Quarterly Check-In, Part One

As tax day approaches, I am reminded of that old saw, The only things certain in life are death and taxes.  But nobody wants to talk about either of those things, so I thought, as this quarter draws to a close, it's time to check back in with you, Readers, about your New Year's resolutions and goals.

How are they going?

I don't really want to talk about that, either. I am here to brag. Why, you ask?

First of all, I won. Twice. I won a raffle. The prize is a massage, which I can redeem at the farmer's market when it opens.  I also won a gift certificate to a plant nursery by guessing the weight of a boulder. I was at a home show with my friend LL. I was very excited about this contest. I had a feeling when I dropped my estimate in the bowl that I was going to win. Don’t ask me why. I don’t even believe in that stuff. Still, I had a feeling. And I won. I won I won I won. My guess was pretty close—1,967 lbs to an actual weight of 1,948 lbs. In the interest of veracity, I must admit the lady who called burst my bubble a bit, if you can burst a bubble only a bit. Newsflash--you can’t. A bubble is either intact, or burst. So. More like a tire with a slow leak is the metaphor I seek. Leak and seek.

Anyway, she told me someone else had guessed a little closer, but every time they tried to contact this person, the person hung up on them before they could speak. This is the tenor of the times, isn’t it? So they moved on to the next closest guess, mine. Of course, I had screened the call, because most calls are not worth answering, then called them back. I am not above hanging up on intrusive calls.

Also in the interest of veracity, I must admit that I had to check with my friend LL about the weight of a ton before I could make my guess. But I was right.

I am thrilled. Now I can drive 75 minutes to spend $50 on a plant. Or a pot. Or something.

I also won by tackling admin. Admin is what gets me every time. Admin is the crap you just don't want to do, but you know you need to do. And life, I am sorry to say, is full of admin.

So, after delaying for several years, literally, I finally took the advice of the plumber and called Delta about our kitchen faucet. This required girding myself for hours on hold with customer service trying not to listen to their hold music and for frustrating questions about make and model when I couldn’t find the manual for the thing. And then I called. And miracle of modern miracle, all I needed to do was text a photo of the faucet to the man on the phone, and next thing I knew, he was promising me a replacement part, for free.

Still waiting on that, by the way.

But—done. Checked off the list. Weight lifted.

The ease of that admin left me a bit foolish feeling. I know I am writing backwards. My point is, this kind of detail, this annoying stuff of which life is full, is the kind of stuff I normally walk backwards around the earth in the opposite direction to avoid. The husband and I call this stuff “admin.” This is because I caught a segment of an interview with someone who has written a book about this stuff, which she calls “admin.” And she claims to have strategies to help all of us poor avoidant sods tackle our admin. Unfortunately, I don’t know her name or the name of her book, and while I could look them up by looking on the website of our local NPR radio station, or probably even by googling “book about admin”, I haven’t. So while this information might indeed be very useful for me, and for you, Readers, I do not have it for you. Because finding it is yet another piece of admin. And I used up all my willpower contacting Delta.

But, to be successful in life, one must figure out how to conquer admin. As well as how to increase willpower. Apparently, according to this author, some of us are better at admin than others. I am definitely others.

So, how to conquer admin?

There’s a great piece of advice bouncing around the self-help coaches: Eat the frog. I believe this phrase is attributed to Mark Twain. Again, I would have to look that up, and so I will just lamely assume it is a reference to something Mark Twain wrote. Or said. After all, it seems plausible. He wrote that short story about the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County. It’s called, “The Celebrated Jumping frog of Calaveras County.” so it seems plausible he said something about eating frogs. Or it’s plausible that our minds just connect that saying with Mark Twain because he wrote a story about jumping frogs. Frogs and frogs being linked. At least in my mind.

I digress. Now, the saying, “Eat the frog,” means to get the unpleasant stuff out of the way first. Off your to-do list. This makes sense. Eating the frog means getting it out of the way and off your chest and out of your mind and off your shoulders. It means you get to cross something off the to-do list. Something unpleasant.

However, there is also the advice to conserve your most productive time of the day for your most important tasks, such as your creative endeavors or other projects that require clarity of thought and a reserve of energy. And our most productive time of the day is usually first thing. And they recommend saving the admin stuff for later, when you’re not as primed for creative work. That way you don’t burn energy and therefore willpower on less important tasks.

