I think Fall does this for many people…it makes you a little more willing to analyze yourself, a little more willing to think about your personal goals, and where you’d like to aim the next 10 years or so of your life. This is a good thing; obviously too much introspection will just make you melancholy, but seasons of thoughtfulness help you honestly assess the trajectory your life is headed. A man I respect once said, “fail to plan, plan to fail.”

Caregivers tend to be great at thinking deeply and often about the person they’re caring for. And some are not as strong at examining their own life trajectory and living in a pattern that is going to result in their own long term health and happiness (which always translates over to the health and happiness of their caree).

I’m not about to tell you to forsake your personal responsibilities and do yoga three hours a day. I’m not going to tell you to eat more salmon and buy a cat (but do it if you want!) But I do want you to be healthy and happy 20 years from now; not an embittered, wounded caregiver who regrets the years lost while caring. If you let other people (or circumstances) dictate your DayMinder every day for 20 years, it’s hard to imagine not becoming a little bitter!

All that being said, I’m going to show a little chart of a few things I did yesterday.

Look about as clear as mud? Let me explain: everything I did yesterday fell into one of four categories:

Urgent and Important

Urgent but Not Important

Not Urgent, but Important

Not Urgent and Not Important

Below I’ll walk through each of these in the context of my day, and then explain how thinking about your own schedule in this way can help you say no to things that just aren’t important, so you have more freedom to do things that are important.

1. My phone rang- it was my dad: As I was sitting in the office yesterday, my phone started buzzing. The phone was demanding my attention right now. It wasn’t something I could worry about a month or so from now, it was happening in the moment. It was something urgent. Now it could have been any number of people, and if it was somebody I didn’t want to talk to at the time, I didn’t have to answer the call. But I looked at my phone and saw it was my dad. My family is an important part of my life, and as a general rule I will stop doing most things to talk to them. I have decided that contact from my dad is important. So for me, a call from my dad is urgent and important.
2. Gmail notified me about my bank’s monthly statement being available:Another thing happened while I was in the middle of work. My email client let me know that I had a new email message. The “bing” sound coming from my computer tried to grab my attention right away—it was urgent. I brought up my email and saw that my bank statement is available. Have I ever even read my bank statement? No. This is something I’ve decided is Not Important. Ever. For me, I will suffer no loss if I block this email forever. For me, a bank statement email is urgent, but not important.
3.  I need to write an article for SageMinder: If you look at my DayMinder (no relation), you’ll see the words “article for sageminder” scrawled on the page with a little check box next to it. In fact, if you saw my DayMinder last week, you would have seen the same words, scrawled down much lower on a list of to-dos. In fact, it was under a section called something like “If I Have Time Today.” If all of today went by and for some reason I wasn’t able to finish the SageMinder article, no biggie. The article is not urgent. The earth will still revolve around the sun if I can’t get to the article until Sunday or Monday. But I love SageMinder. I love what Lori stands for, and I have happily committed myself to writing an occasional article to encourage Lori’s readers. For me it’s something I have decided is important. It is not urgent, but important.
4. I watched a dumb movie on Netflix: After work yesterday, there was nothing that had to be done. So I had plenty of options for how to spend my time. Among other things, I could have read a fiction book that I’ve been interested in getting to for a while. I could have gone on a run, or chatted with a friend, or played guitar for a bit. These are all things that did not have to get done right away. No pressing deadlines. They were not urgent. But there’s something else about the dumb movie I watched on Netflix last night—it is something I would never consider to be important.  It was not important. Now don’t get me wrong, relaxation is very important to me. If I were to watch an engaging movie, or a funny tv show that I’ve been interested in seeing for a while, I would have considered the activity to be not urgent but important. But because in my mind, dumb movies are a total waste of my time, this hour and a half of my day was not urgent, and not important.

You may have noticed that I used the phrase “for me” many times. You have to decide what’s important in your life. But it’s wonderfully freeing to take a look at the things in your life that you’re placing in the wrong categories, and shift them. No more stress about unimportant emails—your spam filter can catch them before they enter your mind. No more stress over trying to rearrange your book collection before bedtime, when it can wait until next weekend. Eventually what you want to do is always live in the important squares, and never live in the unimportant squares. So my ideal day would be spent only doing things in these colored squares:

Mapping out your average day like this is a wonderful thing to do once a year or so. If you’re type-a like me, you can even do it every three months or so! Do what works for you, you may not be as much of a checklist-checker as others, but it is very important for a stressed-out person to know where his or her time is going. If you’re a caregiver, statistics show you’re probably stressed. And if the pattern of your life is one of being stressed out (I’m not just talking about a season of stress), then you’re a bad planner, you’re probably living in reaction to circumstances on a regular basis, and it is going to catch up to you if you don’t do something about it!

So says crotchety uncle Kyle. My apologies if this comes off strong, caregiver. I’m for you, I love you, and I want to look back and have happy memories of the person you’re caring for and happy memories of how you spend your life, not bitter ones. You are a very special person, caregiver, and we’re lucky to have you. I hope these suggestions help you to use the wonderful gifts of empathy and responsibility that you exercise every day, and translate them over to your own personal plan for your life.

Kyle Heath is the Founder of Caris Alzheimer’s Supply, a company that provides eldercare products and caregiver encouragement. He also writes for the Caris Blog.

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