I’m going to actually try to stay off the computer today. I have had a headache basically all week. It’s completely annoying. And yes, I’m going to have it looked at.
I know Friday cat blogging is old skool, but it’s a nice way to end the week. For the record, she’s lying in the bathtub, her favorite thing to do (when there’s not water in it).
A couple of months ago, I pretty much quit looking at my to-do list. I quit putting new things on it and I just kind of went with the flow. Although I still think the GTD system that I used has some really good points, I think there are a lot of aspects to the productivity mantra that leave me cold.
I’ve actually always liked organization systems. Ever since I was in about junior high, I started making lists and schedules. I guess I’ve never quite trusted my head when it came to remember what was on my plate. In college, I didn’t have much of a system, but did feel organized, especially the last year and a half when I was working two jobs and applying to grad schools. I planned a class schedule my last semester that put all my classes on Tues/Thur. I worked and/or wrote on the other days.
By grad school, I had very little to really organize. I had 3 classes and it was fairly easy to keep up with everything. When I moved into the corporate world and had a kid, suddenly there was a lot more to keep track of. So I followed the 7 Habits system. And that worked for a while and it was nice to think that things I was doing were “things that mattered” and “contributed to my life goals” but still I was just checking stuff off of list.
When I discovered the GTD system a few years ago, I liked it for its simplicity and its geekiness. I was able to use some technical tools to track my tasks and it was fun to keep tweaking the system. I credit GTD for helping me organize a conference and for helping me finish a Ph.D. while holding down a job and raising a couple of kids. It was really useful for breaking down big projects into smaller tasks and focusing on the next thing that needed to be done rather than being overwhelmed by the hugeness of the end goal. It’s also helpful for going through email and stuff that’s sitting in piles around my house. I can look at an email or pick up an object, ask myself “what is this?” and then figure out what needs to be done with it. Again, it holds back the feelings of being overwhelmed by forcing me to focus on one thing at a time.
But it started to make me feel like a cog in a machine of my own making. I began to just check things off the list and even reviewing at the end of a week, I just added more stuff to the list. And a lot of that stuff was stuff that was coming in from email and other outside sources. I had little opportunity to step back and look at the big picture. Even though David Allen’s books do talk about thinking at different levels during the review process, I think the system is mechanized to such a degree that it’s really hard just to not do anything. That time has to be scheduled just like any other. I started to feel guilty if I just wanted to read a book or take a bath or sit quietly with a cup of tea. I kept thinking, “Shouldn’t I be doing something right now?”
So I quit looking at lists. I quit making lists. Instead, every morning, I asked myself, “What do you want or need to do today?” I’d come up with a couple of things and I’d start working. Even though I’d started down this road while I still had a job, I hope to continue it and thensome now that I don’t go to an office every day at 9 a.m.
I think I will come back to some revised version of GTD eventually. There are still the nitpicky tasks that are better off on a list: forms to return to school, bills to pay, recycling to drop off. Right now, I have a purring cat in my lap and I’m watching the wind blow the leaves in the trees. I may not be productive at the moment, but I feel pretty good about it.
This was the line at 6:55 a.m. yesterday morning. It was like this until 9:00 a.m. People brought books and newspapers, prepared to wait it out. We had a steady stream with at least 10 people in line until after noon. By 2:00, we realized about 60% had already turned out. I began my day at 6:00. After closing the polls and counting 75(!) absentee ballots, I took everything to the courthouse to be counted and got home at 10 p.m. I was so focused on getting everything done, I have no idea how my precinct voted. I know our township and our county went for Obama. We’re pretty evenly split, so it could have gone either way. Nearly 1000 people voted in our precinct. 916 showed up in person, 75 voted via absentee. There are just over 1100 registered voters in our precinct. That’s a huge turnout.
As some people on Twitter have said, now the real work begins. And that is so true. A woman on CNN said last night, “We are going to hold Obama accountable, and he should hold us accountable.” I think we should stay as engaged in politics now as we were during the election. I’m excited but still anxious about all the problems we will need to face together.
Everything could change. If Obama wins, my biggest hope is that Obama can truly bring the country together. I really do think that I have a lot in common with my Republican neighbors. It’s really a rare few that I disagree with completely. I want for the disagreements I may have to be minor, inconsequential. I don’t want to be called a latte-sipping liberal and I don’t want my neighbor to be called a dumb redneck conservative. I want us to work together so that all our kids have a future. We’re going to need to work together to solve global warming and the energy crisis, to settle our financial future and to defeat terrorism. My hope is that Obama will rally us all around these common goals.
And it starts by voting. I know most of my readers are regular voters, but I urge you to get your friends to go vote, your neighbors. We have a chance to make history, to change our country for the better, to heal the wounds of the last 8 years. Go vote! Change the world!
Random selection of links I found interesting today:
First, a Washington Post article about how gaming “turns kids violent.” The interesting thing is that by the end, the sensational title had lost some of its bite. Turns out, playing violent video games is but one factor that can make kids more aggressive.
Ironically, in the same day’s paper comes an article touting the creativity many video games inspire.
And finally, this blog post from a VC about how traditional educational models are broken. Hear, hear!
Last night, we had a little virtual party. Our first location was crashed by a creepy dude, who placed a big giant penis in our way. So we teleported to the Bryn Mawr space on the NMC campus. We sat out on the green, got everyone set up using voice chat and had a grand old time. We were all drinking things–from rum and Coke to banana daquiris. There is something nice about visualizing people while you’re talking to them. I think I’m going to spend more time in Second Life. If anyone wants to friend me, I’m Scarlett Vale and yes, my goal is to look like Scarlett O’Hara.
From Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things
. . . [L]earning is a process by which we come to know something that we didn’t know before. But what may not be as obvious is the fact that when we learn something new, that learning also changes the way we know everything else that we knew before. Learning not only changes the sum total of our knowledge, it changes the frame of all our knowledge. It alters our understanding of the world. And the person who learned is not the same as the person who set out to learn.
There’s a lot packed into that and plays into a thought I had today at a soccer game. I realized that no matter what I’m doing, I’m learning. I might be observing people and their interactions, noticing how the sky is changing colors, or thinking about the physics of soccer balls. You can learn from anything, if you have the right mindset to do so. The question is, how do you get in that mindset? How do you become someone who can learn from anything, who is curious about everything?
Thanks everyone for your supportive comments on my announcement. Yesterday was my last day of work and it wasn’t as odd as I thought it would be. The last two days, actually, were filled with people coming by to chat, to say goodbye, even though I’ll see some of them next week at my official party. I guess since Mr. Geeky is still there and I’ll be there myself next semester, it doesn’t feel so much like a going away as a leave of absence. Because I plan to continue mostly along the same lines as my work, just independently, I also feel differently than I did when I left my last jobs, all of which were cross-country moves and/or career changes. I don’t have any regrets and I’ve had some good moments of recognizing the good colleagues I’ve had and that I won’t have to disconnect from them entirely.
I’m sure next week will involve a little stumbling. I have in my mind not to try to do much of anything in terms of establishing a new career, to really take a vacation. I actually do really want to do the manual labor of cleaning my house, though I’m keeping that to a minimum. I want to read, write, think. I’ll probably blog here more. I’m sure there will be moments when I miss the structure of my 9-5 job, but I hope to find my own structure soon. I am pretty darn excited about that.
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