OGL 365 – Integrated Worker

Module 6 Paper
Margaret Schexnider

This was a difficult exercise for me. Trying to determine three things I would like

to eliminate from my life versus three things I could feasibly eliminate from my life was

where the difficulty came in, so I enlisted the assistance of my son to help me identify

these three things. With his help, we were able to come up with the following choices:

spending time to talk and assist my friends in processing issues/feelings they were

having/going through, spending less time working at home after work hours, and

cleaning daily. I decided on these three items because I believed I could feasibly reduce

time doing each of these daily, without impacting me too greatly in the future.

I didn’t give up any activity completely, rather opted to reduce spending time in two

of the areas. The two areas I chose to reduce time doing were spending less time

working at home after work hours and cleaning daily.

Day One was almost overwhelming because I had so many due outs at work that I

knew I could work on at home in hopes of keeping my workload within achievable limits,

but I decided to stick with the plan. Regarding the cleaning front, I did not clean at all

this day (I didn’t even unload the dishwasher to be able to load the dirty dishes in the

sink). I felt quite anxious and very uncomfortable overall, especially with going to bed

with dirty dishes in the sink. I didn’t really react, however my son took full advantage of

‘mom time’ and we watched a couple of television shows together. Doing this made me

realize that it felt really nice to free time to enjoy doing something other than stuff that

would always be there, especially because I got to spend it with my son.

 By the end of day two, I had a bit of work piling up, but had opted to unload the

dishwasher and clean the kitchen. Doing the minimal cleaning I did, helped relieve some

of the anxiety and discomfort coming from the fact that I wasn’t maintaining anything

else in the rest of the house that I normally did throughout the week. I spent time

playing a game on my phone and talking to a friend, which was awesome because I

normally don’t spend much time talking to friends unless one of us has something we

need to talk through with the other, and we just caught up and laughed. My son, bless

him, decided to assist with some of the anxiety and discomfort coming from the

cleaning front and picked up his bathroom and took out the trash for me! That was a

wonderful surprise. We then spent time going over his homework (he despises doing

anything school-related after school hours), and he had a great attitude about it. He then

asked how much work I still had to do that night, to which my reply was ‘tons,’ but I

stuck to my guns and said I wasn’t going to do any of it. Instead, I opted to make a

priority list for the next day, which actually helped relieve some of the stress from the

continually growing list and assisted in keeping me on track the next day. Currently, the

anxiety and discomfort is manageable, and taking some downtime daily has been nice.

On Day three I had some minor setbacks. I ended up doing laundry so I wouldn’t

have to do as much over the weekend. The nice thing was that my son helped, and I

didn’t have to fight with him to get him to do so. On the work front, while I didn’t login

remotely after returning from work, however I did have two work-related calls which

sucked about an hour of my time. I noticed at the end of the work calls, I experienced

irritation because I felt like both topics/items could’ve waited until the next day. I still
ended up getting some me time, which I used to catch up on some television shows.

Thus far I think I am digging this reduction challenge.

What I learned from this experience is that the things I feel like I need to do are my

choice. I need to figure out if reducing/eliminating them provides me more relief by

doing something I want to do rather than stress, anxiety, and discomfort from not doing

them. And if the answer is yes, I need to set these as boundaries and hold strong when I

am feeling/receiving pressure from others or myself.