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.

 

On the horns of a dilemma

My nine-year-old said the words I love to hear perhaps above all others yesterday. “Mom, could you just read outside while I ride my bike around the driveway?”

She likes to do driveway laps, but not without company. So she likes me to sit there and read while she bikes. It’s like being given a job as an ice cream taster: surely too good to be true.

I pulled a lawn chair out of the garage and found my Kindle, but just as I opened to the front page of the Sunday Boston Globe, I realized that the circumstances were ideal for tackling a household task I’d been procrastinating for months, which was digging through the myriad packing boxes in the garage to find the nighttable lamps we’d never unpacked after moving a year ago. It’s one of those things I keep meaning to do, and yet unlike laundry or cooking, it’s never essential. It’s always sort of a second-tier priority. And second-tier priorities never seem to get done.

If I was ever going to search for those lamps, this was the moment.

And yet there on my Kindle was an entire Sunday Boston Globe plus an entire Sunday New York Times to be read, and the circumstances were ideal for that as well.

It was a fairly straightforward dilemma. The benefits of searching for the lamp were obvious – locating something I needed and garnering the additional satisfaction of crossing off a task that had stagnated on my To Do list for months – but the benefits of the newspaper couldn’t be overlooked either: awareness of current events, exposure to informed opinions, overall intellectual stimulation.

I spend a few idle moments contemplating the nuances of this admittedly trivial dilemma. Reading the newspaper, especially the Sunday paper, really does make me a happier and more fulfilled person. I genuinely feel lacking when I go a whole Sunday without reading the paper at all. I worry that I’m missing out on important world developments. I feel hesitant to join in conversations about current events, feeling uninformed.

On the other hand, procrastinating on household tasks takes its own mental and spiritual toll. Though there are surely people who never think about housework and are able to devote all of their discretionary time to intellectual pursuits, I can’t imagine being free of the gnawing voice inside telling me I can’t let the household tasks get away from me; they multiply like bunnies. Dust bunnies, that is.

In the end, I treated the conflicting choices inside my head the same way I treat my own children when they quarrel: I made them take turns. First I read the lead story in the Globe; and then, with a deep breath, I approached the mountain of packing cartons.

I suppose the outcome was inevitable. Household chores always manage to sink their teeth in; you give them an inch, they take a mile. Two hours later, I was still going through boxes – not because I hadn’t found what I was looking for but because one thing leads to another with a job like this, and once I’d located the lamps, I needed to find the lightbulbs, and while looking for the lightbulbs I came across a favorite vase that I wanted to bring into the house, but if I was going to find a place for that vase, I might as well find the one that went with it as well. And so on.

Not until after the kids were in bed six hours later did I get back to the paper. It was nearly ten o’clock and I was only one article into the Sunday Globe. Unless I stayed up ‘til midnight reading, I knew I’d feel just a little bit behind, intellectually, all week.

Still, knowing there was one fewer task on my To Do list was worth something. So it was with a very small and yet unquenchable sense of accomplishment that I finally finished one last article and reached out gratefully to turn off my much-missed bedside lamp.

The "oblivion principle" - perks of a privileged childhood

It’s such an obvious reality that I don’t know how it can still surprise me, but I'm sometimes amazed by how hard I can work and how much I can accomplish without my family having any inkling of what I’ve done.

And it’s easy to become resentful of that. I think often of the recurrent image from the “Rose Is Rose” comic strip by Pat Brady, in which every once in a while Rose descends into her Dungeon of Resentment. How is it that I spent all morning cleaning all four bathrooms and no one noticed? Do they have any idea of how much pollen would be piled on the windowsills right now if I hadn’t dusted this week? Where do they suppose the clean and folded laundry they regularly find in their bureau drawers comes from, anyway? Yesterday we were out of milk and today we have plenty of milk: did anyone notice that I spent two hours at the supermarket and then carried in five bags of groceries myself?

I know there are various ways to address this issue, and I know there are plenty of parents who think I should be more proactive as far as expecting contributions of help from my children. But they do tasks that I consider age-appropriate – they’re almost always responsible for unloading the dishwasher after it runs; they bring their clothes hampers to the laundry room when I ask them to; they clear the table after dinner; they would have helped carry in the grocery bags if they’d been home at the time – and it’s not really a matter of my wanting less work on my hands. It’s just the frustration of how invisible it all is to them, how they never seem to actually see me do any of this or notice what I’ve done.

But when I start to descend into the Dungeon of Resentment, I have to remind myself that this life I’m living in my own choice. I’ve chosen to raise a family, to live in a house, to do the kind of work that generates the kind of salary for which buying groceries is not a problem but having abundant paid household help would be.

