my busy week

[lobelia321]

My busy new time-management system
I have been very busy this last week. I have been trying a new system. I am always trying new systems, attempting to overcome my sluggishness and propensity to frittering and that desperate doomsday feeling at the end of a long day where I had no teaching and was supposed to devote my hours to my book and yet did nothing.

So, keeping in mind my success with Flylady since January (omg, wow!), I've been desperately trying out all sorts of other systems. At first, I adapted the Flylady emailing system and emailed myself reminders and motivational messages. But then I didn't read them so they served no purpose. Then I tried Flylady's 15-minute timer method and set my timer in frantic roundabouts: 15 minutes write book, 15 minutes prepare lecture, 15 minutes de-clutter kitchen, 15 minutes write D/D. But I let that lapse and never even set the timer and did 15 minutes de-cluttering and then 45 minutes D/D by resetting the timer and before I knew it, another day had passed and I had done zero minutes on my book.

Last weekend I googled 'how to manage time performance chart academic' because another mother at school who works in publishing told me how she keeps up with her work by doing daily to-do lists (well, duh, I do those but I just never stick to them) and 'performance charts', i.e. monthly charts where she writes in all the tasks she has to have completed by particular dates, and then breaks them down into smaller bits and schedules each one of those in as well.

Children are a waste of time -- apparently!
I was again inspired! The googling brought up a lot of business-oriented sites which are of some use but very geared towards City-type middle managers. One of them had the advice to eliminate time-wasters, such as computer games (fair enough) but also, and I quote, 'chauffeuring spouse and children around'. Now: how can chauffeuring spouse and children be a bloody timewaster? I immediately got annoyed. It smacked of sexism (so obviously addressed to a man, despite the little coy use of the word 'spouse' instead of 'wife' but what woman would be chauffeuring her husband round?). And to consider sitting in a car with one's children, which is a nice contained time of day for chatting and staying in touch and even important conversations and listening to programmes on the radio or on tapes together -- to identify that as a time waster!! Well, words fail me.

So I clicked my way out of that time management site and found a rather nice, straightforward academic anti-procrastination site , written by some guy who had trouble getting his Ph.D. thesis finished. This was just the thing! And it is the first system I've adapted that has now worked for longer than two days! I've been sticking to it all week and I have indeed religiously been writing (at least) ten minutes on my book every day!

TLM
I also drew up a chart with all the tasks I want and need to do, and (adapting from the management ones) I wrote T,M and L next to each one. T is top priority and means things I want to have accomplished for sure and that I would be sorry not to have done if I died in a year. M means medium and is for things I want to do but that can wait a little. L is for low priority, and the sites suggested that the L's can actually often be deleted.

I have two Tops right now: my book and two job/sabbatical applications. So I have just worked like the dickens on these. Then I added a little clock symbol to signify things I have to do (prepare a lecture that is on tomorrow) but that are not really any kind of priority for me personally, they are just part of my job. So there were a lot of these! I don't know where they all suddenly came from; swept under the carpet, I suspect, and allowed to throttle me with panic of a morning as I rushed in to the library, frantically pulling books and videos from the shelves.

Anyway, I tried to do all the Ts by every evening so I could cross them off my daily To-Do list. I also realise why my to-do lists so far (and I have many, many, many lists) have not worked because they were not slotted into a grand scheme of a) overall importantness (book! book! book!) and b) deadlines. If I had an important task to do by 'date in two weeks' time' (e.g. a job application), I never used to schedule time per day to do little bits of that task, working my way backwards from the deadline.

But getting used to this system has kept me very busy!! Especially as I am also addicted to the Flylady routines so have to do two lots of routine. But there is peace of mind, knowing at the end of each day that everything that needs to be done has been done, and everything that has not been done has been written down and scheduled in somewhere else. I used to wake up with anxiety and worry in the night!

Crap car and evil Dil Se stealers
The system makes no space, of course, for emergencies like the crappy shitty car bloody well breaking down yet a-fucking-gain, necessitating me sitting in the rain for 45 minutes waiting for tow-away guy and going from garage to garage, finding one that will replace a battery within less than 784 hours, and having to be jump-started all the time by tow-away guy. Still, the Hitchhikers' Guide-like message on our emergency card was rather nice: 'Don't panic' plus the number to ring. And I did have my to-do list with me so I frantically wrote my job application while sitting in the freezing waiting room of Kwik Fit Tyres!!

