Category Archives: Sustainable Chaos

Honoring My Inner Weasel, Part III

Posted on March 23, 2012 | 3 comments

As failures go, this one’s not catastrophic. Not so much crash and burn as bump and simmer. No cause for flailing and wailing–but maybe a little hand flutter and throat clearing would be in order.

I just posted an Excel spreadsheet for all my students to see, showing how promptly I’m returning student work this semester. After three semesters of being right around or below an average of a week, I’m currently returning student written work, on average, 9.7 days after they’ve turned it in. For my ENG 102 (Advanced Composition) classes, the longer essays are taking me 10.25 days.

There are seven full weeks of the semester to go, and then finals, so if I’m on top of things, the numbers should be below 7 by the end of the semester.

But I’m disappointed.

And not giving up! This failure to meet my goals (I wanted to be under 7) comes along with some other failures (subject for future blog posts, thank you very much, but I don’t want to depress myself by listing all my failures here).

There are some basic reasons the numbers are worse this semester. I have a lot more students, for one thing, and I decided to start using D2L rubrics (D2L is our “course delivery platform” for the UW Colleges–online resources for me & my students) for ENG 102 papers. I also decided to start doing reading quizzes regularly for the first time in ENG 102, and I’m doing those as D2L Quizzes. I’m also doing D2L quizzes for my literature class (did I mention I’ve used D2L quizzes only a little previously, and never where students were required to use them?) and I’m asking my creative writing students to turn in portfolios online so I can grade them digitally, which in turn motivated me to turn my regular rubric into an Excel spreadsheet so the math gets done automatically and I can post it on D2L with the commented-on digital copy of their portfolio….

As always, there was some procrastination involved. But not as much as there would have been in the past. For example, being able to post feedback for each student online means that I was motivated to finish grading assignments in all three classes at the beginning of spring break, rather than waiting until the end. If I’d been grading paper copies, and couldn’t return them until March 26, I would probably be grading this weekend instead of last weekend. (Not that students were checking their campus email during spring break, but they might have–they could have, in any case.)

But I’m realizing that one of my biggest problems is not so much procrastination as trying to do too many things. Here’s what I’d like to do each and every semester:

  • Teach well.
  • Revise my courses (heavily) in terms of reading and assignments.
  • Do a decent amount of committee work (my share or perhaps slightly more or less, depending on a number of factors).
  • Write a lot of poetry.
  • Send a lot of poems out to magazines.
  • Reassemble my poems into chapbooks and full-length manuscripts and submit to multiple publishers.
  • Write fiction. Submit to publishers.
  • Write plays. Ask for feedback.
  • Revise what I’ve written.
  • Do scholarly work on creativity.
  • Work on a chapter for a scholarly book on creativity.
  • Raise funds for a sabbatical (well, that’s not EVERY semester).
  • Spend as much time as possible with my son.
  • Spend as much time as possible with my husband.
  • Spend as much time as possible with my parents.
  • Maintain friendships.
  • Volunteer in my community.
  • (Insert 75 things I’m sure I’ve forgotten to list, HERE).
  • Be a mellow, laid-back person.
  • Get a good night’s sleep regularly.
  • Work an average of 40 hours a week during my contract period.

What’s crazy is how much of that I try to do. What’s amazing is how much I end up getting done.  But here’s the thing–I’m pretty tired of feeling like no matter how much I work, I’m always behind and there’s always more to do.

So.  The math is pretty easy in this case. Doesn’t even need a spreadsheet. There are 24 hours in every day. There are nine months in my work contract. The work contract thing has been true for me for 20+ years. The 24 hour thing has been true a very long time.

So, the answer is simple, right? I need to set my priorities and be firm about them and not apologize. Unfortunately, there’s not a spreadsheet that can show me how to do that.

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Posted in Procrastination, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

Getting Off On Not Putting Off (Procrastination, Part 2)

Posted on January 2, 2012 | 2 comments

There really is something graceful and flirty and coy about procrastination—a way of dancing with time, coming in close, and backing away. The inner weasel frolicking in the deadline woods.

