When Productivity Plummets
I'm sure my thousands of fans have noticed the lack of blogging here lately. (Can you tell that was facetious?) I'd been on a mission to uncover the secrets to productivity -- how can one move from thinking about getting things done to actually getting things done? We all know what we need to be doing, now why aren't we doing it? I'd actually pulled together a framework and was working on an outline (quite proud of myself since I was actually getting something done!) when the unthinkable occurred.
My dad got sick. Not a head cold, mind you, and "sick" isn't really the right word. Basically, he's encountered a life-threatening condition that's left him all but quadraplegic -- he now has the use of only his right arm. To put it succinctly, his heart broke. His aorta, actually. Remember John Ritter? He died of the same thing my dad suffered back in June -- an aortic dissection. Practically unheard of, extremely rare, and incredibly deadly. We had several hellish days where death was imminent. Amazingly, my dad rallied. Someone keeping the bedside ritual with me commented that perhaps he was staying alive for his elderly mother, who is 94 and lives in assisted living. Another speculated that he didn't want to leave "his girls" -- meaning my mother, my sister and I -- or his five beautiful grandchildren. Nope -- I'm convinced that other than the tremendous power of prayer (we won't get into all that on this blog), my dad didn't die simply because he didn't WANT to. He wasn't ready.
We're 76 days in now. He's in a skilled nursing facility undergoing intensive rehab. We hope that he'll be able to go home eventually and have some level of mobility. We're thankful for every day we have with him. My mother's life has been turned upside down as she deals with the ramifications of this event -- from grief to loneliness, medical decisions and care concerns, security and financial issues, anger, frustration, bureaucracy, and a new "normal." I'm adjusting to adding the care of my father (and just as important, the emotional support of my mother) to my already full schedule as business owner, wife, mother, frustrated writer, community volunteer, knitter, avid reader, etc. etc, etc. Staying busy is rather my M.O., but this has jacked things up to an entirely new plane.
Because this article is about productivity and not my father's tragic illness, I'll get back to my main point. In the immediate days and weeks following my father's illness, my productivity was completely gone. I didn't work for an entire week and after that, only worked sporadically for several weeks. My poor family suffered as I struggled to deal with the mortality of my healthy, active father. Volunteer responsibilities went by the wayside. Things that had seemed vitally important only days prior suddenly dropped completely off the radar. Here are a few observations (in no particular order) regarding life in the wake of a life-changing crisis:
- Email can be a good thing. Thank goodness I had a laptop. I kept in touch with concerned friends and family via email, providing important updates in those early hours and days. This was a life-saver in that we didn't have to use a lot of additional energy responding to phone calls in order to keep everyone updated. I was also able to forward important work-related emails to my employees, thus ensuring that my business continued to operate uninterrupted. It would have also been helpful had I had an alternate way for others to check my email, in case I was the one incapacitated or unable to get to my own in-box. A simple program like LogMeIn could come in very handy, allowing others to log in to your computer from another location.
- Be sure to have things in order, so that stepping away from work and other responsibilities is not a complete catastrophe too. I had long since turned over vital, day-to-day responsibilities to key employees, a la The E-Myth so that time didn't stop just because I was out of the picture. The same goes for home -- a family notebook with key phone numbers, menus, school papers, and instructions regarding finances and schedules proved very helpful for folks trying to pick up the pieces behind me during those first few days.
- Give yourself a break. You will not return to "normal" quickly, if at all. I stopped everything but the essentials for quite some time. The first week or so was only about the hospital, sleeping, and eating -- though the last two weren't even possible the first couple of days. Life will eventually return to some semblance of normalcy, but to expect you can quickly return to a regular routine is unrealistic. I finally returned to the gym after a two-month plus absence. It felt great to get back, but there's no way it was going to happen sooner. I also had to frequently remind myself that there would be time to continue work on my book and my strategic planning at a later date. A crisis such as this one does dramatically reorder your priorities and leaves you stripped to the bone. Being kind to yourself when you're under this kind of stress is imperative. There's no other option.
- Have a good support system in place. I was fortunate in that I could rely on my wonderful husband and good friends to take care of the household and run kids to and from as needed. Others took over critical volunteer responsibilities. Still others provided much-needed emotional support. Church members mowed lawns and brought food. It is a cliché -- but cultivating deep friendships will stand you in good stead when the going gets tough. You must be a true friend if you ever expect to have true friends who will take care of you and yours when tragedy hits home.
- Faith does matter. You certainly don't have to worship the same God I do, but this situation has taught me that sometimes things happen that are only explainable if you have faith of some kind. And likewise, faith in God or a higher power can provide a footing that enables you to survive and move on, one small step at a time, even when it seems impossible to bear one more heartache. I found myself saying prayers and liturgical responses from my childhood and singing hymns I thought were long forgotten -- sometimes for comfort and other times, to keep terrible thoughts at bay. There are people who will tell you that it is impossible to have a true understanding of what faith really means in your daily life until a really bad thing happens. They are right.
- Grief is a process. Even if your loved one doesn't die, a health crisis of the magnitude our family has experienced changes life forever. There have been many losses. Everyone experiences grief and loss differently and isn't very pretty. Accept that you will react strongly and emotionally for months and years to come, for no apparent reason, to things that seem mundane. Understand that you will now view caregivers and those who've lost loved ones in a much different way. They become survivors in an army of walking wounded. You wonder how people manage to live and thrive -- yet they do, and so will you.
- Don't make any big decisions. Because life is so stripped down in moments of trial, important life decisions that perhaps you've been putting off seem suddenly so clear. I urge you NOT to take action yet. Your moment of epiphany might become a true disaster a few months down the road. Wait, let life settle back into something regular again, and THEN re-evaluate those areas of life that need examination. Your new knowledge in the light of these events can provide helpful insight as you contemplate change, but shouldn't be the basis for that change. So slow down and think it through after the initial crisis has passed.
- Live in the moment. Especially for those of us who are constantly looking for improvements and ways to streamline and plan life so that we can get through each day more productively, these kind of crises can really be devastating. "One day at a time" is a mantra for AA, but it is mighty universal. When you experience the complete lack of control that goes along with the critical illness and near-death of a loved one, the initial response is to work very hard to regain control wherever you can find it. Alas, that is impossible. We must constantly return, again and again, to the moment, for it is all that we truly know. We cannot predict how our loved one will feel tomorrow or in two weeks or two years. We cannot make them better or worse. This is a lesson though, that cannot be learned just once. Every new day the fears emerge. Will he ever walk again? Will he die today? Will my life ever be the same again? We don't know the answers and we're not going to know them. We have only today. And worrying, while natural when a loved one is at risk, is equally unproductive. Best to let it all go. To quote Mickey Rivers, former second baseman of the New York Yankees, "Ain't no use worryin' 'bout things you got control over, 'cause if you got control over them, ain't no use worryin'. And ain't no use worryin' 'bout things you ain't got control over, 'cause if you ain't got control over them, ain't no use worryin'."

