time, showers, all electronics down (usually a bit of a battle), then family reading time, a bit of hanging out, then everyone to bed. The in-between part – that is the part where a general success plan is needed. (Or to put it in Tim Urban’s words: disaster can all too easily loom.)

Just as Fiona describes, I find that a to-do list can all too easily fall into one of three different pits of disaster. Pit 1 is a to-do list that has grown so long and involved that I lose all will to live. Pit 2 is a to-do list that just has simple and unimportant tasks that can be easily crossed off. (I still feel that nice glow of accomplishment when I do cross off each item. It’s just that the items listed don’t represent the actual important (but probably multi-step) stuff.) And then there is Pit 3: the boomerang task. This is the dreaded task (like a phone call to the electrician to schedule a maintenance visit that then requires a pre-electrician visit task to be completed) that somehow spawns multiple other tasks (all requiring completion before you can actually declare the original “mother” task completed.) Gretchen Rubin describes the frustration of dealing with these types of tasks in her book, The Happiness Project.

With the advent of Phase 2 of France’s “deconfinement,” there is a wealth of out-of-apartment opportunities that easily distracts me from my responsibilities. Lockdown acted as its own structure in my day and made it easier and oddly more relaxing to work on some of my more important projects. The lesson of the past 2 and a half weeks is that, without national lockdown to “help” me, I need to put some of my own structure (back) into place. That way I can both meet my responsibilities and enjoy my “free” time better.

Wish me luck!!

A decorative door number near the auction building, Hotel Drouot, in the 9th arrondissement.