On Productivity and Taking a Step Back

As Leah has gotten older, outings have become an increasingly bigger production. Getting ready for the day could take upwards of 4 hours if she had her way. She has grown more and more particular about ensuring tasks are complete before an outing. She wants to make sure she’s “fully awake” before tackling the day ahead, a question that she asks numerous times a day…sometimes even at 2PM. The girl really likes to feel prepared. 

Point blank: outings are a big deal.

One day, our outing was two-fold: go to Pearle Vision and get fit for new glasses and go somewhere to discuss the future of the blog (this was when we were just deciding to write again). Double whammy day. Let’s go.

I pumped myself up, prayed for extra patience, and we made it to the eyeglasses store. Leah did excellent. “Yes,” I thought to myself, “we’re on track. Today, we are getting stuff DONE.” Checking things off my to-do list brings me a lot of joy.

Right next to Pearle Vision, I spotted a Panera Bread. YES! We didn’t even have to get back in the car and we’d be ready to rock and roll. Easy peasy, right?

Not so fast…

“Umm, I was thinking that I not know about Panera Bread because they not have a Shirley Temple there and that is what sounds really good to have and to do the blog post meeting with it to celebrate to start to write again.” 

Oh boy. Patience Lindsay. 

“Well, you could have a Chai Tea latte?! Those are special drinks too!”

She was clearly not feeling it. I sighed, glancing at the clock as it read 4:18PM. Shoot, we spent longer than I had realized at Pearle Vision. I tried to think of a place we could go with a Shirley Temple that wouldn’t conflict with the upcoming after-work traffic in Omaha. 

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that I had a birthday dinner 45-minutes away that evening and I needed to drop Leah back off by 5:15PM to make it. Time was slipping away. 

Stress built as we brainstormed options. After pulling into about 3 different parking lots, we found ourselves outside of Abelardo’s — this tiny Mexican food spot. It was just about the last place I’d envisioned us going to discuss our re-launch. BUT, it was a 2-minute drive from my parents, has extremely quick service, and the clock had just struck 4:50PM. It would have to do.

“Why are we even trying,” I thought to myself. 

Leah was determined to get our “work time” in, so we went inside. Leah slowly approached the counter to order. We were hopeful they might be able to whip her up a Shirley Temple, but alas, there was no grenadine in the building. A Sprite would have to suffice. 

Leah ordered the drink. The machine didn’t print off a receipt for her, which took us time to process and discuss (she loves to keep records of her purchases). Also, when the lady rang up her drink, it said “Coca-Cola” on the register — something that also took up our valuable, disappearing time.

“I just making sure that I order Sprite not Coca-Cola and I want to make sure it was the right thing that I did good and order the right drink. And also do I not need to keep my receipt and I wonder can we go ask to print the receipt.”

At this point my patience is about to head off the deep end. This was not the ideal situation for us to get anything remotely productive done. Keep in mind that by the time we sat down and got our notebooks out, it was 5:10PM. We had 5 minutes to work. What a fail.

For those few minutes, Leah was fixated on reviewing our past notes. I was trying to explain to her that we needed to look forward to the future. We shuffled through a few things and moments after we sat down, I told her it was time to get in the car. We gathered our things. I got into the car, frustrated.

Leah got in next to me, closed the door, buckled up slowly, took a big sigh, and said, “wow, we got a lot of work done.” 

What?! Had we experienced the same past hour and a half??! I couldn’t even respond. 

She looked over at me, “we did work on it right? I did good? We did work on it.”

I took a deep breath and tried to come up with some sort of encouragement. Not knowing where to begin, I simply tried to come up with a list of what little was accomplished, if anything…

“Well Leah, we did work on it, yes. We established that we need to re-organize and review our old papers, but now is not the time. We also discovered that a restaurant is not the best place to work on blog stuff. You decided that you wanted to wait to write about moving back home from your apartment. We also talked about the Forever Love series and decided that was where we would begin. Not to mention the huge task of getting your glasses fit…”

I was still rambling off things we had gotten done by the time I pulled into the driveway to drop Leah off. The clock read 5:30PM. 

Leah smiled and nodded… pleased with our progress. “Yes we did a lot of work and get things done, wow,” she exclaimed as she grabbed her Sprite and got out of the car.

I then had a 45-minute drive to consider what had just happened. We actually had gotten things accomplished. What felt like a complete mess and entire waste of time to me had actually been…dare I say…productive?! 

This was a huge eye-opener for me, and a moment I have reflected on several times since it happened.

During quarantine, take a step back and lighten up on yourself a bit. Recognize all of the things you are getting done, no matter how big or small. Once you take that step back, I guarantee that you will be surprised by all that you’re able to list off. 

Here’s to turning our minds Upside Down.