Self-care is unsexy!

Situation 

Just one more meeting with my accountant to close the books for 2020. I wanted to just discuss a few details in the accounting software that I struggled with. Then he said: ‘can you just send me an excel extract from your bank so I can look into it?’. I was pissed off. Had I not spent approx 1h a day for all of January to get all receipts digitally into the tool, so we wouldn’t need to do it in Excel again?

Fast forward 3 hours. I learned how to use the software to compare receipts and bank, started going in correcting receipts from 50kr to 50,21kr. I also copied line-by-line every single item on my bank account because my bank doesn’t do excel extracts. All that because I am determined to close my books. 

Was it fun? The most frustrating 3 hours in a while. Accounting costs me a lot of energy. Accounting and other admin things. But boy (girl), did it feel good when I left my office at 8.

My thought was: that is self-care.

Self-care is often referred to as phone-free time, walks in the park, taking a bath. Sure self-care can be nourishing and relieve stress. It gives energy.

But I think the much bigger part of self-care is keeping energy from leaking. Think hard, what is one thing you haven’t done that keeps popping up in the back of your head every so often? That’s a lot of energy wasted (without the situation solved). All of a sudden self-care is not all that sexy anymore.

Here are a few more examples:

• Last week I exchanged my Swiss drivers license for a Danish one. You are supposed to do that within 6 months of moving to a country. I’ve been here for almost 5 years.
• For non urgent doctors appointments, it takes me about half a year to schedule. 
• It took me 8 years to send my master thesis to the HR person that helped with the interviews. I wanted to just correct a few typos and never got around to it.

Josie (my dear thesis partner), if you are reading this: I eventually did send it, he received it well and said it was more relevant than ever. Point being, not only did I fuck this one up but in those 8 years I also spent countless times thinking about it and feeling ashamed. That’s a massiv energy leak.

How could you approach this? 

Tips 

1. Create a shit list. Write down all the things that creep up on you regularly. I keep mine in Evernote, but an A4 paper will do just fine. 
2. Choose an item and break it down if it’s too big. I wanted to digitalise my accounting in a short enough period but also not overwhelm myself. Hence 1 hour daily.
3. Schedule it. 
4. Enjoy the feeling of freedom before you pick the next one. 

To sum it up:

Self-care can be energy giving but more often the caring thing to do is preventing energy from leaking. Do your energy accounting properly! It’s costing you energy in the short run, but saving you a lot of energy in the long run. The feeling when it’s off the list – priceless.