Done for the Week: Out of Time and Out of Focus

I am desperately seeking routine.  In particular, one that will support/permit the blogging productivity (two to three posts per week) that I aspire to. 

Once again, I have fallen short. 

Here's why, in part:

Done for the Week:  Jan. 16-22, 2012

1. Made appointment with orthopedist to deal with foot injury
2. Biked once, and did weight training--foot injury prevented additional dry-land exercise; did hip-strengthening exercises twice
   
3. Watched two basketball games with various family members
4. Continued reading Elizabeth George's A Traitor to Memory aloud with my husband--almost finished
5. Read Smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich; am in the middle of "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" in The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle, and The House by the Sea:  A Journal, by May Sarton 
6. Continued to work my two part-time jobs, putting in extra hours
7. Published 1 blog post
8. Continued work on current clients' projects
9. Attended training and was sworn in as deputy voter registrar
10. Attended new church as visitor
11. Attended 1 yoga class
12. Did laundry 
13. Continued to support my son in his search for an internship
14. Had lunch and breakfast dates with my husband
15. Negotiated dishwasher repair appointment and customer relations deal; ongoing. . .
16. Shopped for final family Christmas celebration
17. Hosted final family Christmas celebration 
18. Paid the monthly bills
19. Meditated 3 times
20. Continued major decluttering, getting rid of approximately ten years of old bills and financial reports
21. Straightened, vacuumed and dusted living room

The most important thing I accomplished last week was the continuation of our household effort, mostly "womaned" by me, to dig out from the accretion of "the childrearing years."  I am entering a phase still short of "Maintenance", but beginning to be able to see more and more of the floor space in my ranch-style, full- (and fully occupied) basement house.  And lo and behold, we have closets!  And drawers!  And shelves and countertops!  I'm really counting on Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project promise that "outer order [will] contribute to inner calm."  If I continue at my current pace of outer "ordering," I should be comatose soon.

My goal for last week was to focus on walking; non-weight-bearing hip strengthening exercises; and swimming--and to make it to the gym three times. I can't say the week's effort was a smashing success in this realm.  As item 1 above reveals, I made it to the gym only one time, though I did manage to combine biking with weight-training.  I continue to have a hard time making myself swim.  Arctic temperatures, my hair-washing schedule, and a crazy round of appointments and activities provided a barrier sufficient to discourage my mild aquatic interest.  And despite my dog's encouragement (in the form of whining, and stealing pillows--his protest-of-choice), I didn't walk at all--other than from one job to another, and one room to another in search of sweets.  I did squeeze in a couple of hip exercise sessions, in addition to the one yoga class that wasn't preempted by an expanding work schedule.  But clearly, I could have done better. 

I had also planned to find more time for this blog last week.  Unfortunately, the universe seems determined to eat the time slots previously reserved for posting.  I'm not sure how this is going to shake out in future, as my work schedule and young-man-launching activities and obligations are growing like Topsy just now.  I am particularly challenged by an erratic schedule, which changes from day to day, week to week, and semester to semester. 

My focus goal for this coming week is to schedule three exercise sessions, three meditation sessions, and publishing of two blog posts (in addition to this one); and to stick to the schedule as circumstances permit, and re-work it, as they demand.

Wish me luck.  I don't seem to be especially good at "pre-meditated" work. (Pardon the pun, which I confess was intended.)

Procrastinating 101: Late (Again) Because Too Many Funny Things Happened on the Way to Wherever

Is this you?

Or this?

Or this?

                                          Absent-Minded Professor Brainard's housekeeper tries to keep                                                 him from missing his wedding--for the third time!

Then this week's Procrastinating 101 may just resonate, as we look at "Cure Five:  Get Focused and Organized" in Diana DeLonzor's Never Be Late Again:  7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged.

According to Ms. DeLonzor's schema, the Absent-Minded Professor is one of the seven types of chronically late people--which you might be if you answer yes to two or more of the following questions:

• Do I frequently forget appointments, meetings, or where I put the car keys?
• Do I often forget names and details of conversations?
• Have I frequently been accused of being unobservant or of not paying attention?
• Do I notice that the light has turned green only after the driver behind me honks?
• Do I regularly digress from the subject when speaking?
• Do I jump from one activity to another before the first is finished?

(That would be three yeses for me.)

DeLonzor says that three main "problem areas" typify those of us who find ourselves in this overall profile: 

• Distractibility (like The Family Circus's Billy)
• Forgetfulness and Disorganization (like, well, me)
• Lack of Awareness of Others (like Fred McMurray's Prof. Brainard, who kept forgetting to show up for his own wedding)

The legions of individuals who are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder--like one of my children--have major struggles in these areas.  But not all of them, or of the rest of us, need Ritalin or some other concoction to cope.  And we can all benefit, argues DeLonzor, by taking these three steps:

• Learning to stay focused on one thing for a sustained period of time
• Getting organized and adding structure to our lives
• Increasing our awareness and observation of other people

As in her previous chapters, DeLonzor approaches our reform by outlining a series of exercises designed to help identify the ways in which these behaviors and tendencies are making us late, and practicing new habits.  