 

And there is also something desperate and shame-inducing and crazy-making about procrastination.

 

The image I have of myself a lot of times is not the clichéd “flying by the seat of my pants” (because I don’t actually know how to picture that, other than some kind of Tin Tin caper in which a giant hook grabs my belt loop and I fly through the air, papers trailing after me). Instead, I picture myself trying to cross a rising stream on slippery rocks that are spaced just far enough apart I have to leap a little each time. Sometimes the rocks turn out to be giant turtles that are rising and submerging randomly. And then sometimes it’s snowing. There is peril involved and palpable relief when I meet a deadline.

 

It’s an exhausting way to live, panicking and somehow succeeding and sucking up the adrenaline rush and then crashing. I think part of my chronic tendency toward burnout comes from depleting my adrenaline stores. The book Tired of Being Tired claims that adrenal burnout is what results, and that our bodies replace adrenaline with cortisol (which does all kinds of toxic things) after a while. I don’t know enough to evaluate the science in that book, but at least on a metaphorical level, it made a lot of sense to me.

 

But I had a lot of years of not being comfortable with how much I procrastinated before I started seeing any real changes. I can’t really account for why all the efforts finally kicked in Fall 2010 semester, and I can’t really account for why I’ve been able to maintain. All I know is what I’ve done, and what I’m going to keep doing.

 

More than 15 years ago, I read Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now by Jane Burka and Lenora Yen. This book helped a lot, even though it didn’t help me grade papers faster when I first read it. It did help me start to recognize that something’s going on if I’m procrastinating really badly or consistently, so I’ve been able to analyze the causes over the years and say no to some things.

 

In terms of student papers, the progress began (slowly) in Fall 2007 when I was in therapy and trying to figure out how to stop feeling overwhelmed all the time. Being behind at work was a big part of why I felt overwhelmed, and being behind in grading was a big part of that. So I started brainstorming all the reasons I don’t like grading student papers, and tried to figure out if I could change any of those things (writing better assignments helps some).

 

Then I started keeping track on an Excel spreadsheet of all the assignments I was grading—when they came in and when I returned them. I’d always told students I thought it was important to return things “within a couple of weeks,” but I doubt if my average was ever “within.”  It was typically on the other side of that, the fat side. Fall 07, my mean was 16. Sheesh.  Just to be glaringly, mathematically obvious, if that was the AVERAGE, then there were times I took longer than two and a half weeks. Sheesh. The standard deviation was 7.94, so not only was it taking me a long time, I was wildly inconsistent.  2008 was better, with averages around 10 and 11 days, and then I didn’t keep very good records for a few semesters.

 

More information helps account for the change that was coming—I took a survey in April of 2008 and asked my UW Colleges English Department colleagues about how long it took them to return student work. It bothered me to see myself at the slowest end of the scale. I had assumed (based on no evidence whatsoever) I was sort of the slowest of the middle of the pack. I could maybe have waved to the middle of the pack from where I was, but I was bringing up the rear. In a Scooby Doo episode, I’d have been the first one picked off.

 

And then, Fall 2010, everything came together. My mean, my straight average, for how long it took me to return student work, was 5.28 days and the standard deviation was way down, 3.59. Spring 2011 was good, but not as great—my mean was 7.25 (an increase for which I totally blame Scott Walker). I had a good summer semester, and then this past fall I was below 7 again: the mean was 6.0872, the median was 6, the most often occurring number was 7, and the standard deviation was 3.2186.

 

What accounts for what I was suddenly capable of Fall 2010 and after? Here’s the best list I can come up with.

 

Life Changes:

×        I turned 45 and just felt tired of having the same problems. I wanted to at least have different problems.

×        I’ve been diagnosed as an adult with A.D.D. I’m ambivalent about the diagnosis, except that it has helped me understand a little better what comes to me naturally and what strategies I need to adopt to compensate. A.D.D. is supposed to fade with age, and it feels to me as though I am generally less distractible. (This is something akin to saying that the ocean is a little dryer some days, however.)

