Mental Maintenance
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Prioritization through matrixing
Today went well. I haven’t been good at setting intentions for the day. My activity is still based on what the pressures are right in front of me. But having a task manager has been helpful in keeping all the individual pieces from scattering across email and slips of paper. Asana also has robust features that allow me to search task that have not been assigned yet, and for tasks that have not been assigned to a project. Add to that the ability to search robustly and change views from project to agenda to calendar, and I have a tool that is flexible enough for my daily, idiosyncratic thinking. Having…
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2016
The new year is here. I am rather ambivalent about it. The most significant thing that has happened so far is that our new boss has arrived. Considering the administration’s schedule for her, I won’t see her until later this week. As it is the beginning of the semester, I have a dozen pressing things to complete over the next few weeks. Most of it is instruction preparation. Others are committee work and general librarianship. The usual trifecta. I still seek to discover the pattern in the chaos and be able to develop a structure that keeps the chaos manageable. There’s not much more to say about 2016 yet. I…
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NNWM 2015 Day 4
So I said that I would participate in NNWM this year and I am — sort of. I always like the idea of this project. This year I have a story line even. But I can;t seem to get any momentum behind it. I open a file and I sit there. I know the point is to just write, but nothing happens. I feel dried up. This feeling is interesting because I know my past hasn’t been that way. I was able to write with various degrees of ease. Right now, writing is the hardest it’s ever been for me. I know what it feels like to just have the…
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Health
I just took off several days from work. I spent part of it going in for a medical procedure (elective and outpatient) and then spend some recovering. I also had a regular physical to get that up do date and discuss tweaking treatment for my headaches. We reclassified them as migranes and are working with different medication. I brought the data that I had tracked. It helped define things and make decisions. I was glad I tracked it and I seemed to cover the right things. One of the interesting things uncovered was that I don’t take the medication as often as I probably should. If I am only experiencing…
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Joy and Peace
This is the non-fiction I have been reading for months. Rising Strong by Brené Brown The Sound of Paper by Julia Cameron Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert Get Some Headspace by Andy Puddicombe Savor by Shauna Niequist The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Mari Kondo Meditation is boring? Putting Life Into Your Spiritual Practice by Linda Johnsen Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor by Lynda Barry How to Be Happy, Dammit: A Cynic’s Guide to Spiritual Happiness by Karen Salmansohn The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer (recently gifted) Ashtanga Yoga: the Practice Manual by David Swenson (recently gifted) The…
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Day in Review Tuesday, September 22, 2015
My brain threatens to make this entry a list of all the things to get done. It’s tempting simply because it’s such a habit. I’m on the long train home, I had to take drugs to get through the morning. What happened in between wasn’t as productive as I would like. Freedom can be a dangerous thing. I did get a walk in the late morning though, just from one side to another, but it was enough. For now, I think I will try to get another module of my IRB training done. Past that I will work on ideas for NNWM. My husband would like me to write something…
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Beautiful words
I have a secret wish to write beautiful words. I felt it rise up in my consciousness on my walk with the puppy last night. The walk was an impusive flight to get out of the house and capture the early fall before it becomes late fall, and then winter. The day gave way to night in the graceful way it does every day. I typically don’t notice. Yesterday, I heard the cricket chirp and the traffic people faded away. The dark deepened and left me with no distractions to focus on. I could smell dinner from the condos we passed. And I wished I could capture all that I…
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Day in review August 27, 2015
I have yet another headache. It is making me short tempered and judgmental. Someone is sitting near me that had an odor that isn’t helping. I’m listening to the guy next to me discuss with his kid, the editorial changes he made to his homework. There are more than a few that are on the rush hour train taking up extra seats. Earlier today, I was supposed to spend about six hours at a variety of clincal shadowing experiences, but I was stood up (essentially). It left me with a free day, but I didn’t use it as productively as I would like. Which always brings me back to the…
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Unproductivity
Another day gone, and another day that I judge myself to be unproductive. I own up to the idea that the issue that I am having is psychological. So many aspects of my life feel out of control. I am entering into year two and instead of having a better idea of what to do, I have a worse idea. I suffer from the problem of having so many ideas that it becomes hard to say no. I also have the problem of execution. I find myself getting lost in low payout tasks or being distracted by email. There is a larger question of why do I feel this way.…
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Stress
In many of my entries so far I have been navel gazing at my life and how it relates to a number of different emotional or mental aspects. I thik what is happening is my tumbling toward managing stress. Job shifts are counted as major life changes. This has been a positive one and relatively bigger than most, which for the last two have been lateral moves. I need to look closely at my headache data, but I sense a headache when I get overwhelmed and feel that I’m either not performing enough (quantity) or worry that I can’t pull it all off (quantity and quality). I have a headache…