Fruit of my brain

Hellooooooo!!! (she calls from the bottom of a deep, paper-lined well).

I've been hunkered down, trying to finish my two Qualifying Papers (40+ pages each) and my Qualifying Portfolio for my Review coming up. Well, sing Hallelujah, as of about 4:30 this afternoon, it's done. Isn't she pretty?

 

Let me tell you, mine is a brain that does not take kindly to hunkering down. Usually I give in to my dilly dallying with a shrug, in a kind of wild-horses-can't-be-broken kind of way, but turns out wild horses don't get a lot done.  They definitely don't get doctorates. Humph.

I did manage to find a few techniques to keep myself focused. I was chatting with my friend and fellow mom/PhD student, Melissa, and she offered to send me a procrastination questionnaire from her work with students. The aim of the questionnaire was to figure out what type of procrastinator you are so you can use specific tactics to overcome that particular brand. Well, hello! I was 5 of the 6 kinds and that was even when I fudged a little to save my self respect.  I am a perfectionist, dreamer, worrier, crisis-maker, overdoer procrastinator. Nice to meet you.

It did help to think about all of these patterns and avoidances that become part of my daily habit (thank you, Melissa).  I came up with a few aids of my own. They're probably obvious and what you already do. I think I'm also a late-blooming-idea procrastinator.

1. Garbage pail. When I cook, I always grab an empty bowl to put all of the little pieces of trash (egg shells, apple cores, peelings, etc.) while I prepare the food. So I decided to set up a garbage pail list next to me on the desk. In the past, every time I had a thought flit across my brain ("oh, I need to call ____," "is the laundry done yet?") I would use that as an excuse to get up and disrupt my work. Now I said, "Brain, this is not the time to deal with this. Put it on the garbage pail list and you'll deal with that later." Totally worked.

2. Timer. 50 minutes of work, 10 minutes of break. Repeat. Turns out what works for a 3-year-old works for me.  Not that I made our children work 50 minutes at a time when they were 3, mind you. Just using the timer to aid better behavior is a very 3-year-old thing.

3. Lay out the day in 2-hour increments. I think I got this from About A Boy*. I don't know why, this just helped me stay realistic about how much work I really could accomplish and kept me from getting overwhelmed. It takes me a while to settle down to writing so I really do need a nice chunk of time. Mine looked like this:

5:30-7:30  Take Maddy to seminary, to high school, go back home, say goodbye to G and Sam

7:30-9:30  Shower, get ready, tidy up the house, make calls

9:30-11:30 Write

11:30-1:30  Lunch, run errands, answer emails, etc.

1:30-3:30  Write

3:30-5:30  Chat with kids as they come home, help with homework & practicing, etc. Maybe write a little if everyone's all set.

5:30-7:30  Dinner prep, eating, clean up, family time

7:30-9:30  Relax, family devotional, maybe a little more writing

9:30-11:30 Get ready for bed, reading, watching, sleep

Scheduling to the minute makes me really rebellious. I've tried that before and I end up feeling too bossed around and I go to a matinee movie instead (That's probably the dreamer+crisis-maker procrastinators in me teaming up right there.) This gave me enough flexibility and structure to stick to it.

4. Parking lot. Sort of like the garbage pail, this is a document open on my computer screen while I write. Sometimes I'll get little jolts of ideas for another place in the paper so I found that if I had a parking lot for them (rather than suppressing them or running with them) it kept me productive and yet still able to use the inspiration that came (and trust me, I needed all the inspiration I could get).

Anyway, that's what kept me sane while I pushed through to the deadline (and, admittedly, the deadline got pushed back along the way. Just keeping it real here, folks.)  Do you use any tricks to get yourself on track? Or are you of the mysterious non-procrastinating variety?

. . .

p.s. I was really moved by my advisor/mentor Fred's obituary in the Boston Globe today. I think it captures him beautifully and I feel lucky that I knew him. I've still been sad about his loss and a bit bewildered about how to move forward.  Today I came across a lovely, generous letter of recommendation he wrote for me a few years ago. It gave me a pep talk and soothed my soul. Thanks, Fred.

. . .

*"I find the key is to think of a day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than thirty minutes. Full hours can be a little bit intimidating and most activities take about half an hour. Taking a bath: one unit, watching countdown: one unit, web-based research: two units, exercising: three units, having my hair carefully disheveled: four units. It's amazing how the day fills up, and I often wonder, to be absolutely honest, if I'd ever have time for a job; how do people cram them in?" (Hugh Grant as Will, About a Boy). 

Take two

Here's Maddy's first second day of school, sophomore year. It was a rainy + chilly day, perfect for the cheerful yellow rainboots and a cozy sweater. 

