On Being Flexible

I spoke in my page SLD Crash and Burn about the issue of planning. The first time I tried SLD, I did not really plan, I just kind of expected it to happen: some time around ten am I’ll take my SLD dose, no problem. That might LOOK like planning but it wasn’t; I did not plan for when I would have to stop drinking my coffee, or when it would be good to eat lunch, so when I did not finish my coffee until ten am, I was flummoxed. In other words, I was hoping SLD would shoe horn in without much effort on my part.

This time, I set out with a clear idea of a schedule: stop drinking coffee by 9:30am, take my SLD dose at 10:30am, be well and truly ready for lunch by noon.

Not working.

I’ve watched my habits as I try to force myself into this schedule, and the fact is, by 9:30am I am usually barely halfway through my coffee. I’m a sipper, not a gulper, so taking two hours to finish a cup is not unusual for me (this is something I never really knew about myself before!). Turns out I need to move everything UP an hour: done with coffee by 10:30am, SLD at 11:30am, lunch around 1:00. Since that is how everything has been falling out anyway, I think I can manage it. lol!

Plan, plan, *fail*

I have not failed to plan, and today things will go as I want them too, but what happened this morning is an excellent example of how simple things can get off track.

Right now my schedule is to finish coffee/breakfast by 10am, drink my sugar water SLD dose at 11am, and then have lunch/snacks post-noon. I do not drink coffee at home. I generally get up between five and six am, write, work out, make ‘breakfast’ (which, when I bother with it, is juice or a fruit smoothie; I generally do not eat solid foods in the morning, it does not set well with me). I drink the coffee when I get to work. Ah, but today, the coffee was not ready when I got in, so I did not make my cup-per-usual. Then I got distracted by “office emergency!!!” so it was an hour before I made coffee. Now it is 9:45am and I am just now sitting down to drink my coffee. No way will I be done with it before 10:30am (I am a sipper, not a gulper). And if I get distracted again, as I am prone to do, I won’t finish my cuppa until 11am, and now everything is an hour behind.

This is not a problem today, thankfully, but what if I had lunch with co-workers on the schedule? Well, I could skip the coffee (nooooooooooo!!!), gulp it down (owwww, hot hot hot), or skip the lunch date (bad politics).

I don’t think people ‘fall off’ the SLD wagon because it is complicated but because they simply get sabotagued by life’s pratfalls. Of course the answer is to plan ahead, and that does help; now, I KNOW I’m already behind, and can make adjustments. My first run-through last year? I was floating along, not paying attention, thinking “Oh SLD is so SIMPLE I can’t screw it up!” but I screwed it up BECAUSE it is simple. Easy to overlook, take for granted, and not account for. That is the dangerous part.

This weekend I plan to weigh in for the first time in about a year. Give me strength.