Last night I went out. On a school night. To watch Bey and Jay tear it up on the OTR II tour. I have zero regrets. It was a life experience beyond words but since that isn’t what this post is about I’ll keep it to myself for now.

I don’t normally go out on school nights because for me that means I see clients the next day. For many hours, I have to be fully focused on them and attempt to be insightful or at least validating. Challenging when tired. Impossible when hungover.

Luckily I wasn’t hungover but I did get home later than expected due to an adventurous detour. And my body just can’t seem to figure out how to function even for a moment on little sleep. So I slept in later than I would normally, throwing my day’s plan off by a couple hours.

In the past this would have thrown me for a loop. I might have fit the description of crabby. Certainly frustrated that I wouldn’t check off all the boxes on my list.

And I had a lot to get done today. Since I’m dog sitting, I now had two dogs that needed entertaining, a house that needed cleaning thanks to these two dogs entertaining themselves while I rocked out, a workout to get in, emails to send, phone calls to make, clients to see, paperwork, errands, some marketing stuff, and a poem and this blog post to write.

I couldn’t ditch the clients or the dogs so that left me with fitting everything else into an amount of time that didn’t exist. There have been times in the past when this thought became so overwhelming that I wasted too much of the precious time on panic over what to focus on first.

Not this time, though.

This time I entered a state of mindfulness, didn’t become crabby, and conquered. Not all of it. But enough to not feel like a loser.

I mindfully restructured my priority list to make sure I got done what needed to get done first (Sorry house.). Instead of bemoaning my fate as I attempted to accomplish each task, I just did the task. With as much presence as possible. I focused on it fully without wondering if I should be doing something else instead.

It was hard to save this for my last task of the day because I’d rather write than do any of the paperwork or other mundane tasks. But alas, since it isn’t yet paying the bills, I had to push it down the list.

However, because I was so mindful, I still have time left in my day to write this. Not much given that it’s 9:30pm but it’s technically still Monday on the west coast.

Here’s the thing, I’ve been in this situation before. The same amount of things to do and the same amount of time. I get a lot more done when I’m mindful and fully focused on the task at hand. Panic wastes time. Regretting the past or worrying about the future wastes time.

Nike had it right when they said “Just do it.” I don’t know that my just doing it came anywhere close to as flawless as the Queen Bee and Hova’s performance last night (Although I did get a high five from a client.) but then again I don’t have their entourage. So for the time being I do what I can the best that I can. Until I get that entourage.