The kids are back to school -- so where's my productivity?

It’s bothering me that I’m not getting more done.

The days just after the kids go back to school should be full of quiet, uninterrupted work hours. My productivity should soar in the weeks that follow Labor Day.

But of course, school isn’t the only endeavor that gets under way in early September. There are new community projects being launched, new writing assignments to attack, new clients to cultivate, and all the local friends I didn’t see all summer to catch up with.

Plus the house is kind of a mess, post-summer vacation, and I’d love to do a serious fall cleaning.

So I wake up too early in the morning – or in the middle of the night – thinking about all I’m not getting done: thinking about upcoming deadlines and unanswered correspondences.

Yesterday, for example, I seemed to get nothing done at all. There were just too many distractions. I called the plumber to fix a leak, chopped potatoes to make clam chowder for dinner, went for a run, picked up the mail, finished organizing the school library volunteer schedule, researched some information related to our insurance policies, did a phone interview for an upcoming column, and pitched a story.

And all the while I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. Not anything I’d lain awake at night thinking about, at least.

But then I realized what I had in fact gotten done: all of the above. It was one of those times that I needed to turn my focus from my To Do list to my Did list. Yes, there were a bunch of items I didn’t get to, but everything I had managed to address surely didn’t count as nothing, did it?

Sometimes I think I need to get more organized and other times I think I just need to be more realistic about what I can do. Everything I accomplished yesterday needed to be done. To my mind, so did a lot of other things that didn’t get done.

But somehow it all works out, and when I get too frazzled, I just remind myself that by some standards, I’m actually keeping up just fine.

 

"To Do" versus "Did"

It’s another one of those days when I have to remind myself to shift my attention to the “Did” list rather than the “To Do” list, and acknowledge that what I did do deserves recognition just as much as what I didn’t do.

That can be hard to put into practice, though. The “To Do” list is such an attention grabber, with its bold headings and flashy colors – at least the ones my imagination superimposes over the items on it. The To Do list jumps up and down and waves its arms in the air. It does cartwheels and performs cheers. It elbows its way to the front of my consciousness.

Meanwhile, the “Did” list sits quietly in a lounge chair with its feet up, laconically watching the To Do list fuss and clamor.

And so the Did list gets ignored while the squeaky wheel of the To Do list gets all of my mental grease. I run through the litany over and over again of what I need to do, what I did not get to this weekend, what’s due in the upcoming week. I vacuumed yesterday, but only half the house (and the easy half, at that). I need to finish working on my Fourth of July article. There are three baskets of clean laundry waiting to be folded. The car needs an oil change this week too, and I should write an email to the mom in charge of the kids’ beach trip for Wednesday.

But, as I remind myself, one is always making choices about how to spend time. As I was ignoring all of the things on my To Do list, I wasn’t doing absolutely nothing. I was spending a Sunday morning with my sister and her 7-year-old, who were visiting from Washington, D.C. I watched my young nephew row around my parents’ backyard pond in a rowboat, and then I watched the same busy child make up obstacle courses at the playground while my sister and I ruminated on the derivations and deviations of friendship.

True, these weren’t on any To Do list. But the vacuuming will still be there tomorrow and so will the work deadlines. My sister and my nephew, on the other hand, flew back to Washington yesterday. By the time they next visit, my nephew may have outgrown his interest in both rowboats and playgrounds. It truly might have been my last opportunity to see him do these things.

So the To Do list outweighs the Did list in flashiness and magnitude as always, but the Did list basks in a sense of gratitude and satisfaction. What I did mattered to me, even if not to my career development or my domestic upkeep. The To Do list will stick around another day; the Did list will fade into memory. Nonetheless, I’m so glad for what I did.

Move the furniture

Last week I came across this entry on The Book Designer blog in which Joel Friedlander told of a man who rearranges his furniture every few weeks just because the frequent sense of change sharpens his creativity and his productivity. The blog writer, who was telling this story second-hand, used “rearranging the furniture” as a metaphor for changing things up and introducing new elements as a way of keeping the mind alert.

I had to smile as I read it because it rang so true to me. My life has generally not been characterized by a lot of major changes, particularly not in terms of physical setting: I’ve spent almost my entire life in the same state, and the majority of those years in the same town. And yet I can vouch for what a positive impact frequent small changes can have on a creative mindset. So many times, the most minor changes in my life have given me an unexpected and seemingly unwarranted sense of renewal. Two years ago, when I changed the time of my weekday run from early evening to afternoon, it seemed like a great idea and gave me new energy. “Afternoon must be a much better time for me to run, physiologically speaking,” I concluded. But then one year ago, circumstances caused me to change from an afternoon run to a morning run, and I had that same feeling of a new spring in my step. It probably doesn’t actually matter what time of day I run, from a physiological perspective: it’s just the change itself that is reinvigorating.

Almost twenty years ago, when I was a copy editor at the American Meteorological Society, the editorial director told us a story about an office in which several copy editors shared one large space. One day, electricians came in and replaced all the lighting with a different kind of bulb. Immediately the productivity of the copy editors increased measurably, so the department head concluded that the new lighting made it easier for them to see and enabled them to work faster. But then after a month or so, the electricians came back and put the old bulbs back in, and again the productivity increased. It turned out, of course, that neither kind of bulb was more conducive to the editors’ productivity; it was the change itself that put a spring in their step, metaphorically speaking.

I find it particularly invigorating when I can find some small way to make my regular practices a little bit easier. Last week I started backing my car into our garage rather than parking in toward the house. Because of my bad habit of being just a teeny bit behind schedule almost every time I leave the house, this change seems to make a tremendous difference in my outlook whenever I leave to go somewhere. The car is already facing the right way and I don’t have to back out? Fantastic! In reality, I’m probably saving myself all of about fifteen seconds, but that one tiny saved step brightens my outlook considerably.

The “move the furniture” blog reminded me again to find small ways to change what I’m doing: a minor alteration in routine, a new habit like leaving my purse by the door instead of by my desk, or, indeed, a trivial rearrangement of the furniture. Routine is fundamental, but small changes within those routines can be effective as well. And it’s always great to feel that little surge of renewed energy that comes from almost any kind of trivial change.