An Hour Lost, An Hour Gained

There’s been a lot of change going on in my sphere lately. As the title says, it’s not all bad, but it does tend to require a lot of extra physical and mental energy to deal with. As I’m sure you could tell by a few of my last posts, it’s been frustrating, but the thing about “things” being upended and changed is, there’s lots of opportunity to change processes and routines for the better.

With the introduction of three new aquariums and their respective inhabitants over the last couple of months, my schedule on Sundays has been a bit…cramped. I knew taking on the new pets would add time and labor to my schedule, but I’d hoped to schedule that in on Saturdays, and currently my Saturdays are all about the storage unit clean-out project. So, two new time-consuming things added at once to my already full weekends has equaled a very sore back by Sunday evening and no time to breathe if I want to get all the essentials (like laundry, vacuuming and dog food prep) done.

I’ve been floundering a bit, because I know I’m going to have to schedule gallbladder removal surgery for sometime this spring/summer, and also that the recovery time from that will be around 6-8 weeks of light duty/no heavy lifting. And I need to finish getting everything out of the storage unit by April 1st, but even after that, I still need to deal with everything that was in storage and is now in our house.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally hit that point where you stop, breathe, and either cry, or force yourself to take a look at things from an entirely different direction. I was making dog food Sunday night as usual, after a long weekend of normal chores plus the extra added physical activities of moving boxes and cleaning aquariums, and my back was *killing* me…which it doesn’t normally do until *after* I’m finished with the dog food (admittedly, the gallbladder issue is getting worse, which affects my back too).

In any case, after a full weekend of everything else, the last thing I wanted to do was spend two hours making dog food. I also do not want to buy dog food, given Athena’s allergy issues. I kept asking myself how I could speed up the process, and the answer to that is…I can’t. There’s no way to make large quantities of meat cook faster, scientifically speaking.

However, I was listening to a podcast at the time, and I honestly don’t even remember which one or what exactly was said, but something one of the hosts said made me stop, think, and consider that maybe speeding it up wasn’t the solution. It didn’t need to be faster, it just needed to happen while I was doing other things.

Why that never occurred to me before is anyone’s guess, considering I spend most work days either figuring out how to automate things or maintaining automated processes already in place. *facepalm*

The solution actually turned out to be slowing down, in order to automate more of the process. I had sort of thought about this before, but I hadn’t gone quite far enough with it.

When I started making dog food, I’d put the squash in the crockpot to cook. But it took a long time, and it was a lot of effort to cut the squash into small enough chunks. So I switched to baking the squash in the oven instead, because it took less time to prep, and I could just bake it in the afternoon, turn the oven off and leave it there until I was ready to pull the other ingredients together that night.

I’d considered doing the ground beef in the oven as well, but then I’d have to remove the squash from the oven first (can’t fit both at once), and that would have affected everything else going on for chores, so I was just frying up the beef in four batches on the stovetop after I combined all the veggies and squash, which took around an hour every Sunday.

What I hadn’t considered is just putting the ground beef in the crockpots, and letting it cook for several hours while I was doing other chores. Ground beef doesn’t need any prep – just toss it in and go, stirring it every so often to make sure it cooks evenly. I have a three-pot crockpot unit, and I can’t quite fit all the meat I need into those three crocks, so I did order another crockpot to use, but I tried the new routine out last week just cooking the leftover beef in the oven while I mixed everything else together, and…it cut nearly an entire hour off the time I actually had to stand in the kitchen working on dog food. As a bonus, with the meat portioned out in smaller amounts, it’s less weight to move at once, which will make it easier to deal with while I’m recovering from my surgery.

My back would have cried in happiness had it not already been wailing in pain.

My point in all this (aside from whining about my back) is that all too often, we think a routine or process simply can’t be tweaked any further before we’ve actually looked at it from all angles. Troubleshooting is my day job, and I still manage to allow myself to get stuck in routines just because I’m so frustrated and stressed that I can’t see any other way of getting a certain task done. I give up too early when I’m in that mindset, and a lot of times, all it takes is a step back, and a bit of time to let my mind “breathe” to find a workable alternative.

And more often than I care to admit, I have to be pushed to the breaking point before I allow myself that mental space to think. Which is a shame, really, considering the time and adrenaline I waste on all that.

The irony of this particular situation is that on the same weekend we “lost” an hour to the time change, I managed to “find” an hour by doing one task more slowly with automation.

I’m working on applying the same basic principle to my writing times and routines. I have actually been writing again this week- not much, but I’m getting some words in, and that’s what counts. I’ve been on hiatus for too, too long.

Blog posts, regular fiction writing, and newsletters. Those are the three things I want to focus on as far as writing and publishing goes. And having that extra hour on Sunday nights will directly affect that, as Sunday nights are when I like to schedule my blog posts and such for the week. So that will work out perfectly.

What’s the last problem you solved by going slower, rather than faster? Is that still working pretty well for you?

Jamie DeBree

Writer | DBA | Dog Wrangler

An Hour Lost, An Hour Gained