The last few weeks have been a total failboat ride due to end-of-semester insanity. Thankfully, I have a mere 1.5 weeks until I can kiss this miserable academic year goodbye for good. So, much like the Spider-Man franchise, expect a reboot sooner than anyone expected.
Author: Julie Platt
Julie’s Week 13: A Credit Line at the Jerk Store
In the real world, being an overachiever is a fairly uncommon quality. Once leaving school, you might meet only a handful of overachievers in your lifetime. That’s not to say everyone else you meet is stupid; what it really means is that only a handful of people have chosen to measure themselves in adulthood with the same criteria children are defined by in school. It’s not bad. It’s just a really singular, specific system, only one among many, and many choose not to use it as their own personal measuring stick.
In academia, however, being an overachiever is a necessity. In fact, it’s the lowest-common-denominator, the absolute minimum requirement one needs to have any hope of moving up from the basement level. Achievement becomes a race among elites, with status markers wholly unlike those used in the real world. In academia, you are only as good as your next publication, your next big scientific breakthrough, or your next grant money intake. It should come as no surprise, then, that the most common emotional state for academics is a volatile combination of fragile insecurity and overwhelming egotism. Twelve years after first entering academia as a 23-year-old MA student, this is certainly where I again find myself. Jealous. Whiny. Catty. Self-righteous and obnoxious. Panicky and despairing. My social media posts vacillate between smug humblebrags and sloppy goodbye-cruel-world vagueness. I am, well, a jerk.
Sudden family tragedy and conversations with old, pre-academia friends have brought my awareness of the real world back with a vengeance. I’m sick of myself, and of the way I’ve learned how to act over the years. I’ve been trying to step outside myself and watch how I act (especially at conferences), and I’m not impressed. I need to be less narcissistic, develop greater empathy, quit interrupting people, listen more. Thankfully, Lifehacker has some strategies for that. The tips for avoiding conversation narcissism seem particularly helpful for me, as I tend to always dominate conversations. So, to concretize my efforts, I’m going to try to do the following this week:
- Avoid talking about my favorite topics when in conversation with others. This seems absolutely key for me, as I often go off on conversational benders about particular things and suddenly everyone looks annoyed and bored.
- Ask those I speak with questions about what they think or feel. My normal response is to chime in about myself, even when I’m not trying to dominate the conversation. Instead, I’ll work on making questioning the default conversational strategy.
- Reflect at the end of the work day on the conversations I had and how I acted. I can’t improve unless I know where I’ve been and where I am now.
I’m sure this isn’t the only time this year I’ll work on being less of a jerk. Academic jerkhood is a pretty big and deep-seated problem, so I think I’ll need more passes at it later on. For now, checking my conversational style is a good place to start on this journey to stop overstocking the jerk store.
Rule 2: Prioritize Like Mad (Julie’s Spring Break Special)
My parents were very clean, orderly people. When I say you could eat off of my mother’s floors, you pretty much could (you could probably eat off of the toilet seat too, but, you know, ew). I was expected to make my bed every single day, fold, hang, and put away my clothes, etc. I wouldn’t dare leave a dish in the sink or a sock on the floor. That just didn’t happen in the Platt household. But when I moved to Ohio and started living on my own, my 20+ years of (vaguely German) neatness training started to unravel. There were many reasons—rebellion, laziness, too much partying, and the insanity of the grad school schedule. To this day, I can tell when it’s nearly midterms because my apartment looks like a bomb hit it, and I’m not even in grad school anymore. I’m an actual adult. With an actual job. I turned 35 less than a week ago. AREN’T 35-YEAR-OLDS SUPPOSED TO HAVE THEIR SHIT TOGETHER???My point in all of this is that having your shit together means you have to prioritize, and sometimes keeping neat and tidy—the quality that marked one as responsible and good in my late mother’s eyes—gets kicked to the bottom right quadrant. So, guess what I’m not doing this break? Cleaning. Organizing. Sorting and filing and scanning. Even though I sorely need to. But there are some other things I sorely need to do more.
What I got accomplished today:
- Bathed, dressed, and fed myself (bonus—put on makeup!)
- Made the bed
- Paid some more bills
- Finished a conference proposal
- Cleaned all the expired food out of the fridge
- Took out the trash
- Planned meals for the next 5 days
- Went grocery shopping
- Made two doctors appointments
- Prepped lessons for one of my two classes for next week
- Did my daily IWCA conference tweeting
- Wrote this shit right here again
Tune in tomorrow for Rule 3.