Oh, I love this girl.

^And even though this is a little overexposed, I love it anyway. It captures her.
Here, I'll add a slightly underexposed one to balance things out: 

. . .

When Maddy brought home all the paperwork and syllabi for the year, for some reason I recalled something Elizabeth Edwards once said. During her son Wade's early high school years she decided to read some of the books he was reading for class so they could discuss them and she could hear his burgeoning analysis and thoughts about life.* 

Brilliant. Now that the kids are older, I feel a bit separated from them in their studies. I'll proofread an essay here and there but mostly Lauren and now Maddy and Sam have sailed their own academic ships. So in light of that, I started thinking that I'll read along with Maddy on a few of her books this year. 

Here's the list for her sophomore English class: 

The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
Song of Solomon, Morrison
The Turn of the Screw, James
A Separate Peace, Knowles
The Crucible, Miller
short stories, Shirley Jackson and others
Ender's Game, Card
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
Walden, Thoreau

And films:
The Front (Woody Allen)
Persons of Interest (Alison MacLean)
Walkout 

Pretty great books, right? It'd be kind of like a low-key, mother daughter book group. That I...crash and wrestle into my own territory and attend uninvited? Is this a sweet & lovely idea or borderline helicopter parentish?  I can't trust my judgment on these things anymore. I swing wildly from benign neglect to hovering. I blame the emptying nest and the fleeting years. Savor is my mantra. Gather and savor.

*p.s. In a sad turn of the story, later, when Wade died in an accident before his senior year, she would read the books for that year out loud to him at his grave. Heartbreaking.

Going back

Proof that this is the first day of school:

There's a little nip in the air,

people are wearing new clothes and smiles as they head off (or, in the case of this photo, as they come home), Louie is looking out the window waiting for friends to come home (see above),

the smell of cookies is in the air (oh, I love this recipe sooo much; it never fails),

and shoes and backpacks are strewn hither and yon.  Yep, we're back.

(Maddy changed out of her new school clothes so fast this afternoon [no way I was taking a photo at 5:30 this morning when I drove her to seminary] that I didn't have a chance to get a photo. Second-day-of-school photo will have to do...)

Indulge me

Please indulge me if I pause a bit today to celebrate the final day of coursework in....my.....LIFE!  I started kindergarten when I was 4, back when they were much more flexible about deadlines and birthdays.

 first day of class^ 

And now, 35+ years later (with some years off in the middle) I have finished my final class of my ed-joo-cation (with still a couple of years of dissertating ahead of me).

Some school-going wisdom I've acquired over the years, or what I wish I'd known before:

Always read the syllabus ahead of time.  Trust me on this.

Go ahead and raise your hand and talk. Ask questions, be skeptical.

Sit toward the back with the sarcastic people (part rebel) but speak up (part teacher's pet).

Eye contact and nodding will go a long way toward making your teacher/professor think you know more than you do.  Especially if you are really texting your daughter on your phone at the time.

The semester system was not created with mothers of three in mind, especially around the holidays.

Some reading is optional.

The older you are, the more likely you are to do the optional reading just because it's interesting. 

There's no shame in dropping a class.

Good writing skills go a long, long, long way. Thank you, Mrs. Stock (and others).

Attendance, while not always mandatory, is usually a good idea.

Years from now, will you really care what grade you got in Psych 301? No.  Just do your best and move on.

Group projects are an exercise in futility and frustration (and scheduling nightmares) but just go with the flow.

Email yourself your papers just in case your disk drive crashes. Sigh.

College and graduate school degrees just mean you sat in class for a certain number of hours, read a lot, and wrote a bunch. No magic involved, just work.

I will admit to some lesser moments.  Like my last class of my undergraduate years, BIS 140 (said with derision), a class that taught you how to use a computer (rolls eyes).  I felt I already knew how to use a computer so I didn't attend very often and learned, when I showed up for the final, that in fact I did not know four different ways to save a document using WordPerfect (who needed to know four ways? And, it turns out, who needed to even know WordPerfect?) and other trivial but tested concepts. The sad result was a mediocre grade that, I found out after graduation and walking across with pride, kept me from getting the Summa cum laude distinction after all.  Whoopsie!

What school memories or wisdom would you add to the wish-someone-would-have-told me list?

Final final

I am currently completing my final final, a take home test due tomorrow.

So I'm hitting the books and going to meetings today.

In the meantime, please enjoy this lovely video by Maggie Doyne

of her children in Nepal

(I wrote about her a few days ago...)

So inspiring.  

I needed to be reminded

why I'm studying and taking finals and putting myself through all this.

Everybody needs to love and be loved.

"open up your chest and let it in..."

Ah, perspective.