This weekend didn’t quite go the way I expected. I wrote on Thursday about how I had a weekend with almost nothing planned, and I was looking forward to reading, sipping tea, and getting a lot of work done. But my schedule ended up filling up rather quickly – which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to have some distractions.
On Saturday morning, I went to a Meetup group that happened to be at the home of another Denver-area blogger – Karissa! We crafted homemade Valentine’s cards for kids who will be in the hospital on Valentine’s Day, and it was so much fun. I am not much of a crafter at all, and joked that the recipients might be wondering why a kindergartener was sending them cards, but I had a lot of fun trying something new and making some new friends 🙂
On Saturday afternoon, I crammed a lot of errands and work in, and then ended up having a few girlfriends over for an impromptu dinner. It was really nice to get some time with my friends, and I felt a lot more relaxed than I have been in a while. But it was early to bed because, Sunday morning I got up early to go skiing at Breckenridge.
This season, I’ve mainly been skiing at Keystone – not because I like Keystone better (actually it’s my least favorite), but only because it’s the closest resort on my pass with free parking right at the base. However, I realized that it’s silly to keep going there when I don’t like it as much, and it’s absolutely worth the couple extra dollars to pay for parking at Breckenridge, where I’ll have a much nicer day on the slopes. I snagged a parking spot about 200 feet away from the gondola at Breckenridge, and it made the day so stress-free! I think there will be more Breck trips in my future.
I left home about 6:30am, and got to Breck at 8:10am, which meant I was skiing by 8:30am. Normally, I would head for a green (beginner) trail as a warmup and then stay on the blues (intermediates) all day. But yesterday, I was feeling confident enough to start on a blue, and then immediately head for a black (advanced) that I had spotted which looked fairly short. I figured if it sucked, I’d be off it quickly, right? But it was fabulous – and I found that it gave me the confidence to literally do all black diamonds the entire rest of my time on the mountain.
I only skied for about 2.5 hours before heading home around 11am, but in that time I skied 16,000 feet of vertical drop – so I was really flying fast! I was incredibly proud of how well I was skiing – I was passing a lot of people, but still felt very in control, and the steep slopes weren’t scaring me at all.
I headed back to Denver with the intent of getting a lot more done with work and around the house, but my afternoon went off the rails so that didn’t happen. Fortunately, I have the best friends in the world, and they dragged me out to a cocktail party at my friend Kelly’s house in the evening. Sometimes you just have to let go of the fact that you didn’t get everything done, and I was glad I stepped away rather than trying to power through.
Which brings me to my weekly January goal check in. I got pretty good about using my to-do list last week, and even scheduling my tasks sometimes. I totally failed at scheduling breaks into my day, but I felt like this weekend I got enough time for rest/recovery that I’m ready to kick my week off strong. Today was incredibly busy, but I felt really accomplished with some of the big things I got done even when time was limited, and I’m excited for that momentum to keep carrying me forward.
However, what I started realizing is that the real value of scheduling my tasks isn’t actually that I stick to the schedule (because I frequently don’t); it’s that if I have to assign a time to everything, it forces me to be realistic about what I can and can’t accomplish. In the last week, I’ve ended two days with absolutely nothing left on my to-do list, which is something that hasn’t happened to me for a while!
So this week, my goal is not necessarily to schedule everything, but to use scheduling as a tool to be realistic about my to-do list. I did a very poor job of this today, as evidenced by my still-very-long-to-do-list, but hey, tomorrow’s a new chance, right? (And Mondays are really rough thanks to travel!) I already have a billion things that I want to get done tomorrow, but my first hour of the day is completely free, which should give me time to schedule, prioritize, and be realistic about how I’m going to spend my time for the rest of the day. Five minutes of planning is worth fifteen minutes of work, right? That’s my mantra and I’m going to stick with it for this final week of January!