Light and Momentary

Fast away the old year passes

When the calendar turns over there will be six weeks left in 2018. 

What's left to accomplish on your list of new year's resolutions? 

Notes from inside my closet

I'd been thinking for a while that I wanted to take a step back from social media. It was eating up too much space in my head and too many hours in my day. At the same time the idea of stepping away seemed daunting. What about all the stuff I would miss if I took a break??

Last Saturday after choir practice I noticed that there was no line at the confessional. I slipped in and talked about my social media issues: the way I'd stayed up too late the night before, scrolling angrily through the Facebook page of the friend most likely to raise my blood pressure. The way I get all self-righteous and snarky. The ongoing low-level anger. The unwillingness to give any of that up, even in the presence of what felt like a nudge from the Holy Spirit. "So I am here seeking grace," I said, with low expectations. Afterward in the Adoration chapel I opened up my journal. In all caps I wrote "OKAY 7 DAYS NO FB NO TWITTER." 

I thought it would be painful. I kept waiting for it to get painful. But instead it has just been...delightful. I got up and ran in the cool of the morning. I read hundreds of pages of Harry Potter to Stella. I finished knitting another sweater. I made some headway on the email backlog, and got the van's oil changed (without thinking twelve separate times "I should get the van's oil changed"; I just went and did it), and planned/executed a half-birthday celebration, and texted the guy (finally) about the kitchen/bath remodel, and drove kids all over creation for summer activities, and played my violin for the first time in years, and made good progress on my research while also not spending too many hours in the office, and figured out a painless way to use all the CSA radishes*, and read Pickwick in the sunshine at the pool. I'll stop there but I could keep going.

*Blitz them in the food processor. Cook them down with the taco meat. Really, I promise.

Coincidentally (or not), I had an in-person dinner with local friends on the calendar for this week. I knew that one of them was struggling, but I only knew what was going on with the others from social media posts. I walked home from that dinner thinking about how poorly social media posts align with reality. I mean, it's not like any of them were making stuff up on social media. It's just that real life is three-dimensional, and social media posts squish that down so it will fit on a two-dimensional screen. And we need people to see the real us, our whole selves. Remember in A Wrinkle In Time, how the kids couldn't breathe freely on a two-dimensional planet? Maybe there's a Lesson there.

OH NO, that sounds super-sanctimonious. I am sorry for being preachy but I also can't bring myself to delete it.

I felt cautious about saying, "I am fasting from social media." When I wanted to tell Elwood last night about how lovely it had been I said, "Wait, I have to go in the closet." 

"Jamie," queried the ever-patient Elwood, "why are you in our closet?"

"Because Jesus! Prayer! Fasting! Closets!" But then I came out, because I am weird enough to shout from inside the closet but not quite weird enough to stay there and converse. 

So. It feels a little weird to trumpet my fast on the internet, but I am doing so as an invitation, not a boast. I am going to re-up for another week. Want to join me? 

Coming Soon: Vacancy

Soon, very soon, there will be some space in my head, you guys. Tomorrow is the LAST DAY of my summer class. Their final is all automagically graded, leaving me with twenty assignments and two discussions and also the grade appeal from one of last week's discussions (NOT THAT I'M BITTER ABOUT THAT ONE OR ANYTHING). I can do this.

Earlier in the day I was going to make The Big List, or maybe two. I always tend to start with the list of summer obligations, like "find a mason" and "get the pictures into albums," and then I have to think harder about the fun stuff. Kind of backward, I know.

But it's been a long day, my friends, and I'm having that thing where my judger is kind of broken because it has been judging ALL DANG DAY. Remember how I was all concerned about my students having to learn a month's worth of material in each week? Only belatedly did it dawn on me that I would also have to do a month's worth of grading every week. I am not sure I can exercise good judgment about summer Big Lists when my judger is plumb wore out, as they would say in the land of my childhood. Huh, you can tell I'm good and tired if I'm talking about things being plumb wore out. Making a Big List is kind of an art: too big and you get demoralized, but a mom's reach must exceed her grasp or what's a nine-month contract for?

So maybe I will just focus on getting the summer off to a good start. The plan for tomorrow: gentle run, brief yoga, a little catching up in 1 Kings, breakfast with lots of CSA veggies, and then check those exam settings. (Online exams, man-- there are so many details. If you're not careful you can make a total hash of things.) Put in a solid 90 minutes of undistracted grading, and then go to the pool with Stella and the sadly neglected Pickwick Papers. Oooh, maybe I'll make a salade Niçoise for dinner, and take a vote about whether to go to the new Incredibles movie or the fun thing at our church. I will enjoy the summer more if I am eating well and exercising regularly. Perhaps tomorrow I will post some firmer resolutions on that front, but tonight I am only going to plan for one day.

The dishwasher is running; the kids are all upstairs. Off to bed with me.

It gets easier

Miriel left me a comment on my last post, saying (nicely), "Isn't this a little over the top?" And, yeah, it probably is. 

It's a temperament thing.