×        I also started swimming two times a week. I had more energy for EVERYTHING.

 

Logistics:

×        My son was a little older, needing me in different ways. My husband and I started taking turns reading to him at bedtime, whereas for his first five years, I was almost always the one getting him to sleep. That gave me an extra hour at night, or an earlier bedtime so I could get up earlier to grade.

×        My teaching schedule changed. I began teaching a late class, 3:30 to 4:45. This made it easier to have a grading block on campus.

 

Behavior Mod:

×        I set up good rewards for myself and actually had the discipline to WAIT for them (can’t explain why I had the discipline last fall—I haven’t had it before).

 

The Glorious Glory of an Excel Spreadsheet:

Keeping track of assignments on an Excel spreadsheet was a lucky stroke of accidental genius on my part. Record keeping is crucial—instead of some vague sense of how well I’m doing, I have really precise numbers. Somehow just seeing the assignments that are coming next also helps me get to work on the current numbers—I know I’m not going to get a break, that if I’m procrastinating, I’m just delaying the inevitables.

I also pledged to go public with my numbers. This REALLY helps. I tell students how well (or poorly) I’m doing, and I even post the spreadsheet itself on D2L for them a couple times a semester. Ultimately, of course, I’m trying to return student work faster because students will learn more and feel less how-did-I-do? anxiety over the course of the semester. However.  I somehow really get off on driving those numbers down. And I seem to have a lot of friends, family, and colleagues who understand how hard this is for me and give me lots of positive reinforcement when I post good numbers.

 

Being organized doesn’t come as naturally to me as some things, but I’m learning, and I’m happy to say that if you’re interested in procrastinating less, it is possible to make progress. I have some thoughts on the spiritual dimensions of procrastination and I plan to write about them. Soonish.  For now, I’ll just finish with this quote from Pema Chodron: “It’s painful when you see how in spite of everything you continue in your neurosis; sometimes it has to wear itself out like an old shoe.” For some reasons I can understand and articulate, and some reasons I can’t understand or articulate, my procrastination is wearing itself out. I look forward to donating it to Goodwill sometime soon.

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Posted in Procrastination, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

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Honoring my Inner Weasel (Procrastination, Part I)

Posted on December 28, 2011 | 5 comments

Other than wetting my pants when I was three (because I never wanted to stop playing to go inside to pee) or having my father threaten to throw away every single toy on the floor (because I never wanted to stop doing anything to clean my room), the first time I remember getting in trouble for procrastinating was in the third grade.

I was bored in math class. This would become a recurring issue for me in school—I was bored in _________ class. It’s not that I’m a genius or anything, but I was always bright and quick in school-matters and I still bore easily. Fortunately, I have also always been able to compensate for my tendency toward boredom with a vast capability to amuse myself.

To make math more fun, I would wait to start a math worksheet until the teacher started collecting worksheets from other kids. This was very dramatic! I was probably doing a play-by-play in my head as I did it—“only one row left to collect! I have three problems left to do! Will I finish in time?” No. I did not finish in time. Ever. So the teacher called my parents, got invited to dinner, and I was told that we were going to have a conversation about how I was doing in school.

The teacher was a genius in this case. I don’t know if she knew exactly what I was up to, but she knew I could do the math and that I wanted to please my parents. Nancy Germann, even after a lot of other teachers in high school, then college and two rounds of grad school, is so firmly planted in my mind as a great teacher, maybe the best I ever had.

Leading up to the dinner, I completely panicked and scrambled for a way to show them all I wasn’t stupid (though of course no one had suggested I was). I ended up making a book out of construction paper with poems that were highly plagiarized versions of Beatles songs and Hallmark cards. I still have it somewhere because she gave it back, knowing we’d want to keep it. I remember Mrs. Germann coming for dinner, but I don’t actually remember ever talking about my performance in school. The problem with the unfinished worksheets went away. I don’t remember ever getting in trouble again with that particular teacher. This did NOT turn me into a diligent student who always followed directions, however. It simply turned me into a savvy student who never got caught not following directions promptly.