My favorites on her list?  Meditation to improve focus; and establishing times and days for certain tasks.  The first of these I continue to work on making time for, finding that the more I need it the less likely I am to do it--grrr!   The second is perennially difficult for me as well.  And I am not helped much by my freelancer's schedule.  I am inspired by DeLonzor's simple instruction, however, to make another attempt to set up at least a skeletal structure, and to resist the impulse to agree to whatever scheduling requests and changes my clients and part-time employers might suggest. 

So no, Ms. S, I can't squeeze in covering for you at a luncheon next week.  I'll be meditating.

And next week Tuesday?  I'll be here blogging about Cure 6--for the timeliness Rebels in the crowd. 

Done for the Week: Launching My Blog Revival

At the end of every summer when I was a kid, my indulgent grandmother took my sisters and brothers and I shopping for new outfits to wear to the first day of school.  It took the sting out of the ordeal of returning to the classroom.  New school supplies helped, too.

Now that I'm grown (as I have been for awhile now), it seems I need to be responsible for my own transitions, and their easing.  I am not starting school this fall, but I am adjusting to new work schedules, and most importantly, to the waning light and warmth that signal impending winter.  

Since, like so many of my countrymen and women, I find myself a few shekels short these days, I will probably have to come up with something to get me through the first couple of weeks of September that doesn't involve pulling out a little plastic card.  One thing I can give myself that may help is the gift of renewed blog rigor.  (See last week's statement of good intentions.)

Although last week concluded a string of weeks of relative blog neglect, I did get some things done.

Done for the Week:  Aug. 29-Sept. 4, 2011

1. Continued 5K training with my youngest son, in preparation for his first race--Finished Week 1 of 9 Week program
2. Ran 2 times; walked once (babying yoga-induced hamstring strain)
3. Finished Run, by Ann Patchett
4. Continued to work my two part-time jobs 
5. Provided technical assistance to nonprofit organization
6. Published 1 blog post
7. Attended 2 yoga classes
8. Continued significant work on current clients' projects
9. Launched client's new site
10. Attended Unity Rally in response to White Supremacy gathering
11. Attended Social Justice meeting
12. Had lunch with friends
13. Went paddleboating with my kids and grandson
14. Picked up my husband at the airport, back from Kenya
15. Did laundry
16. Attended church picnic; helped with setup
17. Reapplied for vocational support for dyslexic son
18. Organized and helped cook four at-home dinners
19. Took my dog to the dog park, with both my sons

Last week's focus goal was to "come down gently, and as little as possible, from Cloud 9-3/4" after finishing the triathlon.  Despite being busy with a clump of work commitments, I did manage to maintain my unaccustomed happy mood.  With it came a bit more energy, which led to a little burst of housecleaning, which reinforced my positive feelings, which boosted my energy level, which . . . .  All good.

So, still not down.  And trying not to second-guess the lifespan of the happiness fairy's reign.

The most important thing I got done last week was getting the new blog site up for one of my clients.  A lot of work went into preparing the site, and we were all pretty excited about seeing it "go live" when his wife clicked the "Publish Post" button.  (You can see his fascinating work at http://callmeexcellency.blogspot.com/.

His is the fifth project of the small business I seem to have inadvertently started.  I am enjoying the challenges, and the opportunities to contribute to others' communication efforts.  Now I will need to learn how to incorporate this new level of activity into an already full work life, and to save some time and energy for my own writing.

My goal for the coming week:  stick to my plan of publishing three blog posts, having taken Labor Day off, and commencing my new regimen of Monday through Thursday posting.

One down, and two to go. . .

Procrastinating 101: The Long and the Short of It

If Dr. Piers Steel is to be believed, we procrastinators may be about to run out of excuses.  (And God knows, we love our excuses!)  It's his persuasive argument, and his damned (good) practical advice that may prove their undoing.

Procrastinating 101 has been focusing these last nine weeks on Dr. Steel's book, The Procrastination Equation:  How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done.  If you have been following its exposition, you may remember Dr. Steel's assertion that poor impulse control is at the heart of most procrastination.  In Chapter Nine, "In Good Time:  Managing Short-term Impulses and Long-term Goals," he lays out the problem more fully, details some creative solutions, and throws in a little ancient Greek literature.  As we have come to expect, Dr. Steel is once again an eminently companionable and unassailably (I looked it up--it's really a word.) knowledgeable tour guide through these regions of Planet Procrastination.