In Gretchen Rubin's framework I am an Upholder with Obliger leanings, which means that I am hard-wired to set goals for myself (Upholder) and greatly assisted by creating some accountability (Obliger). So mostly these resolution posts are just me being me. I have been making new year's resolutions for almost 40 years, and I have learned a lot about what works for me and what doesn't. In most of these resolutions I am building on things that are already working. I was already going to read a bunch of books this year; that's a baked-in habit. I'm just reminding myself to focus some of my reading time on things that require a bit more focus than my most recent Amazon recommendations. I was already going to work out this year; I'm giving myself short-term goals (i.e., finish the race; don't be last) to motivate the workouts.

I used to get stressed out about doing All The Things but these days I give myself permission in advance to adjust as I go, which means some of them won't happen or won't stick. (I posted an example of this in early August. I flossed the heck out of July and now I am back to my usual slacker standards.) I am happiest when I'm working on a mix of habits and goals, which makes for a long post. Habits don't give a person boxes to tick in the same way the goals do, and I LOVE ticking boxes with a passion that is, frankly, kind of weird. But habits make it possible to hit goals repeatedly. Every sustained advance I have ever made in personal discipline is the result of habit formation.

It's a stage-of-life thing.

I sleep through the night almost every night these days, after more than 16 years of frequently interrupted sleep. THERE IS HOPE, mothers of small children; I promise there is hope. When I sit down to dinner with my family, we have pleasant conversations while people (mostly) eat the food I serve them. When I go to Mass, I issue occasional minor reminders about fidgeting. Nobody bites me. Nobody bites anybody! Nobody yells, "But I-I-I-I-I-I wanna cookie too!" in the communion line.

If I remind my kids to be kind to their siblings, they say, "Oh, sorry," with genuine contrition, and strive to do better. I never hear unexpected banging noises from other parts of the house that turn out to be a 4-year-old pounding together two things that really should never have been pounded together. (I still have the marks in my piano bench left there by the bottom of a purloined spice jar. It made an awesome hammer for the 30 seconds it took me to sprint across the house. Why the spice jar? I'll never know.) I am not responsible for anyone else's hygiene or toileting needs. 

This changes everything.

I had no "spiritual output" section for a long time, because all of my spiritual output (except for a tiny music ministry role) was directed toward de-feralizing my own children. It was hard to be alone for an evening, because dinner was a struggle, and bedtime was a struggle, and the in-between times with boys beaning each other upside the head for no apparent reason could be soul-sucking. Even when we were first involved with this parish retreat program 5 or 6 years ago, it was still a sacrifice to have the other person away for three nights.

The load gets lighter. It feels lighter because my children are generally helpful pleasant people these days; it also feels lighter because those years made me stronger. In any case, I can direct some energy elsewhere without shortchanging my family. I still have to plan it: I only said yes to Alpha because it will end in early March just before my teaching load picks up. I will have to choose a fall half-marathon carefully, because I'll have to work around the fall retreat and that could get to be too much. Six or seven years ago I couldn't have done either of those things comfortably, let alone think about doing them simultaneously.

December is coming anyway.

I've had years when I felt blah about making resolutions, but I am usually highly motivated by this true fact: I will pass through this year but once. If I aim at nothing, I will probably hit it. If I aim at lots of things, I will miss some of them. But I'll usually be happy about having made the attempt.

Year of Grace

I am getting a slow start on the resolutions front. It's better to start a little late, I figure, than not to start at all.

Some of what I am working on is the same old stuff: I'm kicking off the year with the Whole 30, hoping for better focus, a more even keel, and the departure of those post-election pounds. I'm planning to use races to keep me focused on the fitness front: April 10K, June triathlon, September half-marathon (probably), November 10K.

This year I am also thinking about my mental health. Over the break I've been thinking about some unresolved baggage that I would prefer to leave behind me this year, so I am planning to seek out counseling to address it. I also want to set up -- and maintain! -- a YNAB account so that we can be more disciplined about money. (And more in tune with each other. You can't make a new year's resolution for anybody else, but Elwood asked me a question about our bank account last month that made me say, "Hm, we need better communication here.") Another logistical kind of task: we need a will that reflects our current family situation.

I have a few specific reading goals: I'm going to read Dance to the Music of Time, Mystery of Edwin Drood, and two Trollope novels. (I'm planning another May Dickens read-along -- almost certainly Pickwick this year -- but that doesn't really require a resolution because I find it so much fun.)

Our house would benefit from some attention and I'd like to seize that particular bull by the horns: our kitchen and downstairs bathroom need some love; I want to get an estimate for some interior painting; once the weather warms up I need to find a mason. (I made a bunch of phone calls last year in search of a mason. A BUNCH. No joy.)

Spiritual input: I want to cultivate the habit of asking daily for St. Joseph's intercession with the specific hope of addressing some long-term frustrations. There's a Greg Popcak book I've been reading f-o-r-e-v-e-r and I am going to finish that up. During the early part of the semester, I would like to be consistent about attending the noon Mass at the Newman Center, though that might need to change once we get to March. And I'm re-reading the Bible and the CCC again this year, though that habit feels pretty solid at this point.

Spiritual output: I'm helping out with Alpha in the early part of the year, and another parish retreat in the fall. I would really like to find a way for our family to get involved with service to the poor and marginalized in Gladlyville, but I'm not quite sure what that looks like. And I am preparing Pete for confirmation at home, so I would like to be systematic about that.

