I’ve blogged before about my need for structure and a schedule, as well as my problem of going overboard. Since my last post on list-need, I soothed myself by making a 12″ x 18″ calendar of the next four weeks’ classes and assignments as well as the major deadlines I have coming up. Before you think but that’s just the nightmare meta-list reincarnated, bear in mind: at this stage the calendar is nothing more than class readings and other professional deadlines, and the forty-five minutes it took me to gather and write down this information in a centralized place left me feeling like I’d just walked out of a breakthrough therapy session. In my book, any list or calendar or schedule or big-scary-organizational effort is worthwhile if it functions as catharsis and if I actually use it, which I have.
All that being said, I must admit, the elaborate form of the calendar raises the question of whether I’ve gone overboard again, but I think I have good reasoning: First, the calendar only shows six days of each of the next four weeks, meaning I budget my time planning to take an entire day off once a week. (That’s not always the norm.) Second, the large sheet is framed under plexiglass. If you’re wondering who would frame their calendar(?!), let me reassure you: it’s just an old beat-up poster frame I already had and wasn’t using. I thought of it because I was holding the innocuous calendar in my hands thinking,
Now that the deadlines are in one place, I don’t want to fall into the trap I usually do of making other calendars and lists — more calendars, more lists — until I once again have to look three places to make sure that it’s Tuesday and find out if there’s time for lunch.
I wanted to be flexible, not to set the calendar in stone or duplicate my efforts; the clear surface allows me to place sticky notes on it for tasks, events, or micro-deadlines without messing up the calendar when I move the stickies. For instance, earlier in the week I tentatively blocked out both Friday and Saturday for a family visit. Now that I know my mom is going to arrive on Saturday, I’ve traded the large notes that said “Mom?” for smaller ones with reading goals, such as how far I hope to get in re-reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, which I’m covering in two classes next week.
Tonight I successfully arranged the notes for every task through spring break. I feel more prepared to tackle the tasks of tomorrow and enjoy my time off knowing I can get it all done, on time, without losing sleep or sanity. However, the process of laying all this out has combined with recent events in my life to make me realize that I did, in fact, take on too much this semester. In this way, my calendar is like a scale, and I can see the needle’s pegged even before I add in me-time. My mood is declining, my social life suffering, my migraines recurring more frequently, and those moments of life that I enjoy most — walking with my dogs, cooking, being with friends — are becoming too rare and are being given too much weight in their roles of keeping me centered.
In short, I’ve run a similar race before, and I know I can’t keep up the pace. I consider myself lucky to have good work and blessed by high-quality students and colleagues; everything I’m doing right now is smart professionally — be it teaching or editing or what little time I can carve out for creative work (more on this in a future blog post) — but this schedule, this rigor, isn’t sustainable for the me-ecosystem. After this semester I’ll have to make some tough decisions about prioritizing my work-life.
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News:
- Submissions have closed for Issue 27: Entropy of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments. Expect to see it online next month. Details about upcoming themes — Image (2011) and Migration (2012) are now available.
- I will be traveling to Amherst in May to speak at “Why Does the Past Matter?”
Current Submission Status: Five essays out to five journals, anywhere from two days to eight months, and three poems out in two contests.