Rule 1: Take Small Steps (Julie’s Spring Break Special)
So, I made my list. You know, stuff that needed doing. I dove in, using the Getting Things Done strategy for listing every single thing that crossed my mind (every card to write, every phone call to make, every room to clean). I listed and listed. When dust settled, there were no less than fifty individual tasks on my “Spring Break 2015” to-do list.It’s clear that some things are going to have to be reconsidered, because a list of fifty things to do in five days doesn’t look like it can be conquered in a series of small steps. So, here’s what I did accomplish today, however small:
- Bathed, dressed, and fed self
- Made bed
- Wrote a bunch thank-you notes and emails
- Paid bills
- Co-wrote a conference proposal
- Got two other conference proposals underway
- Got one of two inboxes to zero
- Delegated some service tasks
- Did my daily IWCA conference tweeting
- Wrote this shit right here
Tune in tomorrow for Rule 2.
Julie’s Spring Break Special: A Week of Habits, Rebooted
So, if there’s one thing I know, it’s myself. And knowing myself, I knew it would come to this. Behind on the blog. Behind in life/work. Habits abandoned, or only practiced sporadically. Seems about right for mid-March, where I left off. When I get derailed with anything positive that I’m doing, I pretty much always wallow in unhealthy behaviors for a little while instead of trying to get back up.
For the last two weeks I was frantically trying to get ready for CCCC, and then attending CCCC. I had to prepare a week’s worth of virtual classwork for my two classes. Once I got to CCCC and thanks to my Overeager Young Scholar Syndrome (OYSS, as in “OH YASSSSS I’ll do that!”—currently being evaluated for inclusion in the DSM V) I found myself with a metric shit-ton of ideas and opportunities and obligations. I got home two days ago with my usual travel migraine. Good news: this week is spring break. Bad news: my migraine and general malaise have lasted until today. Tuesday, mid-afternoon of break. There are only three days and a weekend left. My inboxes are overflowing, and my to-do list is so scary I don’t even want to open the app.
Then this appeared on Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-overcome-workload-paralysis-and-get-back-into-ac-169316979 It’s great advice. After thinking about it for a while. I’m going to use it to knock myself out of my work paralysis and reboot. Here’s my plan (I reordered the original list):
- Take Small Steps: My small step today is to make a list of the things I want to accomplish in the next five days. Listing is something my mom always recommended I do whenever I got overwhelmed, and I still rely on it.
- Prioritize Like Mad: I don’t do this in any formal way, but I think I need to. Not every passive-aggressive work email needs to be dealt with right away.
- Pick One Thing and Finish It: Today I will finish my grading backlog. That’s daunting, but if I break it down into steps, I can do it.
- Make Health a Priority: For the last…I don’t know, twelve years? I’ve not done this, and my body has suffered horribly. How can I work effectively when I feel so awful?
In future posts this week (I’m going to try for one per day) I’ll be reflecting on my priority matrix and highlighting what I’ve completed.
Julie’s Week 9: Check Your Headspace
I have an unquiet mind.
Ensō, a symbol of Zen
I think the first time I realized this, I was trying to meditate with the guidance of a former partner who was a very devout Vajrayana Buddhist. I was sitting on a round meditation cushion, and my legs kept falling asleep while I tried to hold the prescribed posture. The minutes passed, and I couldn’t stop the thoughts from entering, and I couldn’t stop my mind from latching on and going for a ride on each one.
I don’t feel bad about my mind; Pema Chödrön herself, in one of her lectures, admitted to having an “unusually busy mind.” I’ve been reading Chödrön’s work, and the work of other Buddhist teachers and practitioners, since college. As I’ve moved away from the religion I was raised with (Roman Catholicism) and away from the others I’ve had brief dalliances with (Wicca/Paganism, Unitarianism, shamanic practices, etc.), I’ve found much of what I’ve come to believe is true echoed in Buddhism, specifically Zen. The unexpected passing of my mother has moved me to take my spirituality more seriously.
The friendly inhabitants of the Headspace app.
My first step is to begin a regular meditation practice. A little while ago, I purchased a subscription to Headspace, an app that offers guided mindfulness meditation programs that build skills incrementally. It also features focused sessions to help with things like sleep, creativity, and how to defuse anxiety in a crisis. I’m going to start the beginner’s “Take Ten” program at around 10:30 pm each evening. I’ll be meditating for ten minutes daily, at first, and then I’ll take up a more advanced program.
A famous quote attributed to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama goes as such: “Do not use Buddhism to become a Buddhist. Use Buddhism to become better at whatever else in your life you are doing already.” I’m going take this to heart. Here’s to the first small step in the journey to becoming a calmer, more gracious, and more compassionate person.
