A rhythm

As I write to you, I’m sitting on a brown wingback chair in our living room with the orange sun pouring in through a bay window, warming the side of my face. Today is Sunday. And I’ve been feeling sick for about three weeks now.

As you’re reading this, I hope you’re also finding warmth in the things around you. There might be lots of joy and a little bit of heartbreak, or it might be the other way around. But reality is real, and that means a lot.

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A couple of weeks ago, I said I would share with you a rhythm that helps me get back to the things that are part of reality - a mixture of things that I enjoy doing, and things that I enjoy done, but I don’t really enjoy doing (like cleaning). More importantly though, it’s a rhythm that lets me put things down and releases me from the anxiety in between unfinished work. And there is always unfinished work.

(A friendly note, I hardly get this practical and it isn’t my intention or within my capabilities to teach you how to be productive. This is simply a practice that I do. But I hope that it can be a practice that lets you move about your days at peace, too.)

Here’s my rhythm…

At heart, I have a maker personality. It wreaks havoc on the structure of my days, because everything and nothing seems possible at the same time. But I’ve come to accept that that’s how I’ve been made. Not sure what I mean? In a nutshell, there are two types of schedules that people in this culture generally follow: a manager’s schedule, and a maker’s schedule. A manager’s schedule is one that is structured, a day can be spliced by the hour and all kinds of things can fill those slots. A maker’s schedule is one that is less structured, an hour is not an effective unit of time, and the consciousness of a meeting in the afternoon can take up all of the headspace for the entire day. You can read more about it via the link at bottom of this post.

For my personality, continuity of work is very important. Unfinished work is broken work, and broken work is hard to put back together. In a nutshell, my rhythm is made up of theme days. It means each day of the week is assigned a theme, and I slot relevant tasks and activities into those days. It’s important to mention that a rhythm is not a schedule. It is not intended to fill up our days with tasks, hour by hour. And theme days are not about doing more. It’s about slotting the things that we already do into the hours that we already have, so that we can come back to them. This is what my theme days look like on a weekly basis:

Mondays and Fridays are for sit-down work, the kind of work I need a laptop and phone for. These are the days meant for writing and administrative tasks.

Tuesdays are for catching up on our home, like groceries and housework.

Wednesdays are for relationships. Coffee catch ups and check ins with friends usually happen on Wednesdays.

Thursdays are for the kids, like homeschooling Cantonese (we speak Cantonese at home) or taking them to the library.

Fridays are for sit-down work, but also our marriage. We try to have dinner by ourselves and talk.

Saturdays are for sabbath. It’s the day for family. It’s not always happy times but it’s always necessary. We try not to pressure ourselves into having fun. Some Saturdays are boring. But we leave it open.

Sundays are for community and reflection. A lot of these newsletters were crafted on Sunday afternoons.

Now, it sounds dreamy, as I’m writing I’m aware that it sounds like all of the puzzle pieces fit together. But in reality - it hardly happens that way. I’m usually frazzled by Tuesday because housework is a black hole, and so are emails. Thinking that I’d just do this one thing sometimes takes up the entire day, and then any kind of theme for that day goes out the window. And it all sounds pretty prescriptive because I’m sharing with you the specific rhythm that works for me. Yours may look drastically different.

If things didn’t work out this week, let’s try again next week. The purpose is to have a rhythm. A practice that can help put ourselves at ease when there’s unfinished work, and a pathway to get back to those things we wish we had more time for, time and time again.

Time is meant to be spent. May we be honest about it.

Time is a blessing. May we be good stewards of it.

I hope reading this was time well spent for you.

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Read more about the maker vs. manager schedule HERE.