Three years later in the sixth grade, someone noticed my reading skills were advanced and set up a program where I could read at my own pace through some eighth grade readers. It might have worked if they’d let me pick my own books from the library—I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and David Copperfield just for fun about that time. But in that reader (from the 1960s somewhere, with two-color illustrations), I made very slow progress. I think I read three of the stories the whole year.

I think that’s always been part of the appeal of procrastination for me. It’s sort of like disobedience, but not glaringly obvious—the directions get followed eventually. It’s a handy way to combine my basic contrary nature with my strong urge to be a good Baptist girl (when I’m 90, there’ll still be a part of me trying to be a good Baptist girl and fucking it up. Oh, please—I’m 90. I can swear if I want.).

But one of the main reasons I procrastinate is just constitutional—it’s part of who I am. I don’t know if this part can change, the response that is so automatic it’s nearly primal. My mother had two weeks of false labor before I was born, for example. Upon setting a goal or being given a task, my first thought is always “How long can I wait to do that?”

I have gotten better over the years at estimating how long something will take me, and I’m relatively good at meeting firm deadlines because I work backwards from the deadline, using my time estimate. Very recently I’ve begun the brilliant practice of giving myself a cushion of time in addition to how long I think something will take, in case something goes wrong. Brilliant.

If deadlines are mushy at all, though, I still really struggle with not procrastinating.

I define procrastination as doing things in the wrong order such that undone things cause anxiety and other diminished results for myself or other people. I want to clarify that sometimes we call something procrastination when it’s simply a matter of time management. We can’t do every task we need to do immediately upon learning of the task—it’s not possible. For me, it’s procrastination when there’s something I could do, and should do, but don’t.

Returning student work promptly is something I’ve struggled with my entire professional life. When spring semester 2012 begins, I’ll be beginning my 25th year teaching college students. Somehow early on, I got it in my head that as long as students got papers back within two weeks, that was o.k. It’s not o.k.—it’s much too long. But the thing is, there’s never been a clear-cut penalty for me for taking that long or even longer to return student work. Because I did other things well in the classroom and put helpful comments on papers, and never asked students to turn in a new assignment before they’d gotten the previous one back, I almost never got negative comments on my student evaluations about taking too long to return work. Students learn less when too much time has elapsed between the effort of the assignment and the feedback, but that’s hard to measure, and since my students always seemed to be learning A LOT, it was something that made me feel kind of bad, but feeling kind of bad wasn’t much of a motivator to procrastinate less. This hearkens back to my third grade adventure—becoming savvy enough to not get caught following directions promptly.

I thus honor my inner weasel.

I’ve told students for years that I’m a recovering procrastinator, but until recently, there was precious little evidence that I was in recovery at all.

I’m happy to report, however, that Fall 11 was the third full semester in a row that I’ve been able to return student work faster than I ever have in my professional life—my overall average is under a week.

Tomorrow (or maybe the next day, depending) I’ll report on those exact numbers and describe how I got to this point in my recovery. But right now I want to watch a Rom-Com, and maybe take a nap.

There is something graceful and flirty and coy about procrastination—a way of dancing with time, coming in close, and backing away. The inner weasel frolicking in the deadline woods. Two lovers teasing each other by delaying the inevitable. Right. Well, anyway. Until tomorrow.

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LET THERE BE LIGHT AND LESS CAFFEINE

Posted on December 9, 2011 | 7 comments

As I write this right now I’m sitting in the sun. It’s true. 6:11 a.m. in Wisconsin in December, and I’m drinking my coffee, soaking up the rays. Ah….

I am allowed eight more minutes in the sun, at which point I have to turn off the light box on my kitchen table and get on with my day.

We bought the light because in this house the grownups have S.A.D. issues. Though neither of us has the official diagnosis of Seasonal Affective Disorder, it’s clear the issues we have with depression grow worse when the nights grow longer.

