happy birthday, JemJ!! bonne anniversaire!!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *




A very happy birthday to you, crazybutsound!


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This is a little early but have a lovely birthday and pamper yourself!! May your next year be filled with sweet goodness!

work zones, fritter banks and other paperclips for the pathetic personality

F*********CK!!!!!!!!

I set the timer, I did 15-minute segments, I ran about doing errands in town plus getting my hair cut, I got my Renaissance module organised AND THEN I FORGOT TO RING THE TRAVEL AGENT'S TO BOOK MY TICKET TO ATLANTA. And now it's 8.30 pm and I FORGOT, I FORGOT, I FORGOT. Aaaargh.

*takes deep breath*

Anyway, I am in the process of adapting the whole Stepford FlyLady to my non-domestic life, i.e. to work. Work both to do with my institution (teaching and admin) and my research (writing my book and my conference papers). I have decided that the academic equivalent of a SHINY SINK is my NEAT AND TIDY DESK. The wood must show between the piles of paper! Everything is now aligned at right angles, military-styles, and encased in post-it-labelled transparent cut-flush folders. My army of paperwork!

I have decided that email is laundry. It's boring but it needs to be done every day, otherwise it will get out of hand and turn into a 574-message intray from hell. And just as laundry is full of ripped socks, so work-email is full of spam and useless rubbish and time-wasting messages that need to be deleted as soon as they are glimpsed. Also, email can't be saved up; it's got to be done at intervals throughout the day, otherwise it will consume hours.

I have also decided that emails are sort of like hotspots: they need to be put out but in short bursts of attention, not for 1/2 an hour at a stretch. (This applies only to work, of course, *g*, not necessarily to LJ-comment emails.)

I have decided that my office needs to be decluttered 27 items at a time (the fling boogie); this includes hard copy and matter but also digital clutter, like ancient emails or folders.

I have decided that a 5-minute room rescue can be 5 minutes spent on delving into my worst mound, the area of my working life I least want to enter.

I have decided that ZONES can also be work zones! I don't need to do everything at once every day! I can spend a week in the WRITING MY BOOK PROPOSAL ZONE (15 minutes a day!) and then another week in the COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH PROJECT zone and another one in the CONFERENCE SESSION zone! This is my most cherished discovery!! My life can be ZONED!! *zones out*

I have also decided that just as for FlyLady the routines are the most important thing, so it can be for my desk life. I can have a first-thing routine, and a last-thing routine. I have decided that I will first-thing open a document, make sure my desk is tidy and my files are lined up, military-style, and I will pull out a clean sheet of A4 scrap paper every morning and that can be my jotter and reminder sheet for the day. At the end of the day, that sheet will be thrown out! So that it won't turn into a to-do list!

Another last-thing thing is that I will also print out any important document I'm working on. So that it won't disappear into some folder somewhere on my desktop. It will be a record, like the giornate of Italian Renaissance fresco painters (or, in German, Tagewerke -- they parcelled out the entire wall into lots-per-day because they had to work fast before the plaster dries; you could only do so much per day; that lot-per-day was called a giornata, plural giornate).

The next morning my routine will include looking at my previous day's giornate! I will also last-thing put a post-it on each cut-flush private-Eversmann-style folder to say 'Do next'. So that when I get around to that folder, I won't have to think about what to do; I can just do it.

I will choose a day for detail-tasks and do those things on that day, not when they come in. Things like dealing with admissions forms or commenting on students' dissertation. I do not want to be controlled by other people's timetables and do these tasks as they happen to drop into my intray! I want to control when I do them. This will be like FlyLady's Basic Weekly Plan, with Paying the Bills days and so forth. I will have an Admissions Forms day.

Then, not taken from FlyLady, but from elsewhere, I will think about tasks in terms of priority and urgency. My own research is priority number one, but other things with low priority may be more urgent, e.g. setting up an Open Day display panel. Not sure how this will help me on a practical level but so far it is already helping me on a psychological one.

FlyLady reminders always ask WHERE IS YOUR LAUNDRY? I've decided that teaching, also, is like laundry: it goes in cycles. Each week requires several steps: planning lecture, writing lecture, planning seminar, getting slides/ videos, making photocopies, making OHPs (if needed). It's best to do all of this the week before, so I want to start preparing next week's lecture as soon as this week's lecture is over. And this semester I'm teaching four modules per week so it's vital that I stay on top of things! (If I'm not to neglect my number one priority!)

Today I have also invented the FRITTER BANK! I have decided that I don't share the view of procrastination held by that dreadful sanctimonious Neil Fiore whose book I bought. Procrastination is not always self-destructive and un-productive and must be rooted out of our Weberian existences as servants to the capitalist system of maximum output and achievement. Sometimes procrastination is not even angsty, it's just frittering. It's browsing books in Borders, even though I was using the shop as a shortcut. It's musing about Dom leaning back like a willow branch into Karl's embrace. It's buying some boots and then pondering their colour and then returning to the shop and exchanging them for some other boots.

So I have allowed myself a FRITTER BANK. I have one hour's worth of frittering in the bank every weekday. So the frittering is not negative time! It's just time eating into my bank. And I've been generous. It makes me feel better, too, because today I did not even come close to reaching my credit level!!