ROW80 – 2022 – Round 1 – Check-in 2 (January, 16th 2022)

Hi everyone! 

Note: To keep posts short, I’ve made a Trello board with my goals for the year. Feel free to check it out if you want to know more about the bigger plan.

My word for the week is ORGANIZING.

Someone once told me I had the gift of organization. That’s not entirely true. By nature, I’m pretty disorganized and always going in every direction. I became organized because I really wanted to be. And I wanted that because it seemed so much easier and efficient. In the end, I’m not sure anyone is naturally gifted at organization. To me anyway, it’s hard work, but it’s also totally worth it because that’s what helped me get through so many projects.

But believe me, the inner me still wants to do all at once and focusing on only one thing instead of ten is kind of frustrating at time. (OK, to be fair, I should say I’m focusing on only 50 instead of 500…)

So why do I keep doing it? Why do I even bother with checklist and bigger pictures?

Well, first of all, I’m more driven this way and as I mentioned earlier, I get things done.

Then, once I got over the stressing aspect of long checklists and realized it was up to me and only me to move things around and reschedule if necessary, there’s something rewarding in checking these littles boxes. Yeah, each check is a victory and if you chunk things down, you can have several victories every day.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this because the foundation I volunteer for could use more organization as far as the French translation is concerned (I can’t say how it is for other languages, so maybe we French-speakers are at fault somehow?).

I realized this was undermining my motivation, especially as I’m going to be busy as busy as ever, with the Bachelor’s degree and everything.

And of course there’s the question of teams. It’s easy to be organized on your own. It took some effort but I ended up running my business and my life mostly the way I wanted. And I often find hiccups come from others (who are hell if we believe Jean-Paul Sartre). I know it’s also me being impatient because I know I would do things differently. Yet I love working with people when it just clicks. I actually met some of my closest friend through volunteer work!

Anyway, I’m working on patience because I truly believe in the project, but I find it challenging sometimes. And the result is that my motivation ebbs.

So I’m moving the volunteering goal for now because I realized the existing translations were far from ready for translation, and I’ve offered my experience and expertise to try and help correct that. Hopefully, things will fall into place, and if not, I’ll just do my best and stick to translating. 

There’s been change recently, so I do believe things will become more and more organized. At least, that’s what the board is aiming at, so it’s a start. ^^

Thankfully, the university I registered with looks pretty organized. And I was delighted to learn that, by the time I complete the Bachelor’s, there should be a Master’s Degree too!

That really gave me a nice feeling, as if my timing was perfect and things were nicely falling into place.

So here I am, starting the Bachelor’s, which I’ll probably complete in 7 terms, and then I’ll hopefully move on to the Master’s Degree. 

To me, these 5-6 years seem short, but then I realize my girls would be starting junior high by then and it gave me quite a shock. How different will our lives be by then! What’s just a short amount of time to me is literally a lifetime to them right now! This feels somewhat uncanny. ^^