Hm, this post is getting a little mishmashy as I move goals out of my journal and into the text box. I'd like to work on the habit of strength training, with the specific goal of being able to do a pull-up in December. (I am NOWHERE on this goal, my friends. This one is a reach.) And I'd like to be more consistent about volunteering with the music ministry, specifically by limbering up my fingers and playing the flute.

The last area I am thinking about is work, and here I feel a little overwhelmed thinking about goals. I have six papers I want to write at this exact moment, along with two projects that are still in their embryonic stages. And I feel like I need to make plans for the Next Thing-- I have a clear idea but zero direction about how to pursue it. Huh, maybe it's not surprising that I feel overwhelmed. So. I am going to cultivate the habit of getting in at 8 every morning and spending the first 45 minutes of my day on research. I am also going to cultivate the habit of a late-afternoon triage session in which I set priorities for the next day. In this area, at this point, I think habits are likely to be more fruitful than targets. OH AND ALSO: submit an awesome tenure dossier while pushing back relentlessly against impostor syndrome.

I might need more days in this year.

Looking ahead

Before I turned 40 I had a whole set of goals. There was a brain goal: finish the novels of Charles Dickens. There was a body goal: get in shape. That one had sub-targets: do a hundred pushups in <15 minutes, run a 5K in less than 30 minutes, and develop enough core strength to do the Pilates move called the Teaser. There was a professional goal: finish the PhD. And there was a home goal: declutter the whole house. 

It made for a hectic run-up to my fortieth birthday, but I hit almost all of the goals. (I didn’t get the basement decluttered. Everything else happened, though.)

These days I’m thinking about the next big birthday. I’ll turn 50 in a whisker more than 2.5 years— long enough to accomplish something meaningful if I tackle it wisely. 

I’ve thought about another reading project, like finishing all of George Eliot. (My Trollope project will carry me into retirement, even if I read two of his books every year. There are a lot of Trollope novels in existence. A lot.) Or maybe I’ll read Proust. (Oh, I just had a thought for 2018: maybe this will be the year that I read Dance to the Music of Time.)

i could use a house project or six. Things get shabby when you stay put for a while, and then you get used to the shabby. 

I also like the idea of a bigger fitness goal, though probably after tenure. A longer triathlon, maybe, or possibly a marathon. Tenure is the obvious professional goal, but what I’d really like to aim for is a research award. I’ll have to think about that. 

Tonight at dinner my brother suggested that I think about something else entirely, like learning a new language or another skill. I might prefer to polish up one of the rusty languages. For a while there I was reading Les Misérables in French, which was slow but satisfying. That would be a worthy fiftieth birthday goal.

it probably makes sense to give myself a couple of weeks to decide what I actually want to prioritize. I have some time to figure it out, and choosing a motivating goal is a significant chunk of the battle. 

I do not, however, have much time in which to settle on 2018 new year’s resolutions. There’s only one day left in 2017. I’m not quite sure how that happened.

 

Tendencies

I bought Gretchen Rubin's The Four Tendencies as soon as it came out and I'm about three-quarters of the way through it. I am finding it more insightful than I expected, with things I want to remember in each chapter. 

We had a chat about the Four Tendencies in the not-very-distant past, remember? Rubin's quiz told me that I was an Upholder, but I'm definitely an Upholder with some Obliger inclinations. I could take on a ten-year Dickens project happily, but I am more consistent about reading x amount of Dickens every single day if I am hosting a Dickens read-along than if I am just doing it on my own. Rubin writes about the Upholder tendency to be rigid and I was like, "Oh, hi, have you been spying on me?" I remember once when I was following FlyLady pretty closely and Christmas fell on a Monday, I felt genuinely flummoxed. I was supposed to clean my house on Monday, because Weekly Home Blessing Hour is always on Monday, and yet I was supposed to avoid unnecessary work because it was a holy day of obligation. There are many solutions to this difficulty, I can see in hindsight, but at the time I thought I might short-circuit something inside my brain deciding what to do.

I wish I had known about this framework earlier. My oldest son is a Questioner, probably with Rebel leanings, and it took me far too long to figure out that talking to him about the importance of rules was not an effective strategy. My second son is an Upholder with Questioner leanings, and I remember how distressed he would get when he was small about learning that he had violated some unfamiliar expectation -- weeping by the side of the pool, resolving never to return, when the lifeguard said he wasn't allowed to wear his floaty vest in the water.

My husband is also a Questioner with Rebel leanings, and he is completely unconvinced about Rubin's divisions. This is a response she expects from Questioners, but my husband finds her assertion that Questioners gonna question to be utterly unpersuasive. Somehow our conversation took a turn in which we were speculating about the roads we might have traveled if we hadn't married each other. "You'd probably be living in a big city and have a tattooed hipster girlfriend," I said. You would have thought I'd been speaking Urdu. "Tattooed? hipster? girlfriend?" he queried. "Um, what are you talking about?" I tried to imagine my alternate Elwood-less life and came up empty. Would I even be Catholic? What if I'd settled down with another rule-follower and never learned to push back against my own worst tendencies? I'm glad he loosens me up; he's glad I make the trains run on time around here (though I like to think I am more pleasant than Mussolini). I had my planner open and he was teasing me gently as he read over my shoulder. "EARLY BEDTIME in all caps, I see," he commented. "That's because it's like today's MASS and RUN entries," I told him. "It's something that will make me feel better if I do it for myself but that's easy to push aside."

