Self-Careful

Here’s a list of everything I am tracking right now:

1. Money going in.
2. Money going out.
3. Money going out, subdivided by category.
4. Word count.
5. Article count.
6. Article engagement.
7. Upcoming articles and anticipated freelance income.
8. Unpaid freelance income.
9. Hours worked.
10. Hours slept.
11. Steps taken.
12. Additional exercise completed.
13. Active minutes.
14. Calories eaten.
15. Weight.
16. Items I am likely to need to purchase and/or replace in First Quarter 2016.
17. Books I want to read.
18. Events I want to attend.
19. Events I want to host.
20. Dates on which I need to use my Old Navy Super Cash coupons.
21. People to whom I need to reply, on various email and/or messaging services.
22. Best Self goals.

All of this is in addition to the action item tracking, aka “my very long list of to-dos,” that is part of the Getting Things Done system. (This is my eighth year of practicing GTD.)

I’m doing pretty well in terms of the 2016 New and Improved Nicole Lifestyle, In Which She:

• Stops Work by 6:30 P.M.
• Turns off Social Media When She’s Done Working
• Meets all of Her Financial Benchmarks
• Meets 90 Percent of Her Sleep+Activity+Nutrition Benchmarks
• Enjoys Better Social and Self-Actualization

Of course, I’ve only been managing this new lifestyle for six days, and only two of them have been work days so far.

But hey, SUCCESS.

I’m already aware that I’m going to need to earn more, sleep more, invest more in myself and my friendships, spend more time building my career, and become more attuned to my authentic self and its needs (is it cookies? it’s probably not cookies, but sometimes it is cookies), which means I’m going to need to TRACK and then CUT and then TRACK AGAIN and then CUT SOME MORE until I am in perfect balance.

On my toes, of course, because I can do that. Yoga and Ballet Beautiful.

Also, 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. is still a 10-hour workday.

I’m good at tracking things. Built for it, ever since I was a child. (I won “Most Organized” in kindergarten.)

I like planning and tracking and figuring out what to keep and what to change. What I don’t like is the idea that financial security and self-care only work if you assiduously manage every aspect of your life.

I’d like self-care to be the default, and it isn’t. The default is sitting on a sofa for two hours, refreshing social media, and staying up too late because there is just so much social media out there. (Only a very few people default to getting enough sleep. The rest of us have been clamoring “but I don’t want to go to bed!” since we were toddlers.)

I’d like financial security to be the default, and it isn’t. The default is buying a $13 cocktail (plus tip) and then wondering how you spent $242 in five days.

So instead I have to default to the tracking systems and to-do lists, and let them tell me what to do and how to do it better.

I’ll also be honest—it is amazingly freeing. Aside from the part where you trade spontaneity for stability, of course. And the part where you realize that straying from the track means you’ll overspend or undersleep or end up eating cheese and Wheat Thins because you didn’t plan ahead for dinner.

Because self-care and financial security are not the default, and because our world is set up to demand as much money and time from us as it can take, the boundaries you build for yourself have to include only what you most truly value and not one thing more.

Because there isn’t money for it, and there isn’t time.

Turning off social media after work already feels like the best choice I made for myself in 2016, and we’re barely a week in.

It is amazing to just turn all of that off; to let it go and not worry about whether you should engage with everything that’s coming at you, because the tab is CLOSED and you won’t open it again until the next morning.

I wrote at the end of 2015 that “Twitter and Tumblr used to be spaces where I hung out with my friends, and now they’re shifting into something else,” and it looks like the something else is work. Now that I know that, I can put a boundary around it and redistribute the leftover time to something else.

It sounds ridiculous when you put it in those terms, of course. The idea that time has to be chunked up and distributed. But it does.

In December I experimented with another kind of tracking: putting an estimated time next to every item on my daily to-do list. It ended up looking something like this:

• Wake up, putter around: 1 hr
• Breakfast: 10 minutes
• Write novel: 2 hrs
• Yoga: 20 minutes
• Shower/dress: 30 minutes
• Lunch: 20 minutes (inc. prep)
• Bus downtown: 1 hr
• Haircut: 1 hr
• Bus back to apartment: 1 hr
• Dinner: 20 minutes (inc. prep)
• Grocery trip (walking): 1 hr 20 min
• Grocery unpack and kitchen cleanup: 40 minutes
• Evening workout: 10 minutes

That’s a 10-hour weekend day, and it doesn’t leave a lot of room for unexpected adjustments, like if the haircut takes two hours to complete because the salon is running behind.

The only scheduled “unscheduled” time was that first hour in the morning. One of my favorite hours of the weekend.

Sure, you’ll say, but you had unscheduled time at the end of the day, but remember: it was the weekend. I slept in.

I got a statement notification from a credit card I paid off last January and then ignored, because you’re supposed to keep those credit cards empty and open so that they help your credit score, right?

When I checked my statement, I learned that I now owed a $99 annual fee.

I know that the credit card company did its best to play down the annual fee, display the information where our eyes don’t look, and so on.

But it’s still my fault, because I should have known about this, and tracked it, and canceled the card. Or, maybe, weighed the long-term benefits of keeping an $8,000 credit card open vs. the annual $99 fee. Or done the math on how this would actually affect my credit score if I closed the card (I have an excellent score right now, so probably not much).

Either way I owe $99 more today than I did yesterday.

That’s what I mean when I say the world will demand as much money from us as it can take.

Last night I made myself a pot of tortellini, except when I washed the pot there must have been a film of dish soap I didn’t see, and when the water started boiling the soap agitated itself into a thick foam and dinner was ruined.

I didn’t have a second dinner ready, so I ended up broiling some cheese on top of Wheat Thins. I ate it with an orange, some sliced deli meat, and a cookie.

A person who tracks everything buys only the food she thinks she’ll need.

I want to have greater control over my own life and time and money, and I also want greater freedom and space. I don’t want to have to worry that the $27 takeout or the $13 cocktail will mess up my finances for the month, which will mess them up for the year, which will mess them up for the next five years.

But that’s not how it works.

Sure, one impulse buy or sleepless night will be fine, but at some point it’ll be one too many, and since you have to do the math on which one will end up being the “too many,” you might as well do the math from the beginning.

So I practice self-carefulness, as much as I can, and check all of my tracking systems as soon as my alarm rings every morning.

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