So, which advice is better?

Dunno.

Of late, the husband and I have taken to calling everything we don’t much feel like doing, “admin.” Turns out that’s a lot of stuff. Shoveling snow. Changing light bulbs. Planning meals. Admin. Life is full of admin.

But I think a secret to happiness is embracing admin. I mean, there is no way around it. So. You know. If you can embrace, as in accept that fact, then you have a better chance at happiness. Admin is the frog.

The best scenario is that you partner with someone whose definition of frogs and admin is different than yours. Complements yours, ideally.

This is not the case in my home. We have overlapping definitions of admin. Vast, overlapping definitions. In fact, it’s a miracle anything gets done. I can’t tell you how many times the husband claims he’s going to put a letter in the mailbox on the way to work—our mailbox is across the street in a little mailbox house with other mailboxes belonging to the neighbors—and I find the envelope left behind.

You’d be surprised how hard it is to cross the street to mail a letter.
Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised. What do I know. I’m just letting you in on the depth of our laziness chez nous.

This is probably a good time to remind myself of Stephen Covey’s Habit No. 3 of Highly Effective People, Put First Things First. Good old Stephen Covey. Such a fount of wisdom. I myself have always wanted to be a fount of wisdom—or it font, font of wisdom? Perhaps a step along the path to wisdom is being able to repeat the wisdom of others. Anyway, put first things first is Covey's chapter on time management, which boils down to the four quadrants of effectiveness. Or, how to deal with admin in a mature manner, rather than in a hair’s-on-fire manner. I’ve discussed this before on this blog, but it’s been a long time. (http://www.unmappedcountry.com/search/label/Habit%20%23%203) This about the four quadrants of decision- making)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/7_habits_decision-making_matrix.png

So there are the four quadrants. Ideally, you spend most of your time in quadrant II, taking care of things important but not urgent. Here’s where you do your long-term planning, your self-evaluation, your strategizing how best to whatever. This is in the ideal world. In the real world, sometimes it’s all quadrant IV, mucking about with the unimportant and non-urgent stuff. That’s usually followed by a quick (and involuntary) switcheroo into quadrant I, the important and urgent stuff, the crises. After which you have definitely earned a trip back to Quadrant 4 (unimportant and not urgent; online shopping, playing trivia games, whatever.) Although, according to this handy chart cribbed from Stephen Covey, Quadrant IV should be ELIMINATED from your life.

I think not. We need Quadrant IV. Probably just a lot less time in it.

Honestly, I am not sure which quadrant is the frog-eating quadrant, and Stephen Covey is no longer around to clarify. What I know is that priority-setting, scheduling, and making a plan are three things that make me want to pull the covers over my head and forget.

So we can see why I am not a highly effective person.

Quadrant III is the quadrant we are supposed to delegate. That’s correct, we are to delegate the un-urgent but important things in Quadrant III to someone else who can take care of them. Hopefully this person will have an affinity for admin.

Sadly, since I don’t live in an office, I have no one to delegate things to. I suppose this must be the Eat the Frog quadrant. You have to eat it to get it over with. Unless you can delegate this task to someone else.


I’m thinking, which is the Eat the Frog Quadrant? And I’m thinking maybe I need to rename these quadrants.

	URGENT	NOT URGENT
IMPORTANT	QI  Hair on Fire Taxes due today	Q2  The place for the Big Boys and Big Girls with Brave Hearts and Minds. Or- Research whom to bribe to get kid into Ivy. Also, which Ivy?
NOT IMPORTANT	Eat the Frog? Q3 Mixing advice is so dang hard.	Q4 Binge watch “Russian Doll”

After proving to you just how much I avoid admin, I am going to confound you by saying that I actually did google the NPR interview with the admin-coining expert. Here's why: Another handy tip for getting things done is to use your tendency to put off admin to your benefit. Put off something highly unpleasant by doing something less unpleasant that is also easy. Such as googling the author who coined the term “admin.”

Her name is Elizabeth Emens, and her book is Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More. Here’s a blog post about her general idea*. Summary: 4 approaches to admin: The Super Doer, the reluctant doer, the admin denier, and the admin avoider (moi).

So what was more unpleasant that I had to do? I'll never tell. Instead, I will report that I mailed three important letters this week, which balances out the rebate I failed to earn because I waited so long to send in the form that the offer had expired.

