52 Changes - Ten Good Minutes

If your home is at all like mine (and let’s face it, it’s not, unless you also live with a psychotic cat and her aloof sister ;), the time when you first come home from work is hardly your most productive.  Work is exhausting, and what I usually want most is to put it far from my mind once I’m at home.  So, generally speaking, I’ll walk in the door, toss the mail on the table, turn the TV on, and veg out on the couch with either rerun-daytime television or mindless video games until Stacia gets home.  Which can be fine, but it’s not exactly in line with my plan to get better at achieving some goals.

That said, it’s still a fact that when I come home from work, I’m pretty wiped out and don’t want to launch immediately into cooking or cleaning.  I still need some relax time.  So what I’m asking myself to do is give myself “Ten Good Minutes” when I come home, and then I can do whatever I want.  For those who watch Pardon the Interruption, I did steal that title as a take-off of their “Five Good Minutes” segment where the guys interview whichever sports star happens to be of interest that particular day.  And coincidentally, things like PTI are exactly the kind of shows I don’t really care much about, but find myself watching after work.  :)

Obviously my goal is not to interview sports stars.  That might be neat if you’re way into sports, but I only follow a few niche ones, and besides I can never think of intriguing questions to ask people.  (note: maybe a future topic for something to work on).  My Ten Good Minutes is instead focused on small achievements and on spending a little time for myself.  My plan is to sort each day’s mail immediately and then actually decompress from work.

The mail thing isn’t too interesting, but I figured it wasn’t worthy of its own topic so I threw it in.  As I mentioned last week, things have been piling up at home since I’ve been particularly lazy, and mail is one of the primary contributors.  Almost all of our mail is junk, but when you don’t feel like sorting it and throw it on the table daily, a handful of junk mail becomes a giant stack of mail that needs to be sorted.  And usually there’s a bill that sneaks through, somewhere in the stack.  We’ve yet to be legitimately late, but we’ve been close a time or two.  So, part one is to spend five minutes or so sorting the mail and getting it thrown out or filed away.  Exciting!

The second five minutes is more for me than the household.  My work life consists of sitting in the same chair at the same desk staring at the same screen for eight hours straight.  The work can be interesting, but it also can be frustrating, and the combination leaves me a little bit stressed, physically and mentally.  Flopping right onto the couch, I’m still in the work mindset, then there’s the dinner rush, then more TV or reading or out-and-aboutness, and I never really reset from work until it’s time for bed.  I’m not about to have a panic attack or anything, but this may be a contributing factor to my recent lethargy.  What I want is a clean break from work before I can become home-Greg.

To start with, I’m going to spend 5 minutes daily on simple mindful breathing.  Relaxing, taking deep breaths, focusing on the breath, keeping my mind free but not actively focusing on anything.  After five minutes, if it’s time to make dinner, I can work on that, hopefully re-energized rather than still carrying work stress.  If I learn enough, this might one day evolve into real meditation, but even if I just keep doing my meditation-lite, it’s still a good way to decompress from the workday.  Overall, it’s just ten minutes, but together they should contribute to decluttering the house, and decluttering my mind.

I’ll be honest – though this is this week’s change, it hasn’t gone perfectly.  The mail thing I’ve done, and as such there’s no mail lying around on the kitchen table.  The “meditation” has been a bit harder.  I’ve done it every day so far, but I haven’t made it right after work consistently.  It’s really easy to jump right into doing something when I get home.  But it’s only a five minute delay to just settle down and (literally) take a deep breath, so I’ll try to focus on actually doing that.

This one’s a bit harder to gauge whether it’s really worthwhile or not.  I plan to give it a try consistently and see if I enjoy it.  If not, it’s not a failure to decide I don’t need to do that behavior anymore.  Not snoozing is a no-brainer, but pseudo-meditating is something I’ll have to try to find out.  And incidentally, we haven’t hit the snooze this week either.  So far, so good.  Oh, and next week’s change is more in-line with the big goals, so that should be fun.