Julie’s Week 8: When Disaster Strikes…
Don’t get it twisted.
Well, the last two weeks have been a mess. A slushy, icy mess. With a big frozen turd stuck directly in the middle.
My university called a grand total of five (!) “snow days” (this is southeastern Arkansas, so it was more like some sleet, ice, and a light dusting of snow). In addition, I was gone—at conferences—for some additional days. By the time I finally met my first-year writing students this past Thursday, I realized I had seen them for exactly four (!!) class days in entire month of February. I will need to do some serious surgery on my schedules to get us back on track.
It would have made sense to use those days “off” to get work done. But I didn’t. I spent my precious snow days watching TV, napping, and generally being a waste of life. I definitely have a propensity toward laziness, but I’m also feeling a lot of sadness, loneliness, and generalized, career-related angst. There’s the apathy that comes with loss; nothing seems to matter anymore. I eat junk food. I get in fights with people I know, and with people I don’t know. And then, little by little, all the good progress I’ve made comes undone.
I’ve still got one day left to post—one day to save Week 8 from being washed away with nary an impact. I’m going to use it to concoct a strategy that I can use when things go bad–a disaster plan. Here goes:
- Get clean, in some way. Take a shower. Brush my teeth. Do the dishes, take out the trash, put in a load of laundry, pick up the stuff that’s not where it’s supposed to be and put it back.
- Get away from energy sucks. This includes avoiding social media for 12 to 24 hours. Anyone who knows me knows that social media can turn me into the absolute worst version of Julie Platt that is known to exist. I am aware of this. I am not proud of it. I can get away from it. I will.
- Pick an item on my to-do list that I have been avoiding, and do it. Pretty much the same as eating a frog (see Week 6).
- Pick a reward, and enjoy it. I’m in the process of making a list of rewards that don’t include spending money (see Week 5). A few I have so far: enjoy a beer, cook something good, take Dobson for a walk, play a game for 30 minutes.
- Listen to Allegra, Heather, and Katie’s HBIC playlist. I WOKE UP LIKE DIS
Have a good end to your Week 8, bitches.
Julie’s Week 7: A Work-Work Balance
Photo by Flickr user DiAnn
All work is the avoidance of harder work.” So says the American poet James Richardson in his famous book Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays. I’ve often paraphrased this quote—in sincerity and in jest—when talking for the millionth time about the workload that comes with a career in academia. Plenty of smart people have articulately described what it feels like to do this job; one of my more recent discoveries is Amanda Ann Klein’s “No End In Sight: Academic Research and ‘Time Off’”, in which Klein, considering what it would take to get to the status of full professor from associate, states “I came to the realization that the stress and late nights, the self doubt and loathing, were now unnecessary. I am not going to get a better-paying job and my current employers, no matter how many books I publish, how many students I mentor, or how many committees I serve on, are not going to give me any more money. Or at least not much money.” As I think about the way the academic labor force/market has changed, and how academia in general has changed, I know that what Klein is saying is more true than false.
In the last year, I have had some pretty intense ups and downs. The day after my 34th birthday I became engaged to my long-time love, and started to envision future stability. Six months later, my mother suddenly died, leaving my entire family (immediate and extended) heartbroken and bewildered. The fragility of life became very, very real, and my days were punctuated with terrifying thoughts that everyone I love could be taken from me in an instant. As I returned home to Pittsburgh for the holidays, I started to realize that no matter how great the writing center was, how well I performed my service obligations, how sharp and consistent a teacher I was, nothing about my job would improve. Nothing would change the attitudes of those colleagues who disliked me from day one. Nothing would persuade all of my students to complete their readings and projects. Nothing would move me closer to my family, my friends, my fiancé, and a grocery store that isn’t Walmart. The only thing that had the potential to improve my life in any way was obtaining tenure (and it’s becoming less and less likely that tenure can do much to improve anyone’s life). And in order to get tenure, you need publications. It’s the sad thing about academia; the only thing that validates you as a person is getting a manuscript you spent years of your free time working on into the hands of of a few dozen people at most. Busting your ass getting organizations and conferences and workshops and learning centers going, and performing sizable amounts of of emotional labor to get a few lost student souls to figuratively come to Jesus—none of this means much of anything when it’s T&P time.
