Creating Daily Structure

OLLI has suspended for the summer.  A lingering professional albatross lifted at about the same time.  So I enter the summer with considerable liberty and security, more than I have enjoyed in a while.  My OLLI commitments, though, also provided needed structure in retirement.  My class schedule required me to commute from home to the campus most weekdays, then pay attention as the lectures or DVDs were presented.  I would often schedule an errand following class, sometimes supermarket or maybe retrieve a prescription, or even occasionally seek out lunch.  I had to be at a place at a set time.  On most Saturday mornings, shabbos services provided that time structure, at least for the morning.  Without these, I am left with my treadmill schedule as the main source of self appointments, not counting an ongoing commitment to myself to arise each morning at a fixed hour.  In the summer, even on treadmill days, by 9AM there are no places I need to be each day.

A list of what I want to do each day still gets listed the night before and reviewed each morning while I sip my first cup of coffee.  An opportunity to do more of these items without that pesky schedule telling me when I need to get dressed and into the car.  But having to work around those fixed obligations forces me to assign times to do things that have no deadlines.

I must take best advantage of these lazy, hazy days of summer, starting by restoring some of the structure no longer present during OLLI's summer break.  I've scheduled two appointments, one to get a Senior SEPTA Pass which adds to my freedom.  With this I can arrange museum visits, now timed, and a couple of bus trips to NYC over the summer.  I've scheduled a platelet donation.  And I am almost ready to assign some days to drive downstate to the beaches.  Some doctor's appointments have places on my calendar, and a couple more ought to be added.  I have a presentation to give for the synagogue, the lecture having an assigned place and time, though its preparation does not.

More likely, though, I will need to create an artificial time structure.  At a certain time I will write, record, upgrade the house, garden, cook, or shop.  Not too rigid, but time-bound in some short-term way.

Schedule Struggles

One laudable personal achievement post-pandemic has been the introduction of routines, primarily morning, but really extending much of the day, into the post-supper times.  I have a wake time with few deviations from it.  Sleep time has not established itself quite as well, but close enough to create something of a box of time for my waking hours.  Every day, with some modifications for shabbos and yom tovim, I start with dental care, make coffee which I bring upstairs to My Space, retrieve the newspaper from the end of the driveway for my wife irrespective of weather, wash some dishes, then retreat with my coffee mug to my desk to begin the day.  A blog effort, some crosswords, FB notifications while I sip the first cup, invariably brewed in a Keurig Express machine from pods obtained from a Shop-Rite discount.  Then treadmill if scheduled that day, time dependent on when my OLLI class begins.  On-site at OLLI completes most mornings.

That leaves a mostly unstructured block of time every afternoon, though my personal prime energy time has been the mornings.  Afternoons have very occasional appointments, the time to tackle tasks on my Daily Task List to bring Semi-Annual projects to fruition.  What I have found, though, is the morning structure, created by me, makes my mornings productive.  Afternoons have been less so, with my Musts largely dispatched by the time I return home from OLLI.  I have tried priorities, and work on them, but often do not bring projects to completion, in large part because I am often unclear on what completion entails.  Some things I do well, particular those with a future deadline like an upcoming Torah reading assignment or a submission to a writing contest.  I have a way of pacing myself knowing the end point but often flounder when there is either no completion deadline or I cannot grasp what the final result of my effort should look like.  I have tried to create structure with a timer which encourages me to define the time block for working on something but not for determining the final result.   I suppose there is no reason why I cannot do the same structural definitions of tasks for the afternoon that have succeeded in the mornings.

The evenings go a little better.  Supper gets prepared by me most nights, with eating time a little before 7PM, linking my PM medicine to supper preparation with nearly complete success.  I have a defined time for twice-weekly stretching in late afternoons and a defined time to record my weekly YouTube video, with very few postponements.  Then I have a recreational block, TV time, though more productive than the endless sitcoms I watched prior to subscribing to a comprehensive cable service.  I gravitate to YouTube shows about the trajectories of religion and videos of travel to places I might like to visit but realistically won't. That alone defines my personal interests.  There is Netflix, worth the monthly fee, where my interest varies between short series on assorted topics or more recently stand-up comedy presentations.  I do not usually try to catch up on what I should have done during the afternoon but didn't, nor do I do much housework.  Often I will read from a book I am pursuing, the amount determined by length or time before I begin to read. And I work on Torah readings during the evening hours, pacing myself to achieve fluency by a certain date.  Bed at a fairly specified time, a very helpful rather recent introduction.

So my lost opportunity appears to occur in the afternoons, that unstructured time box between my return from OLLI and supper preparation.  I need to add structure, a predictable routine, for tackling the Semi-Annual projects that lack deadlines, or even a definition of completion.  The templates for doing this are well established and successful most mornings.  As OLLI reaches its summer hiatus, that amorphous time interval will greatly expand.  It needs to be recaptured by the many things I'd like to do but have not taken advantage of my ability to perform at top level.