Obliger tendencies in action, you see. Can I get myself to bed in five minutes? Probably not, but off I go to see how close I can come.

Tweaks

1. Today is the last day of my sixth Whole 30, which means now I have to decide what comes next. I'm thinking the same thing I always think: it's so good for my energy and self-discipline (and waistline), and so ridiculously restrictive. Probably I add in legumes and some dairy, while keeping grains to a minimum and added sugar pretty much at zero. Probably.
2. I'm also thinking about work accountability. Time-tracking is a good discipline because it compels me to keep thinking about what I'm doing with my life, hour by hour. There's a Slack channel run by some Ravelry folks that might offer a good level of low-dose accountability. I've been hesitant to participate because they all seem like good pals. But probably "would you like an invitation to our Slack channel?" was not secret code for "just don't participate because that would be annoying." I think I'll give it a whirl.
3. In my ideal world, kid activities would not be more than 10 minutes away from my house. Pete's soccer team practices 15 minutes away, out in the middle of nowhere, and I will be very happy when soccer season is over. Stella is interested in taking gymnastics at a place that's 20 minutes away; I don't think I can do that cheerfully on a weeknight. Over the course of my time-tracking week I spent something like six hours driving, including my trip to visit Joe on Saturday. That's, like, three weeks' worth of driving squashed into one for me. There are so many people in this world who routinely drive six hours a week. Probably any of them reading this post are thinking that this sounds very silly. It's good to know your own limits, right? 

Still thinking about time use

Okay, you guys, I won't subject you to the line-by-line summary of my whole week, I promise, but this is the thing that's on my mind: I cannot know how many days remain to me. I would like to use them well. There are a lot of things to fit into those days.

Mornings are pretty consistent around here, but today I didn't have to teach at 8. I got everybody out the door (Stella rode with Elwood instead of walking today) and enjoyed a quiet 15 minutes with the NYT and a plate of eggs with greens and garlic.

On Tuesdays I don't teach and it's tempting to ease into the day-- check the Washington Post, maybe. But today I got a student started in my lab space right at 8 and then dove in. I spent an hour on a revision-related task I'd been avoiding and dreading (Dear Self: It almost always feels better to do the work than to avoid the work) and then a second hour on easier revisions. At 10:15 I sent a progress report to the writing challenge coordinator and took my 8x8 KenKen out to the quad.

I made a total hash of that KenKen, though, and returned to the office feeling annoyed rather than refreshed. (Do I have any fellow NYT 8x8 KenKen lovers out there? Today was a tough one, wasn't it?) Email + getting another student researcher started + posting two assignments for my undergrads took me up to noon, when I scurried over to the Newman Center for Mass. I had a quick chat with friends afterward, and then ate lunch, with a chapter of Sourdough to keep me company.

The search committee met at 1 and I was not able to escape being named co-chair. Thankfully I don't have to create the gridded schedules for our candidates. I am so bad at gridded schedules -- they are just a weird blind spot in my brain and I fear I would assign at least one candidate to bilocate or to meet with the dean at 11pm.

Then we arrive at the slumpy part of the afternoon, in which I flailed a bit after a meeting re: yesterday's drama. (Good news, though: I think we have a much more satisfactory plan than we did yesterday.) Purposeful break, says my 2:45 cell, and in it I finished that stinking KenKen. Email and grading and prep for my 8am class tomorrow took me up to 4:30, when I skipped on home.

At home: dealt with mail, talked to kids and husband, cooked. When my part of dinner was ready I put on running clothes and headed out with Stella. She scootered (and left me in the dust); I huffed along and lamented the way that fitness doesn't stick around if you're not making use of it.

After a long chatty dinner (6:30-7:15) I decided to make coconut chai rice pudding. This was not my best idea: only one kid liked it and it made a mess and the coffeepot overflowed in the process. It felt like a scramble there, cleaning up a mess and reminding kids to finish up the tasks that actually belong in the afternoon (laundry & tidying). But Stella was in bed at 8:15, and I am just about to slather some lotion on my face and call it a night.

I like to set up coffee for the morning so it's waiting for me at 5:30, but I do not want to wake up to coffee puddled on the floor. There's a rip in our reusable coffee filter that allows grounds to get into the valve and create, like, a tribute to Iguazu Falls. I should probably just make a French press in the morning since there are no disposable filters in the house. 

It's like the Time Log of J. Alfred Prufrock: do I dare to brew a pot? I can hear the Cubs fans calling, each to each. (It's September. The radio is always tuned to the Cubs game.)

I hope they will not call to me, actually, because I am going to SLEEP.

Day in the life

This week I am doing Laura Vanderkam's time-tracking challenge, a salutary exercise that I can never seem to sustain. But one week every now and again is better than no weeks, I suppose. I don't plan to tell you all about every hour of the week (everybody breathes a sigh of relief), but I am going to tell you some things about today and we'll see how it goes. 

