I think my favourite pastime is data management. When I tell this to my best friend Juliana, she will say something like “Ya, duh.” Like when I told her “So, I decided to move my personal to-do list into Asana as well” and she said “I knew you would eventually.” When my organizational, time management, personal development tools dominate my side of the ‘what’s new?’ conversation, she gets the idea.
I’m obsessed with Airtable. We use it at work to organize just about everything that goes into a film festival and it’s so brilliant that I wanted to use it for something of my own but didn’t think any of my things I keep in sheets needed the interconnected records of an Airtable. But then I found some that did. And I happily spent an evening copy-and-pasting and correcting information from Google Sheets into an Airtable base.
It’s not a hobby, like playing the piano, it’s just a pastime. Something I do to pass the time. (Well, not always, I can get obsessive about it.) It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle. (Which Juliana loves to do, so she will totally get this.) A jigsaw puzzle has all of its parts there, you just have to put them together, one piece at a time. It requires some brain power, but very little decision making. Or, at least very low stakes decision making. Nothing can go wrong, no matter what order you decide to put down the pieces. That’s what makes it a calming thing to do when you have anxiety. There is only one solution and you will get there eventually. It’s a small world that is in control, which is a soothing balm on anxiety in an uncontrollable chaotic world. Data management, at least what I’ve been doing in converting and moving data into a new format, also doesn’t take much decision making. There are choices to be made about how to organize the data, but then everything just takes its place in the only place it could go. And at the end of your puzzle, or Airtable, you sit back and look at the bigger picture you created from all those little pieces you put in the right spot. Satisfying.
When I’m anxious, it helps to focus on a smaller world that I can control. I cannot control the government’s messy management of the pandemic protocols, but I can clean out my kitchen cupboards. I cannot make travel plans for this year, but I can buy white extension cords to tidy up my living room. (See: last week’s video) These activities don’t fix anxiety, of course, they just help me ignore it for a while.
I've always liked data management (and puzzles) but I think I’m turning to it now even more because my other organizational pastime, making plans, is not available to me. I can’t make plans. I can’t even daydream about the future. I can’t plan my next trip. It’s hard even thinking about looking forward to the summer. I need hope in my life and this constantly shifting unpredictable (stupid government can’t pick a plan and stick to it- but even if they did, there would be people who wouldn’t stick to it, so it’s chaos no matter what) pandemic life makes hope impossible. Nothing to look forward to, at least nothing with a date or plan attached, other than “once this is over” but we don’t even know what that means or when we’d call it “over”. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to travel again, but I know that I can clean my kitchen cupboards and cover them with white contact paper, and I can move all my movie watching records from a Google Sheet to an Airtable base, and I can do yoga, put food in my mouth, floss my teeth, and get dressed up on Fancy Fridays. The list of things I can do is much smaller these days, so I gotta pay attention to every small, seemingly inconsequential thing I can do by choice. Gotta focus on the haves, not the have-nots.
Like everyone, I'm doing what I can- to feel good (or at least a little better), to feel safe, to keep going. Piece by piece.
A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Sharing is Caring: I’ve been listening to my iTunes library, starting at the beginning- when I got my iMac at 16 and dumped all the downloaded music and CDs I had so far into iTunes- which has been an interesting trip down memory lane. (What am I not remembering because all these 2000s song lyrics are taking up space in my head?) So much great music I am rediscovering, including this band from my hometown that stopped making music in 2013, but I fucking loved it then, and turns out I still do. Check out Fire and Neon for some jams. (I’m bad at describing music, okay? It’s just… good. Pop? Electronic? Rock? Little bit disco? It’s a fuckin’ jam.)