Werk it Wednesday: Snoozed

Posted on December 7, 2016 by heatherlauraclarke

Nope, I’m not talking about sleep — although I’m hella tired right now after taking the puppy out twice in the night, and then getting up early to serve sticky pancakes and apple slices to elementary schoolers.

(It’s barely nine and I feel like it must be noon.)

This is about work.

So Inbox by Gmail (which I completely and totally love) has this feature called “Snooze.” The idea is to keep a cleaner inbox by snoozing emails you need to look at, but not immediately. Instead letting them hang out in your inbox, taking up visual (and mental) space, they disappear … and come back when you want them to.

Sometimes this is really helpful and I snooze emails until a specific day when I need to check in with someone or submit something.

Other times? I snooze ’em until just the next day, when I think I’m going to have more time to deal with them.

The morning at 8 a.m., my phone starts dinging like crazy as all of the snoozed emails start pouring back in. It’s so funny that even my neighbour (whom I’m usually with at 8 a.m. after bus stop drop-off) goes “Oh, it must be eight.”

The feeling of ohhhhhhhh rightttttt when the snoozed messages start flying at me, every morning, is akin to the feeling I sometimes get on Sunday nights when the weekend’s almost over. The Sunday Dreads.

So why not just deal with each email as it arrives, and stop snoozing? When you’re self-employed and you work ~~from home~~ (in total chaos with children everywhere), it feels like there is NEVER enough time. Because there isn’t.

The trouble isn’t with snoozing emails, though. It’s me.

I’m tired of being perpetually “busy.” I mean, I love BEING busy. I’m the kind of person who enjoys a bit of bustle. But lately it feels like the work/life balance is swinging heavily to the “work” side of things.

I’m snoozing “life” things even more than I’m snoozing emails so I can deal with other, more pressing emails. I will manage to wash a couple of loads of laundry and dump them on the daybed in the basement, and then it will be DAYS before I get around to sorting them and dragging the baskets back upstairs.

I’m snoozing the promise to play Barbies with C because of work. I’m snoozing the mess on the dining room hutches even though it’s driving me bonkers to see bins the kids’ art supplies stacking up. I’m snoozing making the muffins I said I’d make. I’m snoozing the rooms that need to be tidied and the outgrown clothes that need to be sorted and the husband who wants to talk about his day and the dog that wants to play and the sewing I’d really like to do.

I’m rush, rush, rushing through everything and I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know whether the solution is setting more concrete work hours (haaaaaa I’d just work anyway, if something needed to be done) or taking on fewer projects (fat chance) or scheduling in the “home” stuff with as much priority as my work?

If you need me, I’ll be here — digging through my “snoozed” folder and trying to get things to the “archived” one.

And probably wishing I would just stop for 10 minutes and cook myself some eggs.