5:30 wakeup today, with half an hour of quiet: Lauds, Job, Luke, Catechism on societal supports for individual vocations, quick journal entry
6-6:30, shower, subdue hair, make a smoothie
6:30-7, process email over breakfast, talk to kids about the day
7-7:20, flip through the Times, do the KenKens, check backpacks and steer kids out the door
7:20-7:45, walk part of the way with Stella and then up to the office; this is also rosary time for me
7:45-9:15, final preparations; teach grad students
9:15-10, meet with FOUR separate people, only one of whom was expected. One of these meetings is a closed-door affair about some brewing drama. Urgh. 
10-11:55, teach two undergrad classes
11:55-12:10, meeting with more drama, more URGHing
12:10-12:30, palate-cleansing KenKen (I might have a mild addiction to the 8x8 KenKen) + peek at hurricane updates on FB
12:30-1:30, brisk walk to fitness center, 35-min swim + the rest of the rosary, speedy shower
1:30-2, grab a sandwich, eat it while prowling through social media

(Hm, that's almost two hours away from work tasks in the middle of the day.)
(Also hm, I am bad at coming down after a morning full of teaching, and today I wound up finishing my important afternoon to-do items. Maybe there's a connection.)

2-2:30, another student meeting, a little flailing during the attempt to settle in and revise (flailing = irrelevant internet searches, skimming articles unproductively)
2:30-3:15, happy productive editing time that leaves me with 19 lines to tackle in my 41-line revisions table
3:15-4:15, kind of a frustrating hour, with two additional conversations about THE DRAMA, one of which is helpful but lengthy. Also checked in with kids and processed most of my work email from today during this window.
4:15-5:15, writing a quiz for the grad students and reviewing their readings for the week
5:15-5:30, peaceful amble home
5:30, enter the WHIRLWIND. Pete needs to leave immediately for soccer pictures. He is crying, worried about getting homework done since he also has Scouts. I am trying to update a financial thing that I forgot about but Pete needs me. We grab his sandwich/water/Scout stuff/homework stuff and hit the road.
5:40-6, try to settle Pete (pray/comfort/plan) while driving like the mom version of Mario Andretti to the soccer complex. Fill out the picture form in record time and hand it, panting, to Pete.
6-6:25, so we weren't actually late for pictures after all
6:25-6:45, after pictures, I take Pete to Panera so he can use their wifi for a quick homework session. I drink tea and read a Kindle sample of Sourdough while he works.
6:45-7:15, to Scouts, and then home
7:15-7:45, Elwood has made kebabs and four of us eat them with melon. I keep yanking myself away from thoughts of work drama.
7:45-8:15, I do the bedtime routine with Stella while the downstairs crew clears the table and starts the dishes
8:15-8:50, finish dishes, wipe flat surfaces, start laundry, get ready for bed, give the 17yo a check for renewing the minivan registration tomorrow, send the 20yo his ATM card with a hastily dashed-off letter
8:50-9:15, log time, chat distractedly with Pete and help him with math homework, pelt through the writing of a blog post and hope it is not too incoherent or inadequately edited
9:15-9:20, I cannot post a completely unedited blog post. Can't do it.
9:20-9:40 will be condensed compline and a few stolen moments of reading in bed

Huh, my inner editor says this post is kind of a mess but OH WELL I am publishing it anyway.

Weekly Re-Shrew

If you've tried out the Getting Things Done system, you're already familiar with the weekly review. It's one of the GTD cornerstones. I see why it's a good idea. I just hate doing it.

Mystie Winckler describes her approach in this post -- the basic idea is that you need to empty your inboxes, knock out any quick and easy tasks that they generate, and plan for the following week. Set your priorities, she advises. Review your calendar. 

My problem is always the inboxes. By the time the inboxes are empty, I don't want to do anything else. I want to set my auto-reply to LEAVE ME ALONE UNLESS YOU ARE LIKING MY SOCIAL MEDIA POST. Who has time to PLOW and POPULATE and POSITION when there's so much email in the world?

I am just going to think aloud at you, friends-- okay? Because this seems like it shouldn't be so hard and yet I do find it hard. Right now in my personal inbox there are four messages that require me to think about Joe's new school. How are we going to handle transportation for him on long weekends? How often will we visit him? Answer: I do not know. There are two messages that involve tasks for a boy with a follow-through problem. I should deal with the follow-through problem and with the tasks, but [cue wailing inner three-year-old] I don't waaaaant to. There are two messages about Boy Scouts that require me to talk to a boy who doesn't really want to stay in Boy Scouts even though I think it's a good idea for him to stay in Boy Scouts, and one about Girl Scouts that requires me to make stay-or-go choices about Girl Scouts. I have also been avoiding the five messages reminding me that it would be a good idea to accomplish some non-essential work tasks like reading a new issue of a journal, and the four messages about the Mystie Winckler course derailed by our NYC trip.

Four of the messages represent conversations I want to have with people I care about. They're just buried under the decisions and responsibilities that make me weary.

Are you a GTD-er or a weekly review-er? Do you have any inbox secrets to share?  

Habits and hurdles and roots

At the beginning of July I made myself a habit-tracking log. You can see some of what I was working on in the picture, if you're into that kind of thing. I was reasonably consistent about reading the Bible, but then we move into the section where it's clear I didn't really want to be working on the habits I assigned myself: didn't want to be reading Trollope, didn't want to be running, didn't want to take time for yoga. I did finish Mystie Winckler's Simplified Organization course, and I got a year's worth of pictures into albums. (Although! I just realized as I was drafting this post that I overlooked a couple of early July pictures. Check out these flaming bananas from our experimental fiction feast!)

