When you’ve got a gray deadline
Oh, hi friends!
Can you frame your gray areas today?
I was in a meeting with my friend Tari yesterday, and as we talked about a long-term project, she swiftly began to set up frames—deadlines, boundaries—on a large task, taking into account: holidays, workloads, buffers. She worked backward from a must-hit deadline to create benchmarks to get us there. (She’s exceptionally good at this!)
There are so many gray areas—things you might want to do, things you say you will do—but instead of wrangling them, or creating impossible deadlines or unrealistic expectations, what if instead you made a nice, neat little frame for them?
(Basically, this is another word for deadline, excising the word “dead.”)
Since my next two days will be very gray and “busy” (trying to stop with that word), I’m going to frame my expectations: things I can do, things I can’t do now but will schedule for later, things I must do, things I will say no to. Frames!
As someone who tried to swerve into earnestness and away from cynicism a few years ago, I appreciated this. It’s OK to be earnest!
Speaking of earnestness…
Sometimes, I see movies 15 years late.
I watched The Station Agent over the weekend and was captured by the quiet storytelling, the empathy, the humor…
I was going to link to the trailer, but it's terrible and makes it seem like a hokey comedy (there's a voiceover!). This is a sweet clip instead. Watching a quality movie always makes me feel like dining at a nice restaurant. Full and happy.
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara