Thursday, October 05, 2017

Chocolate and control and writing, oh, my!

Dame Eleanor has a post up with normal news, and JaneB has one that's funny and heartwarming, and John Scalzi has one about why it's hard to write  that's much more eloquent than my similar rant of a few weeks back.

So if you've already responded to the news and donated, etc. etc., here is a different question: how are you granting yourself a feeling of control when the world seems out of said quality--i.e., "self-care," as people say now? I've never had a mani-pedi or any of that salon stuff, but here are a few things:

1.  Eat more chocolate. I used to get this for special occasions, but now I keep a bag of my beloved Guittard chocolate chips in my office and eat them when I finish something especially administratively boring. Or feel more stressed than usual. Or after lunch. I'm trying to taper off, but maybe not right now.

2. Take another FB break. At first I was all "but--but--I won't be able to wish people whose emails I don't have Happy Birthday!" and then realized that they would survive. As to missing out on scholarly stuff that gets posted to FB--well, if you post a CFP there and there only, you've already limited your range considerably, so capturing the attention of a broad range of scholars clearly isn't what the organization is going for, and it doesn't need my attention.

3. Change office hours and meetings to suit the times I'll see the most people and that suit me the best. The corollary is that I've stored up enough rage courage to respond politely but with some heat to the people who are never in the office or attend meetings if I hear even a hint of "where were you when I looked for you at 4:30 on Tuesday?' or some such thing. *Yes, I keep track when I'm in a meeting and my colleagues are consistently absent, for exactly this reason. No, I probably shouldn't care.

4.  Figured out an academic version of the Serenity Prayer. As in "grant me the serenity to hear about another time-sucking initiative on which they claim to want our input, the strength to read between the lines, and the wisdom to know that it's already a done deal and I don't have to pay any attention to it."

5. Start writing again. Between travel and research trips and the news and writing conference papers and house renovation, this was a chaotic summer for writing; added to this is a series of things I promised to write and that are not exactly flowing from my pen. So: back on the horse, I say. I've actually written at least something every day for a few weeks, with the help of my old taskmasters Strict Workflow Pomodoro  on Chrome (which only lets me go to Twitter, my noncaloric chocolate substitute, when the apple turns green), 750words.com, and my black notebook where I record progress and cross things off. *My accountability group helps, too.

How about you? How are you gaining control over your life?
*Edited to add. 

1 comment:

gwinne said...

Yes yes yes.

I have not tried that chrome app; I might give it a go.