There’s an episode of Northern Exposure in which the characters discover these crazy light caps and they want to wear them all the time. I get it now—I have not yet wanted to turn the light off when it’s time. It is intoxicating.

So yes, I’m self-medicating, but this seems more productive than my standard self-meds—caffeine, alcohol, and salty-fatty-sweet-food-of-nearly-any-variety.

[Oops—there. Time’s up. Two minutes over, actually.]

I really identify with (we’re talking seriously resonate with) this quote from Pam Houston, in an essay called “ Breaking the Ice “:
“On September 21 I feel nothing but flat-out panic that we are about to enter the long slide into darkness that feels like an annual survival test. People think June 21 should be a seasonal-affected person’s happiest day, but it’s really joy mixed with trepidation. June 21 may be the beginning of summer, but each day will get a little shorter from then on. March 21 is the only truly joyful day: twelve hours of daylight and nothing but clear sailing ahead.”

But for me, this winter is better already. There may well be a bit of placebo effect going on when I turn on the light, but I don’t care. Even the first day I realized I didn’t feel the need for that second cup of coffee with breakfast (let alone the third or fourth at work), and with less caffeine in my system, I’m sleeping better. My doctor friend Betsy pointed out to me once that caffeine stays in your system 24 hours.

The third day of the light box, I wrote an ode to it:

LIGHT BOX

What Goethe said he wanted, we now have,
My husband emailed me. Not officially
A medical device, and yet I love
It more than Xanax. As if a little box of Italy
Beams up from our table. Just once a day
I sit in front of it, in the morning, first thing.
I never want to turn it off. I want to stay
On the piazza in the sun, emboldening
Myself for normal days of normal strife
And pleasure, days I find so difficult
Sometimes. I’m simply not equipped for life
In winter. Summer makes me gloriously hot
And happy to be alive. When he was about to die,
“More light” is what the poet said. “More light.”

There’s a parallel universe (the one from which Narnia springs) in which I’m a freelance Christian evangelist and author and the title piece of my latest book is Let There Be Light and Less Caffeine. In it I talk about the light box being helpful but my morning devotion ultimately being more helpful. If you live in that parallel universe, please buy that book, because as a freelance evangelist, I depend on the grace of God and the influx of cash from my brothers and sisters in Christ. And buy it from a local bookstore, if you would.

I’m not in that universe, but, even in my current unchurched mode, when I say “light,” I think God. In the Cruden’s Complete Concordance I stole from my Dad years ago (hey—maybe I should buy him a replacement for Christmas—I wonder if they make it for the Kindle….) there are almost 200 references for “light.” When I read the reference

“is a lamp, and the law is l.             Pr 6:23,”

I hear a praise chorus—not sure if it’s something we sang at camp or if it’s from an album—the  Christian pop band Second Chapter of Acts, maybe?

(And here I say a heartfelt thank you Jesus for the blessings of the internets—by the time I figured out that the lead singer for Second Chapter of Acts,  Matthew Ward, looked alarmingly like Riff Raff from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I wasn’t in touch with anyone who would get both references. There aren’t that many people on the planet who would get both references.)

And of course I think of light when I think of Christmas. Wendell and I will be lighting advent candles on Sunday and talking about Jesus and light. We’ve got our tree up, and lights on  our porch. (A student said, “I saw your lights. They look like they’re falling down.” “That’s how we roll,” I told her.)

Speaking of the second chapter of Acts, it is the second chapter of Luke that we usually use for our Christmas story. It’s what Linus quotes from, for example. But it’s the first chapter of John that I need the most, not just at Christmastime, but year-round. (And not just because one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems begins “The Word made Flesh is seldom, but tremblingly partook.”)

I cling to John 1: 5 this time of year, and somehow the King James Version sounds better than any,  “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” The darkness either didn’t understand the light or couldn’t overcome it, depending on your translation. In the winter up north, either way, that’s good news.

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