What helps more than that, though, is to reiterate to myself my belief that being oblivious to the work your mother does is actually one of the privileges of a comfortable childhood: a privilege that will ideally be passed down from generation to generation. Like my children are with me, I was equally oblivious to how hard my mother worked to keep our household up and running. But every now and then I’ll look back on something from my childhood and be curious enough to ask her. Earlier this summer I found myself thinking about the evening cookouts we used to have once or twice a week at our family cabin in the mountains during our month-long Colorado vacations. The cabin was about thirty minutes away from where we stayed in town: we’d often drive there for dinner, sometimes just us five but more frequently with guests, spend a few hours, and return to our place in town for the night. I remembered happy evenings around the campfire with grilled hamburgers and toasted marshmallows and songs and jokes, but I didn’t remember anything about the sleepy return to town at bedtime. “How did you get all the dishes washed after we got back?” I asked my mother last month. “Didn’t it take hours to unload all the food and cookout gear?”

Of course it did, but I didn’t think about that at the time; it was one of the privileges of my happy childhood. My children may be oblivious to the hours I spent yesterday morning cleaning the house or the 45 minutes it took me to prepare yesterday’s picnic which we took to the pond for an early dinner and swim, and that’s a gift I’m giving them. If they someday choose – and are fortunate enough – to have an adulthood similar to mine, with families of their own and lots of opportunities to have fun, they’ll do this same thing themselves.

Yes, it’s good for them to help out around the house and do age-appropriate chores. But if they’re blind to just how much effort it sometimes takes to make vacations and holidays memorable, to keep the house clean and organized, to be generous hosts to friends and relatives, and to keep everyone safe and happy so much of the time? I may just have to consider that a privilege I’m happy to be able to give them.

All in a day's work

I admit that by the time September started, I was ready to send the kids off to school. We’d had a good summer and done a lot of interesting activities, but I was eager to turn my focus to my work. Afraid of the consequences of reducing my output over the summer, I hadn’t cut back on writing assignments at all; I had just tried to do the same amount of work in three-hour rather than six-hour workdays, per the deal I strike with the kids in the summer that I can work from 9 a.m. to noon and then we’ll have fun together all afternoon. So as summer ended, I had ongoing clients, new clients, and projects of my own that I wanted to pay more attention to. The resumption of school meant the resumption of long days of writing for me. At least in my mind.

And for the past two days I’ve been extremely productive, turning around assignments, generating new ones, and hitting deadlines. But what I tend to overlook when I line up my daily agenda in my mind’s eye is the sheer diversity that my workday encompasses. There are articles, essays and press releases to write, of course. That’s the work I get paid for. But there are household tasks, farm tasks, and family tasks that crop up throughout the day as well, which makes it really beneficial to be self-employed but also makes it challenging sometimes to account for my time.

Yesterday, for example, I did plenty of writing. I also scheduled a vet appointment for the dog, made a batch of puttanesca sauce, began organizing the volunteer schedule for the school library, sent a logo to the editor of the school newsletter so that she could help me publicize the upcoming Spaghetti Supper, let the sheep out to graze, posted two articles to my website and ran two miles. Throughout the late morning, I could hear a cow mooing incessantly, so shortly after noon I went out to investigate and found that her calf had once again wandered into the bull pasture. The mother cow wasn’t happy about this at all, but the baby was perfectly content, so I decided no action needed to be taken and went back to work.

When the kids arrived home from school, I helped them assemble ingredients for their weekly banana bread baking session; their goal this week is 25 loaves to sell at Farmers Market on Saturday. I washed dishes and folded laundry in the course of the day, and visited with my parents next door for a few minutes. I sent out save-the-dates for Tim’s birthday party.

And at 10 p.m., I was ironing. Not ironing clothes; ironing artwork. Holly had spent the afternoon making fuse-bead creations, which are like little mosaics made out of plastic beads that then stick together once you iron them, and I had promised her I’d iron them after she went to bed.

We live in a small and fairly homogeneous town, but days like today make me appreciate the inherent diversity in any 24-hour period. Writing is a wonderful way to make a living, but it’s only part of how I spend my day. And I consider this a blessing. A diversity of activities keeps us all busy and stimulated. And it’s made me better than I ever imagined I’d be at prioritizing. Sometimes an article deadline can wait but an impatiently braying cow cannot. It’s helpful for me to recognize the difference, even if I might never choose to share that distinction with my editors.

Had enough of the To Do list? How about a "Done!" list?

The Zen Habits blog posted an article recently suggesting a novel approach to To Do lists: list just one item. Accordingly enough, it’s called the One Thing System.

I like the way author Leo Babauta explains his process, but the problem with that approach, for me, is that I actually like To Do lists. I feel far more anxious when I don’t have an active To Do list going than when I do, no matter how long it is. Frequently, I sit down at my desk in the morning feeling like I can’t possibly get through all the tasks I have for the day. But then I open my Google calendar and take a look at the Tasks list and it looks much more manageable than I expected. In a way, it relates to what I always say when I talk about journaling: writing down your feelings is important because thoughts move in circles but words move in lines: if you keep it in your head it swirls around endlessly, but if you write it down you progress from point A to point B. The tasks in my head swirl endlessly, but written on a To Do list, they extend straightforwardly from number one to number five, or number ten, or wherever they end. And then it’s just a simple matter of checking them off.