I was, however, flustered and had to give the lecture I had cancelled during the seminar slot and promptly left my Dil Se DVD in the DVD-player of a uni seminar room and the next day it was gone and someone has fucking made off with it! That is one of my top ten evah movies and I am annoyed!!! (*stomps foot*) *wails*

D/D = L wtf??
One strange thing that came out when I was assigning Ts, Ms and Ls is that I assigned an L to the D/D. Now that was an odd insight, seeing I have been so obsessed with that opus. Ergo: it's not been scheduled in on my daily to-do lists. So what happens the other night? I have a dream that inspired another fic in my head! Now, once I have this system under control maybe I can actually find time for a bit of L here and there. It can be L for Leisure.

Self-congratulatory paragraph (very rare for me who is usually under-self-confident
But still! My sink is so SHINY, and my house is so CLEAN, and my toilet smells of the aroma of BLEACH, and I am so BUFF because the sons and I go swimming every Saturday at 9 a.m., and I look out through the windows of my study eyrie and see my SHEETS gently swaying in the breeze, and I've got TEN THOUSANDS words written on chapter 4 of my book (*fuck*, *falls over*), and I sent off my JOB APPLICATION yesterday, and the sons did the VACUUMING today!!!! They are Flyboys!!!!

And the house smells of the scent of CAKE wot is baking in the oven, and there is also home-made BREAD on the way, and have I been replaced by an alien from a pod?????

Big Brother for Babies
Oh, and we have all in t'family been enjoying those supernanny programmes that seem to have invaded British television under various titles. It's either Big Brother for Babies or Evil Teens or SuperNanny but it's all rather mesmerising viewing. It's especially good for us parent types, because it makes us feel so smug, it's wonderful. E.g. there was one family where one of the girls was 2 1/2 hours late to school because she refused to get dressed. Now, *pats self on back*, my sons have never not got dressed for school (unless ill). They might be late because their mother is a hopeless fritterer (although not lately!!) and her car a clapped-out Golf but no matter how they whine and scream, they have always been dressed for school. *pats back some more*

Also, seeing these family problems from the outside, it becomes very clear very quickly that it's not the children who are the problem but always the parents. Which is not all that smug-making except the children in the programmes are so much worse than mine that it's smug-making after all.

Cold Turkey
Goodness me, what a long post. I've obviously got withdrawal symptoms!!!

Comments

[bunnysquee.livejournal.com]

yes, you have been replaced by an alien pod person. check out your post - all organised into sections with bold headers and everything. *peers into monitor*

the most important thing is, are you happy with your house smelling of baking and bleach? if so, keep it up.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I love my house smelling of baking, and I love my toilet smelling of bleach. I just can't believe that I am achieving all of these smells without any input of my mother!! (This was my big problem during counselling.)

I didn't add the headings until I'd typed the whole shebang, and I thought this looks like a glop and nobody will read this, so I copied thamiris's way of organising mega-long and un-lj-cut posts.

*stares at your rather cute iconlet*

[bunnysquee.livejournal.com]

sometimes i wish i could be bothered with cooking and cleaning, but in a not so much kind of way.

*uses your favourite iconlet*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

But this is the wonderful Flylady way: it only allows you to do 15 minutes a day! Plus routines. The cooking is an optional bonus wot i added in.

Ah, icon.

[noblerot.livejournal.com]

LOL, it's the return of the shiny!sink.

*hides*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Why are you hiding?

[noblerot.livejournal.com]

The shine! It blinds me!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

If only I had a digital camera!!!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's Eddie's site! I love that site. My two favorite pieces of advice are to stop in mid-sentence so it will be easier to start again, and "You just have to keep starting."

I too am trying a new time-management system, which involves:

1. Noting the three naturally-occurring segments of my writing day (coffee shop mornings, home from noon till school's out, evenings after kidlet's in bed, not all of which are available for writing on any given day)

2. Setting a medium-sized goal for each segment in a given day (400 words, which is small enough that I can do it even when I'm not feeling all that well, but big enough that it usually gives me momentum to keep going)

3. Not allowing myself to do anything else until the goal is met

4. When I've met my goals for five days, taking a damned day off.

People of my personality type tend to mislead people; we keep all sorts of planners and to-do lists, and people assume that this makes us productive, but actually it's just because keeping planners and to-do lists is more fun than actually doing productive work.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

You know that site? Are they any others of that ilk that I should know about? Why am I always the last to discover these things?