"Impulsiveness," says Steel, "multiplies the effect of delay, making it a major determinant of the Procrastination Equation's outcome."  For those who have not yet seen Steel's formulation, and those who have but have not committed it to memory, the mathematical expression he has devised to represent his theory of procrastination looks like this:

Here low Motivation predicts the big P, Procrastination.  The other elements have been teased out in previous posts (see, particularly, Procrastinating 101: 12-year-olds Get It, So Can We ).

Impulsiveness contributes to the divisor in the equation, so that the more impulsive among us will experience lower motivation, and thus be more inclined to procrastinate.  And, as Dr. Steel warns, "you can't escape your fate.  Impulsiveness is not something you have, but something you are."  Yikes!

But there is hope, and it begins with Odysseus.  Dr. Steel recounts the preparations urged upon Odysseus by the goddess Circe, who knew that he would face, on his return trip from Troy, the temptress Sirens.  Circe advised him to plug his men's ears with wax, and to lash himself to the mast of his ship, so that he would be able to pass through the district of these irresistible creatures and continue his journey.  Thus, Odysseus employed the technique of precommitment.

Dr. Steel recommends we face the fact that temptations too often get the better of us, leading us off task and into putting off what we need to get done.  We would do well to identify our Sirens, and to invest in precommitment.

He offers three contemporary strategies (no ear wax or ship masts required) for precommitting, intriguingly categorized under the heading "Bonding, Satiation and Poison."  For the sake of brevity, and my sanity (it has been a looonnnnnngggggggg week!), I will just hit the highlights here:  

• Throw Away the Key--The idea here is to devise a way, technological or analog, to block off the exits while focusing on work.  Steel mentions, e.g., a program for Apple users called Freedom, which blocks internet access; Clocky, an alarm clock on wheels that goes berserk when you hit Snooze; and Google's "Take a break" button, which gives the user fifteen minutes of email-free work time.
• Satiation--This approach addresses our urges and impulses by having us "tank up," scheduling in a modicum of pleasure and relaxation, and then slotting in work around these "appointments."  Dr. Neil Fiore popularized this Unschedule in his book The Now Habit:  A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play.
• Try Poison--This strategy features penalties & scare tactics.  One example was employed by my ex-husband in his dissertation research on behavior change.  Participants put up $100, which was forfeited to their least favorite cause or charity if they resumed smoking during the study period.  Alternatively, Dr. Steel recommends visualizing in horrifying detail the dire consequences that could result from putting off a dreaded task.

Then there's "Making Attention Pay," Steel's two-pronged advice for diminishing the pull of distractions/temptations.

• Inside Out:  Pay Attention Please!--We can minimize the appeal of those objects and activities that would keep us from work by altering our perceptions, and thus the level of attention these things command.  Using abstraction and symbolic representation--e.g., focusing on attributes of a desired food, and thus recruiting the prefrontal cortex to compete with the limbic system response of "yum," "gimme"--is one way of doing this.  Another is to run a "smear campaign" on the desired object, attending to its negative qualities and consequences--e.g., weight gain and high cholesterol from junk food; STDs, unwanted pregnancy and a ruined marriage from infidelity; or public disgrace and firing from failure to complete work.
• Outside In:  Now You See It, Now You Don't (stimulus control)--This approach attempts to limit the environmental cues which distract us.  For example, a dieter might stock the fridge with only healthy food choices.  Those of us who struggle to stay on task might limit the number of windows open on our computer desktops; remove troublesome bookmarks; arrange our work spaces to cue work and not entertainment; incorporate work triggers; and--addressing two of my personal pet peeves--declutter our work space, and maintain "pristine" boundaries between "clashing life domains, typically family and work."  Hard to do for the increasing number of us who work from home, and whose laptops accompany us from one messy and distracting space and location to another.

And finally, Scoring Goals.

Dr. Steel has this to say about goals:

We have already touched on some of what makes a goal good.  In chapter 7, we mentioned that making goals challenging is more inspiring than making them attainable.  Easy goals are attainable. . . .In chapter 8, we focused on making goals meaningful by linking them to personally relevant aspirations.  If you see how present tasks lead to future rewards, you will value them more highly.  In this chapter, we will put the finishing touches on goal setting by putting time back on your side.

• The Finish Line is Just Ahead--Dr. Steel's suggestion in this section is to proceed toward "concrete, exact" goals by stages, using subgoals.  In this way, we can take advantage of our tendency to work more intensely closer to deadline; a series of intermediate "deadlines" will result in spreading out effort, and a better quality product.  He discusses the issue of "motivational surface tension," and using a technique I first learned from Alan Lakein (in How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life)--setting a mini-goal that gets us started, and more often than not, ultimately engaged in the work we're avoiding.
• Full Auto--This advice builds on the predictability that flows from build routines and habits of work.  He also urges us to plan for distraction, as in "'If I lose focus, then I will move my attention back to the task.'"