I'm doing a six-week Mystie Winckler mini-course, but I got up this morning and thought, "UGH! I have to do those stupid routines AGAIN? I just did them YESTERDAY!" I...might be one of Mystie's remedial students.

There is a tree drawn on the left-hand page of my journal as a reminder of Psalm 1, my great-grandfather's favorite bit of scripture. I drew it because I was thinking about bearing fruit, but then all through the month I kept bumping up against the idea of rootedness in Christ. I knew I'd see roots mentioned in Colossians 2, but I was surprised to encounter them in Ephesians 3 as well. You know how sometimes you see a word everywhere you go? Rooted was my word.

So I have been thinking about roots: the way they can stabilize a mammoth entity. We can rest peacefully under trees, knowing they won't fall over on us, because of their root systems. I have been thinking about the way that plants feed themselves through their roots, drawing up the goodness that makes it possible for them to bear fruit and create shade. For some plants, like hydrangeas, the nature of the soil in which they sink their roots can alter their whole appearance, which prompts me to think carefully about where I am rooting myself. I have been reflecting on the idea of roots working their way through rock-- it's a slow process. It's normal for that growth to require patience. And here's a final little tidbit I learned last month: though roots themselves are hidden, the health of the root system governs the growth of the whole plant. In response to the environment in which they find themselves, the roots produce a substance that can speed -- or slow -- above-ground growth.

I think for August I'll focus less on counting yoga videos, and keep thinking about roots instead.

Obligers, upholders, habits, and goals

Summertime is my season for thinking about making changes and getting stuff done, and so I've been been mulling over strategies lately. Gretchen Rubin's book Better Than Before talks a lot about understanding yourself as a key to changing your habits. She has developed a framework -- her forthcoming book is all about this framework -- that describes differences in motivation. 

Hold on, there must be a google-able image I can share...

...Oh, look, an image and a quiz. Want to take it and share in the comments?

I haven't taken the quiz because I don't think I need to. I am an aspiring upholder. I have upholder inclinations. But I have some definite obliger stuff going on as well. From the moment I read her descriptions, this bothered me. It was as if (in my mind) the upholders were the good kind of people and everybody else just needed to grow up. Those obligers should just pick up their marbles and go home.

And then, after an embarrassingly long time, it dawned on me that this attitude was unlikely to prove productive. What if I just acknowledged those obliger tendencies? Just a tiny bit of external accountability does great things for me: a blog post, or (sometimes) a Rav forum post, or stating my goals for the month while I am meeting a work friend for coffee. The half-marathon group I did last summer is the reason I finished my half-marathon. The sidebar checklists I used to post here were unbelievably motivating for me; I would practically salivate at the prospect of opening up the editor and adding a <del>. Maybe the best example is the Crazy Shakespeare Project. At the time I felt guilty because it took me 53 weeks (rather than 52) to read 17 Shakespeare plays plus the poetry, but in hindsight I have to say that was a pretty successful undertaking.

Maybe it's better to work with the way I am put together instead of wishing I were put together differently. (You think, Jamie?)

Here's the other thing I have been mulling over: I like working toward goals better than working on habits. There are lots and lots of voices saying that habit-building is the the golden key to a full and happy life free of periodontal disease. And I can see their point, sure, but habits don't give a person as many opportunities to open the editor and add a <del>. Habit formation leaves me feeling like I am inching forward when I want to swoop.

One of the pro-habit/anti-goal writers I read recent-ish-ly said it was better to work on a habit of daily exercise than to say "I will spend 18 weeks preparing for my first marathon!" He said that scenario set people up for falling off the exercise wagon: the marathon ends, and so does the training program, and it's back to eating Doritos on the couch for our marathoner. I read this and winced: my own exercise routine tanked after my half-marathon in September, and didn't really recover until 10K training in the spring.

So clearly, it's a both-and situation: you can't hit the goal of running the marathon without the habit (or at least the four-month habit) of serious exercise. A person can set up successive goals that feed habit formation. But it's probably helpful for me to know this about myself: I do best with a clear and ambitious goal, a deadline that is optimistic but not crazy, and a little bit of an audience. It took me three tries to type the "little bit of an audience" part, because I still wish I could be sufficiently motivated by the goal itself. 

It occurs to me that this discovery should not be surprising. A person who just entered her fourteenth year of blogging is clearly a person who might like a little bit of an audience. Even so, I am wincing a little at myself. So tell me about you, please: upholder? obliger? rebel? questioner? And habits or goals or both?

Summer Update

My 15yo wants me to write a blog post about the hostile octopus we encountered while buying pavers at Lowe's, but I told him the hostile octopus would have to be immortalized another day. I'm writing an accountability post today. Remember all of those things I was going to do every day this summer? It turns out that I put a large number of things on that list. Who knew? 

I'm three weeks into the 12-week summer. I have been consistent about writing for work and I have been exercising enough to finish a triathlon (3 minutes faster than last year!). I have been decluttering and deshabbifying with some regularity. I have not been doing yoga at all, let alone daily. (I was doing a Yoga With Adriene series that's mostly 30-minute videos. Twenty is a better length for me.) I am behind on 1 Kings and the CCC. (1 Kings is kind of a willpower sink. But I'm almost to the Elijah part.) Pictures are completely untouched because I hate dealing with pictures. I love having dealt with pictures, though.