In the last few days, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a number of my colleagues about their work habits, and found, to my surprise, that many of them have drawn clear and sturdy boundaries between their home and their work lives. Some of them have far heavier teaching loads than I do, and they still find a way to leave their work at work. I can’t go quite that far, but I think I can control the kinds of work I do when I’m at work, and the kinds of work I do when I’m at home. So, I’m going to do my very best to do most of my teaching and service work at work. That means no course prep or grading when I’m in my apartment, and none but the most pressing of emails after business hours. I will then devote the other half of my life to a different kind of work, and do most of my research and writing work at home. I’m not aiming for perfection; just a more defined set of boundaries, and a better way to fend off grading creep.
Julie’s 52 Habits Update
Week 6: My latest frog (commenting on papers) is waiting for me when I sit down at my desk tomorrow morning (assuming we don’t get like a quarter inch of ice overnight and the entire state shuts down).
Week 5: Still in the process of getting my budget together, but I did manage to tie up a few significant loose ends in my finances.
Week 4, Week 3, Week 2, Week 1: My schedule was disrupted last week by a conference/road trip, and I have another one to go to at the end of this week, so I’m going to go easy on myself and wait until next Sunday to get back on the wagon.
Julie’s Week 6: Frog In My Throat, Delicious!
I begin this week with a quote that is usually attributed to Mark Twain: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” That quote is often followed-up by this one, also attributed to Twain: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.“
What does it mean to eat the frog? Well, I ate a frog this morning without actually meaning to, and it made my day exceptionally better. Let me explain. I hate grading. I mean, I really hate it. I find it to be the most soul-eroding task I have to do as an academic, and I procrastinate on it to shameful extremes. I’ve avoided grading to the detriment of my teaching evaluations, which is where I’m generally and consistently zinged. I don’t even want to talk about how bad it’s been in the last few years, but let’s say I ended up giving out a lot of extra credit points out of sheer guilt.
21-year-old me in Taiwan, May 2001, pretending to eat a raw baby octopus. It’s not a frog, but you get the idea.
So why, exactly, do I hate it? I think I’ve finally figured it out. It’s not because it’s tedious (although it definitely is that) and it’s not because I’m annoyed with my students for being lazy or careless (although that definitely comes in to play). I hate it because, for me, it’s where I have to face my own failures as a teacher. When I read a student draft that misses the mark completely, I blame myself for not teaching the student well enough. I second-guess all my lessons, and agonize over the things I must have done wrong. It’s painful. I hate it. Never mind that it’s not completely true, and that students are also partially responsible for their own learning (or their lack thereof). I am the worst teacher ever and I suck, and this subpar writing is the proof. So, I leave all the grading work to the very last minute, and even beyond that last minute.
But I didn’t do that today. Today, I got up, fixed a cup of tea, opened my laptop, and began grading. I kept grading and grading until all the grading was done. I felt so relieved—the kind of relief I hadn’t felt in a very long time. And I felt freedom—the freedom that comes with knowing that the absolute shittiest thing I had to do was done. The rest of my day—dog walk, more work, cooking dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up, doing errands, more work, writing, etc.—felt calm and under control, with very little lingering guilt. I had experienced the joy of eating a big, juicy frog first thing in the morning.
In his book Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, Brian Tracy states,
“Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment [. . .] Discipline yourself to begin immediately and then to persist until the task is complete before you go on to something else.” My frog this morning was grading student work. I ate it. It wasn’t great, but wasn’t that horrible; the anxiety I experienced while procrastinating was far worse. And once my frog was gone, the rest of my day was so much better.
This week, and next week, are going to be especially busy and exhausting. On Thursday, I am driving my writing center staff to Austin (an 8+ hour trek) for the SCWCA conference, where I will present twice, attend a board meeting, network, and look after my minions, some of whom have never attended an academic conference before. Next week, I will hit the road again with my colleague to be featured presenters at the SWCA conference in Nashville (Our pictures are in the program. Really!). So. I’ve got a lot of writing ahead of me, in addition to course prep and grading and meetings and general day-to-day work. So, I’m going frog-hunting. Each morning, I’ll identify the biggest and juiciest frogs, and eat them immediately upon hitting my desk. I mean, after all, I do live in the South.
Julie’s 52 Habits Update
Week 5: Did a little more taking stock of my money; realized that things are kind of complicated and I’ll need to spend a good afternoon sorting through all my bills and figuring out how much to budget for. I’m going to hit pause until I return from my conferences.
Week 4: Pomodoro-ing has been very successful. It’s much easier to write when you only have to do it in short bursts.
Week 3: Still behind on the Morning Person course. However, I am still getting up and getting ready immediately. I’m going to start making my bed every morning, too; it’s a small task that doesn’t take too long (like, 4 minutes?), makes my room look spiffy, and makes me feel responsible.