The thing about giving the wrong impression is so, so true. And I mislead people willingly, mainly because I am hoodwinking myself. What I've learned from the Flylady list is that list-making can (has to be, I guess) turned to good use; you just have to know how to make the list and what to write on it and then how to make yourself do the stuff on the list. I am drowning in list. But I guess now I have a 'master list' and am consolidating all other lists so I just have to look in one place. Okay, two places. (Okay, actually three but three's manageable!)

I am totally with you on the medium-sized goal. Actually, my goal at the moment is tiny because it seems I cannot cope with more. I have subscribed to the newsletter of that academic lifecoach who is linked on Eddie's site and she talks about the 'tolerable ten'. So my goal is ten minutes of writing a day. (And then, to do what Eddie says: try to exceed that.) But even if I only do the ten minutes, I get to give myself a gold star on my calendar. My sister-in-law who is a musician says it's like scales: people tend to think musicians are inspired all the time but she says it's 95 percent hard slog and work and, basically, doing your scales. You can't get the 5 percent inspiration without it, and you've just got to start on your scales and you can't hang around waiting for that inspiration. This also I found helpful. I always tend to think I've got to be in the mood but what if the mood only comes once every blue moon or what if it comes at 11 in the morning when I have to be at a marketing commitee meeting????

I liked Eddie's advice of going to a place where the only alternative to doing the task is to do nothing: sort of boring yourself into it. The problem is that I type at my computer and the computer is EVIL TEMPTRESS LJ ONLINE SLASH LAND. My sister-in-law has sent me a pile of nice felt tipped pens to motivate me so maybe it's time to remember the ole longhand.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I know about Eddie's site because one day I didn't want to do any writing, so instead I spent the whole afternoon googling "procrastination." Things That Are Examples Of Themselves.

I like the comparison with scales, because the thing about scales is that they train your fingers to hit exactly the right note without input from your brain -- so that if some great musical inspiration hit you, you'd be prepared to play it rather than lose it while you hunted for the right note.

Or weightlifting, too -- you can't always be climbing mountains; sometimes you're doing boring, repetitive things designed to make you capable of climbing mountains.

I absolutely cannot write on the computer. The computer is nothing but a big box of procrastination. I write longhand, with mechanical pencil in a little spiral notebook. And making myself do things you have to do on the computer (such as type, or edit) involves an elaborate system of rewards and punishments which makes the spouse, who is naturally gifted with self-discipline, laugh at me.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I like the mechanical pencil thing. I love mechanical pencils! The thing is I have got used to typing on the computer, and it is wonderfully efficient for some things, e.g. for uploading my chapter draft and then working on it at work and then going to the library and using the library computer and accessing it from there, etc.

But the temptation thing!! If only the internet hadn't become so libidinous for me in 2002! But my longhand is totally shot. My hand is a claw. I realised that you actually need fine motor skills for handwriting. I used to have beautiful handwriting! Now my fingers can just do the clonkety-clonk up-and-down movement on the keyboard. It doesn't help that I taught myself to type with ten fingers when at uni so I now type very, very fast, and my longhand is not fast but crooked and illegible.

[brightest-blue.livejournal.com]

Wow. You are amazing. I can't believe how much you've changed your life over the past few months. You seem happy- I hope you are, most of the time at least. Maybe it was the breaking-free-of-the-mother episode that made all of this possible. Because now, even though you may be doing things she may approve of, you're doing it YOUR way.

I do have to confess to an inferiority complex when it comes to reading all of the things you got done. We moved nearly two months ago, and even though we've made some progress, we are still mostly NOT unpacked. I'm trying not to be too hard on myself, because I still have plenty of sick days, but I'm getting frustrated. Hubby can only do so much without my help, and he's plenty busy, running errands, making sure I get the right stuff to eat and taking care of the pets.

Not to mention we have this enormous garden that is a disaster of mud and weeds right now. I keep trying to tell myself it's no big deal, because no one else can really see it, although I do want it to be nice when the weather warms up. Oops, sorry about angsting away on your LJ.