*//www.girlboss.com/life/elizabeth-emens-life-admin-excerpt.

On Not Sending the New Year's Card and other Failures

I missed my weekly post last week. Sorry. There was the middle school musical. It was tech week and then there were four performances. This wouldn’t have been so much to do if I weren’t on the Make-Up Committee, but I was on the Make-Up Committee. And there was a lot of make up to apply for the show, Seussical, Jr. For a 7 pm start time, we had to arrive at 4:15. With a cast of 65, there were a lot of faces. I painted giraffes, leopards, wolfish things (including the 6^th grader), as well as eyeshadows on Circus McGircus players, and forehead swirls on Whos.

It was fun, Readers, okay? I got into this situation because a couple of years ago I did the make-up for the 11 year old and her friend when they went trick or treating as Goth girls, and apparently my skill in that endeavor reached certain channels leading to the middle school musical make-up committee. Okay, truth: At the informational meeting that followed auditions, all parents were instructed to volunteer for one committee or another, and as we swarmed around a table filled with clipboards, my friend, whose child was a Goth girl with mine that Halloween said, “You should do make-up, cuz you did that Goth make-up so well.”

I am sorry to say I failed to take away a single photo of my work. I was so busy. So you’ll have to take my word for it. It was spectacular.

I did take away a cold, however. When a large portion of 65 children breathe in your face, it’s the thing you do. I’m not complaining. It could’ve been a stomach bug. I gave them nothing as long-lasting. As one of the other make-up committee members and I confided to one another, we made sure to eat a mint before working, and to apply more make-up than usual (which is usually zero in my case) to ourselves, so that we would project competence to the middle schoolers who presented their faces to us.

So. That was last week. Now another week has gone by and I am sorry to say I am avoiding writing. I’m avoiding the blog. I’m avoiding the shitty first draft. I’m avoiding the labels for our New Year’s card. The card that is waiting patiently in a nice stack of identical siblings to get enveloped and stamped and sent to sixty lucky recipients. Sixty. Not even enough to cover everyone on our mailing list. How did that happen? Vague memories of having lots of extras the last time we sent out a holiday card (it’s been a few years) in tandem with no memory of how many of that year’s cards we ordered. So we estimated. Underestimated in this case. I’m actually pleased to know we had more people on our list of friends and family than we thought. Chuffed. I’m chuffed. Though not chuffed enough to go to Staples, buy the blank labels, print them at home and slap ‘em on the envelopes.

And now we have one more piece of evidence why I’m not a household name. I can’t even get myself to get my name into the households of people who actually know and care about me. Purportedly. I don’t want to assume too much. For instance, to assume that people on the list would enjoy receiving a New Year’s card from me. From us, I should say. From the family. With a line or two of personalization across the back. That would be presumptuous.

It’s a really cute card, though. The husband and I are absent from it, leaving only the younger members of the family – the girls and the dog – which ups the attractiveness of the card, although perhaps lowers the total interest receivers might take in it, as it eliminates the chance to examine how life has aged us. This wasn’t intentional, this omission. I would’ve opted for a photo of all of us; but if we’d waiting any longer to get a good one, then we wouldn’t have ordered the cards, which have been sitting on the dining room table, ready to roll, for three weeks. 

With all this baggage surrounding a holiday card, it’s not marvelous that I hesitate to impose myself on people who don’t know or care about me, an endeavor that would help make me a household name.

If I were a household name, I would have an assistant who could go to Staples and send out these cards.

Oh, look, Readers! I managed to write something! Next time I’ll write something more meaty. 

What Robert Benchley Can Teach Us About Success

I think we can all agree that achieving a goal makes a person feel successful. I think we might all be in agreement that one compelling definition of success is achieving a goal. And I think we can also agree that there are many reasons why achieving goals can be difficult. One of the most prevalent reasons is procrastination. I know we can all agree on that.

Yet just the other day, I came across an opinion piece in the NYTimes by author John Tierney called, “This Was Supposed to Be My Column for New Year’s Day.”  It is a defense of procrastination. Apparently there is research to bolster this defense, research which can be summarized in the following way. If you pull a procrastinator off the couch, you will discover that while she may not have achieved her stated, highly important goal, she needs to relax on that couch, because in an effort to avoid her stated, important goal, she has worn herself out by frantically cleaning out the closets, grocery shopping, clipping coupons, pruning hedges, going to the gym, and any number of other tasks deemed less important (and usually themselves subjects of procrastination,) and certainly not necessary that day. But she is exhausted. She has earned her rest.

