Hugh Hollowell

Trying to build a a better world.

The best self-care advice anyone ever gave me

This essay published

As a child, we had some neighbors – Montaree (we called her Montie) and Mr. Doc. They were retired farmers who had bought a few acres from us and built a small house to live out their retirement. They were surrogate grandparents to me, and I loved them intensely.

They were simple folks who lived in a simple house, and like many of the generation that had survived the Depression, were thrifty. They made do, or they did without. Nothing was wasted in that house, ever.

They had a son who lived in Jackson, three hours away, who always came for holidays. And as she prepared for their arrival, the threadbare sheets and towels were put away, and out came the beautiful, fluffy towels that had been in hiding since the last holiday. She had special towels for guests, or, as she called them, company. She had special dishes for when company came over too, and special silverware.

I asked her once why she didn’t always use them, and she said they were too pretty to use everyday, so they were saved for company.

Mr. Doc died in the summer, and shortly afterwards, things changed in the house. The everyday plates went away, and the good plates came out. The towels on the bar in the bathroom were fluffy, and the company silverware went into rotation.

I saw the good towels in the bathroom and asked her who was coming.

“Nobody is. After Doc died, I decided to treat myself like company.”

That is still the best self-care advice anyone ever gave me – treat yourself like company.

Winning

This essay published

I have a long to-do list. I bet you do too.

As a creative person with a large imagination and a raging case of ADHD, who is mostly introverted and moderately depressed, I often don’t get everything done I want to get done. And at the end of the day, when I am looking at that long to-do list with the things not yet done on it, it is easy to get overwhelmed, which only makes it more likely that I will get less done tomorrow.

So I have a simple hack I use to get stuff done: Make sure I have one “win” every day. I identify a win as anything that moves me closer to any degree to my goals. So, since I want to eat healthily, eating a healthy breakfast would be a win. I want to have strong relationships, so writing an emotionally hard email would be a win. Or maybe I ran today, or maybe I sat on the couch and took the day off, but read that book that has been on my to-read pile forever.

The point is, at the end of the day to be able to look at what you have done and realize you had at least one win. Now, you probably had more than one, and that’s great, but you only need one, and you need to recognize it.

If you only had one a day, that is nearly 400 times you made positive moves toward the future you want in a given year, and that is pretty amazing and powerful by itself. But also, going to bed while not being frustrated with yourself is life-giving.

Using units to structure your time

This essay published

Those of us who are in the helping professions seldom end up having 40 hour, structured workweeks. Instead, we are often responsible for creating our own schedule, which always involves other people’s schedules, which can lead to long, unstructured days.

For instance, I have an office, but am only in it three to four hours a day, with the rest being nighttime meetings, breakfast meetings, coffeeshop meetings, or time spent out in the field. And I still have paperwork to do and writing to do, and all the other sorts of things people expect me to do.

If I’m not careful, I can end up having a day where I have a breakfast meeting at 7:30, get to the office at 9:00, have a lunch meeting at 1:00 PM, spend time in the field until 6:00, where I grab something in the drive thru on my way to a seminar I am supposed to teach at 7:30 PM, and finally get home at 10:00, exhausted.

And for many of us, this sort of thing happens all the time. It is really easy to have a workday that spans 12 or 14 hours, and we wonder why we are exhausted and burned out.

Or maybe we are really good at sticking to eight hour days, but we end up giving up our days off to “just catch up”.

A technique I have learned that has really helped planning my days and weeks. It goes like this:

Your day is split into three units: Morning, afternoon, and evening. You have two goals – don’t work more than two units any given day, and don’t work more than 12 units in a given week.

For the days, you shouldn’t work all three units in a given day. So, if you know you are going to have night meetings, schedule your day so you are not working that morning or afternoon. If you have a full day packed from 9-5, don’t schedule anything that evening.

For the weeks, if you know you have to work Saturday morning and have a presentation Tuesday night, you are already starting the week with two units filled. Throw in a Thursday night meeting and we are up to three, which means, if 12 is our goal, that we can’t work full days the rest of the week.

I find this much more helpful (and realistic) than counting hours. It is easy to wrap my head around, easy to plan around and imposes structure. It turns your calendar into more than a device for recording your appointments and meetings, but rather a framework for structuring your life.

Question: Do you have any “rules” for structuring your week?

My News Diet

This essay published

One of the best things I have done for myself over the last six months is gone on an information diet. Just like a food diet, that means I have deliberately put limits on my consumption of information, and only allow myself to consume it at determined times.

Here is what that looks like:

First steps

I abandoned my Facebook account, and started a new one, with relatively few close friends on it. I belong to no affinity groups.

I quit consuming my news via Facebook or Twitter or other social media.

The diet:

I own a Kindle Fire (which is an amazing deal. For less than $50, you get a decent, fully functional Android tablet). The Washington Post has a super deal for Kindle Fire owners, where you get a six month subscription for $1, and it’s 3.99 a month after that.

I also subscribe to a couple of “news aggregation” emails, including the New York Times and Need 2 Know. They both send emails to my inbox every morning with top national headlines. (Need to Know is also good about sharing pop culture things, so I know what latest shenanigans Taylor Swift is up to.)

When I do see an article someone shared on Social Media, I save it for later. I use Pocket, which is amazing, but you could use Instapaper or just use Facebook’s saving function. The tool doesn’t matter – you just want to separate stimulus from response.

So, every morning, I get up, drink my coffee and scan headlines from many different sources, with professional editorial voices at work. I read the articles that interest me, and, wonderfully, I have no chance to argue with people I know.

Before, I would see an article someone shared and then read it right there. I might, in a 5 minute period, swing from something the president did to this weird thing a cat did to here is why you should be scared about bees.

Then you are whiplashed all over the place, and you are out of control of what you see and what you feel, and then you get angry and your blood pressure goes up and… but maybe you’ve been there?

You have to control what you allow in. If you don’t, it is easy to get overwhelmed with the weight of everything coming at you. The pace of information is maddening, and unsustainable. There is far more media created these days than we are capable of ever consuming.

So you need to go on a diet.

Resources:
A helpful book for me in this was The Information Diet, by Clay A. Johnson