Week 2: Paleo-ing in fits and starts. I have seriously underestimated the depth of my emotional eating k-hole. Again, I’m going to hit pause until I return from conferences, and try to avoid eating deep-fried-deep frying on the road.
Week 1: Still knocking it out each day. Woot!
Julie’s Week 5: Dollar Dollar Bills, Y’all
Getting to the roots of the problem.
Let’s talk about money.
When I graduated from college in 2002, I landed a salaried job–with benefits–within a month (this is now and kinda was then pretty much unheard of). I was living with my parents, who were so thrilled that their English-major kid found a job that they didn’t charge rent. So, apart from my car payment and cell phone bill, I was free to spend my modest salary on clothes, cocktails, and lunches from the Whole Foods salad bar. I was out on Match.com dates until 2 and got to work by 8 the next morning, was in CardioKick by 5:30 and charging kitten-heel flats in Banana Republic at 7 with a sack of takeout Thai food waiting in the car. In short, I finally had some money, and I thought I was hot shit.
Guess how much money I saved during this magical time? Guess how much I could have saved? When I was in grad school and trying to make it to loan disbursement while overdrawing my bank account and paying bills late, I cursed my stupid decisions. The ivory pantsuit was $200 I could never get back, and it ended up in the donation pile (because it seemed I packed on about 75 pounds with every subsequent degree I earned). I guess it wouldn’t have mattered a lot, now that I see how puny my savings would have been compared to ten years of adulthood below the poverty line while desperately trying to appear professional. By the end of my Ph.D., I had accumulated a terrifying amount of credit card debt (and let’s not even talk about student loans). When I got my first academic job (the one I’m still at), I hoped I could get ahead of my bills, but my disappointingly tiny paychecks (yet another issue in academia) vaporized on contact with my expenses and my debt.
And lest you think I’m in denial: I know that all of this is at least 50% my fault. In addition to food, I exchange my feelings of sadness, anger, and fear for stuff: clothing, makeup, jewelry, shoes, home decor, electronics…the list goes on. I justify this with excuses: I work so hard! I never get to go anywhere. I miss my family. I hate my body/apartment/car/life. It’s been a rough day/week/month. I must look like such a loser compared to XYZ, they have a job and a house and a family and a retirement plan…The worst excuse of all was/is this: It doesn’t matter. This is how I pretend that a slip-up is not actually a slip-up, and that I’ll get it together perfectly tomorrow. Then I wonder why months have passed and I’ve seen no progress.
And then there’s this other thing that happened. On September 21, 2014, my mother died. She was a few months short of retirement and her 66th birthday. It was unexpected and sudden, and horrific and unfair and cruel and surreal. And, without sharing too many private details, I’ll say that in the weeks and months that followed my credit card debt became a thing of the past and I found myself with some substantial assets. And although I would joyfully give up my newfound financial security to have my mom back…it’s not going to happen. So, I try to tell myself that this was mom’s way of helping me, one last time.
I wish this place really existed. Until then, I’ll stick with a boring old budget app.
That brings me to the present moment. I need a damn budget, now that I actually have enough money to cover my expenses. So, naturally, I’m using the personal finance software You Need A Budget. It helps you create and stick to a budget and gives you access to free online money management classes. At $60, it’s steep, but I got a deal on my copy several months ago. My goal is to have a basic monthly budget planned by the end of Week 5. Also, I’m emptying my Sephora and Ulta and Old Navy online shopping carts, because the reward points ain’t all that.
Julie’s 52 Habits Update
Week 4: Not too shabby with these daily pomodori. I’m doing 20-minute intervals with 5-minute breaks, and I’ve found that the Pomodoro Timer app is highly customizable and can track whether or not I’ve met my goals. Also, what this is helping me to do is prioritize writing. I could have spent the last hour doing more class prep or grading, but I pushed all of that aside to write (even if it is just a blog post—you gotta start somewhere). I’ll be no good to anyone, least of all my students, if I can’t get anything published and lose my job or something.
Week 3: Still holding steady at getting ready immediately upon waking, but haven’t done anything since then. I’ll make it my goal to spend some time planning my ideal bedtime routine this week.
Week 2: I’ve been avoiding the scale as last weekend’s mega-depression drove me to the proverbial feed bag. However, I made some tasty paleo dishes this week, including a respectable chicken tikka and paleo naan, and a wicked good pad Thai with zucchini strands in place of the rice noodles.
Week 1: I’m getting close to making 2 daily distraction-free hours an actual, bona fide habit. When I don’t do it, I feel weird. Yay!
52 Habits 