The food thing-- I have been super-unmotivated to eat carefully. SUPER SUPER unmotivated. This is true even though it might be the #1 influence on my get-up-and-go. So. Tomorrow: new leaf on food. Re-assess on some of those other things that were initially going to be daily tasks but are not happening on a daily basis. Onward.

Summer plans, part 2

Laura Vanderkam posted a summer bucket list this week, which made me say, "Hm, I should think about that." I have this quirk, you guys, that allows me to write cheerfully about the 17 new habits I want to form this summer and then shrink away from planning fun things as if they were trips to the dentist with a cavity-prone angry toddler.

Maybe part of it is that it's hard to please all the people in a big family. In the same way that I find it demoralizing to cook night after night when there's always some dissatisfied person at the table, I tend to focus too much on the grumbly moments from family activities. But seriously: why go to the trouble of planning a vacation when you could stay home and be annoyed with each other for free?

Picture my fun-planning machinery clunking into motion like the Tin Man.

This summer we are going to head to NYC as a family, so we can visit Alex while he's working there. Other things I want to do for fun: plan a couple of exuberant picnics, run the local 5-miler for the first time, go see a Shakespeare play, play miniature golf, go boating, buy a piece of art at our local arts festival, check out one of the Celtic music jams at a nearby nature preserve, and go camping. There are a couple of things already on the calendar that are mostly for me: I'm going to a conference in June, and I'm doing that triathlon with my college roommates again.

I'm feeling like if I were a more fun person I would have a more persuasive list of fun plans. I would plan trips to Chicago for concerts and the Boundary Waters for canoeing. But I am only me, and I am better at habit lists than fun lists.

What about you? Are you a bucket list type? What's on your summer list?

Twelve Weeks, part 1

I have been waiting for a cloud of self-discipline to enfold me like a Hollywood starlet's fluffy robe but ALAS it is more of an emperor's-new-clothes kind of garment. This is a repeating late-May theme and I should probably make a note for my future self: Dear Future Jamie, it is likely that you will be tired when the spring semester ends. 

I think that if I start counting tomorrow I have twelve weeks of summer ahead of me. I'm not teaching this summer, and I am looking forward to the break even though it is a little painful financially. I cannot confirm the date of our August departmental gathering, but I think it's on a Thursday in mid-August. Twelve weeks is a nice round number, so let's go with it, shall we?

This summer I want to be disciplined about tending my body: attending to food and sleep and exercise. Eating paleo is annoying and really probably too hip for the likes of me, but it turbo-charges my brain and my ability to cope. I'm going to aim for a lightly modified paleo program, in which I don't fuss about legumes and rice. I'm also curious about what might result from a daily yoga discipline coupled with more consistent aerobic exercise. Want to join me?

This summer I want to be consistent about daily spiritual reading instead of saving up a week's worth of Old Testament readings for our Saturday Adoration hour. I'd also like to work on a vespers habit with the kids, and on getting to a daily Mass or two each week.

Each day I'd like to spend some time on moving goals forward in a small but consistent way: an hour of daily writing time for work, 15 minutes of slapping pictures in albums for the family, a block of time focused on decluttering and de-shabbifying our house, and a bit of daily time finishing up Mystie Winckler's excellent courses on home organization. I started her program last summer and got most of the way through; I'm confident that returning to those will be a fruitful undertaking.

And one last set of habits: it's easy for us to spend the evening slumped in front of individual screens. In addition to a vespers practice, I'd like to make time to blog earlier so that I'm not dashing off a hasty post with an eye on the ticking clock, and so that I can read aloud to Stella without feeling that I ought to be wielding the Bedtime Shovel instead. I'd like to start getting ready for bed early enough that flossing doesn't feel like a penance suitable for Sisyphus, or skin care like an exercise in futility. It's so much nicer to go to bed early with the rosary finished and a book in hand, rather than rattling off the last decade while calculating the depth of tomorrow's sleep deficit. All of these things are easier for an introvert mom when there is some silence elsewhere in the day, so that's something to contemplate for part 2. Part 2 is mostly going to be about summer fun, but this introvert mom needs her silence in order for fun to happen.

A definite disadvantage to my plan to blog more frequently in 2017-2018 is the uptick in posts saying "LOOK, it's a post and now to SLEEP. It's LATE. THE END."

Regrouping

All righty, friends, I need to get myself together here. There was the week of grading followed by the week of fallout from grading (well, fallout plus finals), and I am ready to get back on track. There's always a student who raises my eyebrows during finals week, but this time there were two. They raised more than my eyebrows, let me just tell you: they also raised my blood pressure, my alcohol consumption, and the occasional question about whether roofing might be a nice contemplative line of work. I have a story I wish I could tell you, a truly astonishing story, but prudence dictates otherwise.