But again, Dr. Steel says all this better than I.  You might want to just read the book yourself.

Next Week:  Chapter Ten--Making it Work.  We're in the home stretch now!

Done for the Week: A Short Story of a Busy Week

This morning, the sun is out.  And that's news these days, where I come from.  

Last week, I ran outside with gloves on; my triathlon camp was relocated indoors by icy winds and rain; my newly planted flowers were in danger of perishing; and my mood went south in the face of unalleviated gray skies.

Here's what I got done, anyway:

Done for the Week:  May 9 - 15, 2011

1. Continued training for triathlon
2. Ran twice with my training partner 
3. Attended semi-grueling day-long triathlon camp 
4. Finished The Zen Path Through Depression, by Philip Martin; The Book of Good Habits, by Dirk Mathison; and A Short Guide to a Happy Life, by Anna Quindlen
5. Attended Board meeting
6. Attended Housing Authority board meeting
7. Attended church's annual meeting, serving as (amateur) parliamentarian
8. Attended church's Coming of Age service, as mentor
9. Attended Coming of Age party 
10. Called my mother
11. Continued to work my two part-time jobs
12. Published 5 blog posts (though global Blogger malfunction ate one--it may still be restored)
13. Attended 1 yoga class
14. Cooked twice
15. Shopped for groceries
16. Caught up on laundry
17. Watched two playoff basketball games with my sons and husband
18. Spent many hours removing glass fragments from my lawn, and garden area
19. Began planting new flowers--forget-me-nots, columbine, pansies, hanging basket of petunias
20. Went out driving with learning teenager several times 
21. Saw my therapist 
22. Took a posting "snow day," courtesy of Blogger shutdown

The most important thing I accomplished last week, in my opinion, was to attend a "semi-grueling day-long triathlon camp."  This item makes the top of my list because it represents the biggest push I've given myself recently.  And although I am flagging a bit after this difficult, and seemingly interminable winter, I know from experience that it's going to take some pushing, balanced with some rest, to get me where I'm intending to go this summer.  So I'm going to suck up the sore muscles, absorb the good information and personalized instruction, and keep going. 
 
Last week's focus goal was to "return to daily meditating." The alert reader will notice the utter absence of any items related to meditating on the above list.  I continue to struggle with the need for routines supportive to my goals.  Last year, as I prepared for my first triathlon, while juggling my jobs and the needs of a relatively large and complex family, I was better able to rely on digging down to some reserve of energy to help me accomplish what I needed/wanted to get done.  This year, not so much.  Even sitting to meditate, which restores me when I actually do it, is beyond my scheduling and executing capacity most days.


The condition of the world, and the continuing political maelstrom in my state, are seriously sapping me.  I am in a state of mild exhaustion, and would benefit greatly, I believe, from being able to have even one thing that I do at a regular time each day--something that could become habit, to be done more or less automatically, without spending time and effort deciding to do it, and figuring out when to do it.

To that end, my focus goal for the coming week is to find a regular time to meditate, and to build a habit by meditating at that time every day.

My work is cut out for me.   Namaste. . .

Growing Up Chaotic

Looking back through the "annals" of my year old blog, I observe a certain preoccupation with the question of routine.  Alternatively, I long for routine; loathe it; seek it; undermine it; break it; escape from it; and construct and reconstruct it.  But routine is almost never a neutral force in my life.  It is not familiar enough for that.

When I was visiting with one of my sisters recently, we discussed our familial problems with routine.  Neither of us was certain why we were raised with so little of the kind of scaffolding that can support day-to-day effort.  But, for whatever reason, both of us grew into seat-of-our-pants, fly-by-night moms, and workers, and housekeepers, and friends.  We meet the most ordinary recurring tasks fresh each time, as if caught by surprise that bills need to be paid again, groceries shopped for, meals prepared, kitchens cleaned, laundry done, jobs reported to, projects accomplished, holidays celebrated, etc., etc.

Psychologists might look to circumstances of our family of origin to explain this missing limb.  Our father was a grossly overworked and overworking physician, who struggled with depression for as far back as I can remember.  Our mother's lively intelligence was subsumed in the challenge of raising five children, and pretty much single-handedly keeping the home fires smoldering.  There is an abundant literature about what kinds of adults emerge from parenting by alcoholics, depressives, and others whose painful realities limit their availability for functional parenting. 

My siblings and I could certainly have turned out worse.  We are more or less "intact" and relatively "normal," whatever that means.  We have our parents' love and hard work to thank for that, at least partially, if not their happy natures.

But none of us has a particularly easy time organizing our days, or our lives.  We do have a whole identity as creative free spirits, a point of pride that may compensate somewhat for the energy we waste in reinventing "solutions" to commonplace problems.

Some days, though, I'd trade this sense of ersatz superiority for a mindless trance that would lead me through my to-do list, and a certainty born of "the way we've always done it."