Structure.
Bullet points, organisation charts, pivot tables, process flows, Venn diagrams, tick boxes, labels, to do lists, project Gantt charts. They are all part of me. I’m pretty sure my blood sample contains numbers, arrows and boxes.
Give me a mess and I’ll organise it. My life runs on Google Sheets and I even made my previous partners run on spreadsheets too, they truly had me at “Excel”. I love this about me, it helps me organise my life and it helps me easily reference and access things, ideas and concepts.
It’s practical, but it also gives me a sense of control, which of course, in high doses is toxic. There’s a light and shadow to anything, and in its darkest form, structure turns into a spreadsheet-zilla nightmare of hanging onto every detail and becoming too stuck in the box I built for myself.
Sometimes I get paralysed and can’t make decisions without seeing numbers or a diagram, can you imagine how disabling this is when you’re just trying to pick dining chairs? I’ve had to sit on a stool for weeks before I could move through the inertia. I
’ve had to learn to become more flexible and let go of the comfort of numbers every once in a while, it’s liberating to make emotional decisions sometimes and it reminds me that the most precious things are not measurable.
Though I run Mindful Sauce, this site is not just about me, it’s about you, it’s about us and the community we are building.