Lather-rinse-repeat every single finals week: end-of-term stress throws off food and sleep and exercise and household order. Tomorrow I have a brick workout scheduled bright and early, after which I will clean my house and deal with some of the backlogged paper and personal email. I'm going to be part of a prayer team tomorrow afternoon, and I'd really like to get to confession before our adoration hour, where I will catch up on the Scripture reading I have neglected this week. I still have some exams to grade, but I think I'll let those wait until Monday. And when I go to the office on Monday I will not actually set my work email auto-reply to say "Dr. Gladly does not ever award extra points in response to end-of-term email pleas," but I will think about it.

Good night, all!

Disciplined Enough

I was surfing through my archives recently and I came across a post from September about time management. I expect we all have ups and downs with self-discipline, yes? If you are relentlessly resolute in your wee-hours wake-ups and your tenacious tickings-of-boxes, you probably have better things to do than read this particular blog. I wrote that post when I was in a good groove: waking at 5 and immediately spending a chunk of time in prayer, working out 6 days per week and training for a half-marathon, prepping a new class but staying on top of things at work, and still making time to read good books to Stella and get Pete to soccer practice on time and provide concrete support to a struggling teen and also knit and post frequently.

It is not coincidental, I don't think, that I had just finished doing the Whole 30 at the end of August.

I have an ongoing problem with saying, "This amount of productivity is enough productivity." If I get into the office and check off all the things on my list, my temptation is to say, "Tomorrow's list should have more things on it!" rather than "Today's list was exactly the right size!" Maybe that's a good work goal for 2017: to figure out the right-sized list for me, with the right mix of short-term and long-term priorities.

I guess the more times I do the Whole 30, the more obvious it becomes that I am better at life when I am eating that way. I say this with a little reluctance, because the Whole 30 is kind of ridiculous.

But I'm going to do it again for January, and direct some attention to right-sized lists instead of super-sized lists, and see where that takes me. I'll report back.

Begin as you mean to go on

I re-read my 2016 goals before I wrote my 2017 goals, which was a rather depressing exercise. Although-- maybe that's me being hard on myself again. You know what I think it is? Instead of tickable boxes, I wrote my 2016 goals with a focus on habits and attitudes. This was probably a good focus but it does leave me with fewer boxes to tick.

Good things from 2016: I finished my first triathlon! (which required me to swim, in a race, in a quarry with actual* krakens!) and also my first half-marathon! and stayed injury-free the whole year!

*actual ≠ literal

Also in the physical realm: progress on the food front. Lessons learned from the Whole 30 have allowed me to stay in my preferred weight range consistently, but I've also made some headway in figuring out the art of occasional moderate indulgence. I finished Melissa Hartwig's Food Freedom Forever last night, and I plan to keep thinking about her recommendations.

Spiritually: I was immensely challenged and encouraged by Understanding Scrupulosity and it has had a significant impact on me. I've hardly blogged about it all because it feels a little scary. But I should blog about it. I met my goal of reading the Bible and the CCC in a year, and I'm glad I did. I took on a stressful task for the spring women's retreat team, and I'm glad about that too. I foresee more of the same in 2017: I am going to re-read the Bible and the CCC, and I'm on the team for another spring women's retreat, and I have to keep feeling my way forward with the scrupulosity question. I also need to take some steps forward with the ministry I mentioned back in the fall. I guess ideally I'd like it to have another leader at the end of the year, and be a regular helper instead of the motive power.

In the office: this year I had three papers accepted for publication, and more presentations than ever before. I taught 6.5 classes, and they mostly went well. (That spring semester grad class remains a tender spot.) Hm, I am realizing I need to do more thinking about work goals, because unrealistic work goals contribute directly to apathy and demotivation in the office. When I'm not teaching it's too easy to plan to Write All The Papers, but Writing All The Papers is not really consistent with the flood of grading and student email that will re-enter my life in a couple of weeks.

This is sort of a hodge-podge-y post but I think I will hit publish instead of tweaking. I would love to hear your thoughts on 2016 accomplishments or disappointments, and 2017 plans or hopes. If you are a resolution sort of person, are you a habits/attitudes sort of resolver, or a tickable boxes sort of resolver?

Excavating

This morning I did not have to give an 8am lecture full of newly prepped content. This morning I slept until 6:58, which, while not planned, was not a catastrophe. I thought I might go into my office and kerbam-kerpow my way through my to-do list, but I neither kerbammed nor kerpowed.

Over the past month I have been drifting into that state where non-essentials get pushed aside. This means that my Do All The Things list contains a bunch of backlogged Things. Probably the first on the list should be (1) Eat better followed by (2) Get back into the exercise groove. Probably that will help me make better decisions about all the other Things.

After I finished the Whole 30 I mused about staying gluten-free, but gluten-free is a hassle. I miss that Whole 30 magic, though, in which my default state of mind is that I am by golly going to get stuff done. I also just bought Run Fast, Eat Slow, and it looks promising. So here is my tentative plan:

1. Do a Whole 10, with the freedom to intersperse non-Paleo recipes from RFES.
2. Register for a November 10K as an impetus to get moving again.
3. Plow through the backlogged grading, with special emphasis on the grad class I've just handed off.
4. Make a Plan for the three (!) conference posters that I'm presenting next month. (4a. Decline to think just now about the amount of painstaking work that one of them will require.)
5. Revisit the abandoned brain dump notes, and make another Plan for that stuff.

I'm going to aim to make excellent progress by Thursday. I'll report back.