Okay, that was less a summary than a long explanation. The point is, while procrastinators may not be doing what they say they should be doing, they are often busily taking care of other tasks that need to be done, but are less urgent, or less distressing and difficult. So, what these researchers suggest is that at the top of your to-do list you put “a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t)….then, farther down the list, include some doable tasks that really matter.” Then, as you vigorously avoid what’s at the top of the list, you accomplish much of what’s lower down on it.

Or, as another researcher put it, his strategy is to “play my projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by working on another.”

Tierney has the good sense to quote Robert Benchley. (He ought to, he’s had plenty of time to find apt quotations for his piece, which he claims to have been putting off for at least five years.) Mr. Benchley is one of my favorite bedtime reads, especially if I’m feeling particularly jittery about the loads of responsibilities in my life that I’ve shirked. On the subject of procrastination, he wrote, “The psychological principal is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Now, Mr. Benchley wrote this in 1930 or so, and this research on procrastination is just now happening….Readers, draw your own conclusions. Mine is that the folks who have got onto this subject, have some really significant research they ought to have been doing, and I only hope I’m alive to read about it in the NYTimes when they finally get around to it.

This method of using procrastination as a reverse psychology tool runs aground on the question of how you are ever supposed to get around to doing those things that are really important, difficult, and terrifying. Like signing your will, for example. Or. (My mind has gone blank. Just the thought of thinking of those terribly frightening deeds that need doing has scrubbed it clean. You get my point.) If you keep putting off and putting off the thing at the top of the list, you haven’t dealt with the original task, the Prime Mover of Procrastination, if you will. That Prime Mover got the whole to-do list rolling in the first place. 

My point, Readers, is that when your evasion tactics have run out, and your photos are in albums and your teeth are bleached, but you still haven’t faced that will, for example (and this it not at all related to my life,) then you have to have a solution for procrastination.

Now, Mr. Tierney has written a book with Roy Baumeister called Willpower, so of course he has a solution for us. He'd better. It's called the Nothing Alternative, summed up by Raymond Chandler’s rules for writing, which were a) you don’t have to do it, but b) you can’t do anything else.

This is all well and good, especially if you have an excellent editor like Gordon Lish to shape your efforts into paragons of excellence; but if you don’t - and in any case, even Gordon Lish couldn't execute Raymond Chandler's will, or mine - I offer another option. Options are good, especially when you’re on a deadline and you need to make a decision. You can put off your decision for the perfectly justifiable reason that you need to consider your options.

So I offer you mine. Ready?  It's kind of counter-intuitive. Bear with me.

Children.

That’s right. Children. Have them. Have your own, or get some who are your responsibility. Because children derail your plans every day. Have you ever tried to complete any task while children are present? Can’t be done, can it? How about a sentence? Complete a sentence? Nope. See, they throw your whole system into chaos, and if you’re not sleep deprived because of some weird phase they’re in, you’re sick because of something nasty they brought home to you. These examples are most applicable to younger children, but older children have their ways of derailing, too. That project they forgot to mention is due in two days for which they must have a presentation board which means you have to drop everything and go to Staples immediately? The meltdown over math that causes you to forget to make dinner? 

Why or how does any of this chaos help you end procrastination? Well, years of saying, “I’m too tired to do blah or blah, I’ll do it tomorrow,” only to spend the night emptying the barf bucket and watching old movies on TV and then being really, really too tired to do blah or blah the next day, taught me the meaning of that phrase, "no time like the present." I would say to myself, I will do this deed now, because you never know what’s going to happen later. So, yes, if I wake up and the weather’s decent and the kids are healthy and I have slept pretty well, then I know today’s the day to take care of that thing I’ve been dreading.  You never know what tomorrow will bring. So do it now.

And by “it” I mean, pick up a copy of Robert Benchley’s stories, if you haven’t got one already. Remind yourself that he may have joked about procrastination, but he got his work into print, which means he finished it. And then go lie down on your couch immediately, and read a few chapters. You’ll feel better, I promise. You can get to that to-do list later.