And regarding your flyboys- yay! I'm amazed at how often I come across the testimonials where eventually the whole family converts to all or part of the fly-system.

I'm also addicted to to-do lists, and it's rather gratifying to check things off as I complete them. I use Outlook and it lets me set priorities for each task. So my bills get paid on time, but all the birthday cards et sent out late. Maybe I need to re-prioritize; because after all friends and family are more important than bills.

I have high hopes that my birthday bicycle will help cure me. I only survived last summer by walking Sasha every day, and I'm hoping some exercise on a fun new vehicle and a bit of gardening will help me out. I also read an article on Crohn's Disease (which one gastroenterologist had ruled out, mistakenly I believe) that said recent research showed that it can possibly be permanently cured by a cocktail of antibiotics. Would that it were so!

Update more! I miss you! It doesn't have to be long. :-) Which reminds me I still have an e-mail from you I need to respond to.

I really hope you can continue on this kick. I've known you for three years now, and you do seem like a different person, but in a good way.

*love and hugs and smooches*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I am often happy, it is true. Well, being the terminal case that I am I daren't speak the word 'happy' ever but let's say, I'm not depressed. I'm too busy! And who brought me into this new life???????

And I am amazed the way the mother thing has solved itself. She is coming to visit for the first time since the depression this summer and for the first time since Flylady, of course. It will be interesting!

Flylady testimonials are strangely prophetic. I have had several lots of visitors coming into the house recently, looking astounded and saying, "Have you redecorated? Your kitchen looks bigger." and similar things.

Do not have an inferiority complex! I am a) employed and b) not ill. Also, remember Flylady's dictum number one? Do not beat up on yourself! I still have problems with that one myself so maybe that's why I know how important it is, :-)

[brightest-blue.livejournal.com]

Being busy is a key thing in not being depressed, I think. And I WILL not beat up on myself! *gives self massage instead*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Being busy is totally crucial to not being depressed! I absolutely agree! I never think now, 'o no, I've so much to do, I'm so busy, I just want to have a day off'. I know from experience that days off are my personal hell. But I need a list or I will do nothing and get gloomy. So now I have my Flylady routines and another list for my work-related stuff. I have a master chart for the next 14 days (!!) and then I make a new to-do list every night. Sometimes I fall into bed with exhaustion and I hardly ever have LJ time anymore -- but there is no time to get depressed! So that's fine by me.

It took me a while (several years?) to figure out that I don't really *want* leisure time...!

[brightest-blue.livejournal.com]

It took me a while (several years?) to figure out that I don't really *want* leisure time...!

If there's leisure time, then you need to be busy during that time too, even if it's just sitting down to watch a movie, it needs to be scheduled, than bounce right back up! That's the crap part about being sick- I'm being forced to have leisure time and I DON'T WANT IT.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I can see how that sick/leisure thing is totally craperoo.

[msilverstar]

I am deeply in awe of all you're doing.

Children are not a waste of time, but they are a humongous consumer of time! And that counts! They're not less important than writing and teaching and shining your sink. (BTW, I realized that you can't shine the damn thing unless you wash all the pots and pans... clever). So good for you for spending quality time with them.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

The SHINY SINK is very clever: first, you empty the sink, then you wash the stuff you've emptied from it or put it in the dishwasher but you can't put it in the dishwasher because dishwasher is full! So you empty the dishwasher and then you wipe the countertops because now that the sink is so SHINY, the countertops look manky, and then you notice that the stove is a pile of greasy gunk and before you know it, your entire house is sparkling and your toilet smells of bleach!

Well, that's what happened to me, anyway.

Yes, children are a consumer of time but not a WASTE of time.

[made-up.livejournal.com]

I'm discovering that children *are* time, ticking away right in front of your eyes. I think I'd better hurry up and friend you if that's OK, as your suffering mirrors my own (am also deep in book/papers/life jumble). Bet I could beat you on procrastinating though. The last time we commented to each other was over football, and I note that Eddie says you should avoid spending time indulging in the vicarious triumphs of celebrities or sports teams. So presumably the time invested in a) following a football team and b) slashing it, is *doubly* wasted.

And my sink is like a toxic dump. Even though I've got a cleaner.