Or not so simple, sometimes. When my To Do list feels daunting even once I see it written down, I have a different trick I employ. Once in a while, I break from writing a To Do list in the morning and instead, at the end of the day, I write a “Done!” list. I itemize everything I did get to, everything I finished, every small goal I reached in the course of the day. Productive? Well, it may not seem so: after all, seeing what I’ve already done won’t overtly help me make progress to those things I still need to do. And yet somehow it helps. It reminds me that even on those days when it seems like I did very little, something, however finite, got done.

I did that yesterday, and as often happens, it was reassuring. First I wrote down the work obligations I’d fulfilled. I interviewed an expert on Margaret Fuller and finished drafting an article about an upcoming Margaret Fuller celebration. I submitted a photographer assignment form to get a photo to go with the story about Margaret. (Yes, it’s hard to take a photo to run with a story about someone who has been dead for 160 years. We decided to go with a picture of an actress who will be playing Margaret Fuller in an upcoming dramatic production.) I reached my daily editing quota.

Then I moved past work to list other Done! items. I noted that I fed the dog and the guinea pig. I ran two miles. I folded a basket of laundry. I made dinner for my family. I delivered a check I owed to a neighbor. I stopped at the bagel shop for some pumpernickels and some sesames. I filled a two-liter bottle with water and brought it up to the attic. (For vague post-9/11 reasons we try to always keep a few full two-liter bottles of water around, and during last week’s water main break affecting communities around Boston, I’d given away our supply to our student minister.) I called a friend to find out what happened at Wednesday night’s School Committee meeting.

It’s all somewhat satisfying until I take yet another step back and acknowledge how many things are on neither list: not my To Do nor my Done. I didn’t read the New York Times, not one single article. I didn’t serve any meals at a soup kitchen. I didn’t send any checks to charity. I didn’t compost. I didn’t write a letter of comfort to a prisoner.

But the Didn’t Do list can be turned on its head to serve other purposes as well. Because it’s only fair, if I list things I didn’t do and didn’t plan to do, that I include a few items on that list that it’s good I didn’t do. I didn’t kill off any pets. I didn’t make any frivolous clothing purchases. I didn’t poison anyone. I didn’t commit slander. And so on.

There are myriad ways that task lists can work for us or against us. Sometimes they’re overwhelming; other times they’re a comfort. If I tried the Zen Habits method and put just one item on my list each day, what would it be? Well, I could always resort to the Hippocratic oath: First do no harm. Suppose day after day, that was the only item on my list. Could I live up to it? Probably not. My children may well end up in psychotherapy claiming that the essays, blog entries and in Tim’s case full-length memoir that I wrote about them did plenty of harm. My not-very-impressive environmental habits probably generate more harm than I realize every day. I kill mosquitoes. I forget to water plants.

Still, at the end of the day I can look at all these different lists and reassure myself that overall, I did okay. Not stellar, maybe. But not awful. And tomorrow’s a new day, full of new lists to be made.

Household flame-jumper

This morning I felt like a domestic flame-jumper. All around me were little metaphorical household fires to be put out: I moved from one to the other, quenching them methodically, as the kids watched and my husband slept late, having been up late last night studying for an exam.

I overslept by five luxurious minutes, then sat down at my computer to write my prescribed 1,000 daily words for the practice Julia Cameron calls Morning Pages. Done with that, I moved last night’s clean laundry into the dryer, because the previous morning both the kids had had wardrobe crises, not able to find anything they wanted to wear, so I wanted to be sure they had an array of clean clothes to choose from today. Then I let the dog out, retrieved the newspaper, and hopped onto the stationary bike for 45 minutes of aerobic exercise. Food for the guinea pig’s bowl, then off to wake up both kids (I’ve learned that the trick with Tim is to turn his bedside lamp on when I wake him; that keeps him from going back to sleep) and down to toast bagels for them.

They were bringing soup for their school lunches, so I fetched the pot of corn chowder I made last night from the fridge and put it on the burner to heat before I poured it into their Thermoses. Out with the dog again, and since she has a vet appointment this afternoon, I needed to follow her with a plastic bag (the one from the morning newspaper) to fetch a sample. Back inside and washing my hands ferociously, I called the kids to breakfast for a second time, then checked the dryer. The clothes weren’t dry, and Tim needed to be out the door in fifteen minutes, so I removed all the laundry except his sweat pants and shirt and put just those two items in for a quick five-minute drying cycle. (Apologies for the energy inefficiency.) Back downstairs, both kids were finishing their breakfasts. Tim, who leaves first, finished up and collected his things: backpack, lunch, water bottle, trumpet, music folder.

Holly, still chewing on her bagel, suddenly let out a little squeal, clambered down from her stool and went racing upstairs. With the kind of split-second action that makes me marvel at how brain synapses work, I recognized what had happened: eating her bagel, she had remembered that she lost a tooth yesterday at school, an event made particularly notable by the fact that while showing me the tooth in the car on the way home, she dropped it into the dark recesses between the console and the passenger’s seat. Once we got home, I found a flashlight for her and she spent a half-hour searching for it, but it was just like the scene in Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine, except that instead of a tooth looking like a grain of sand on the beach and vice versa, Holly was hampered by the fact that she was searching for a tiny tooth in the accumulation of lint, driveway grit and crushed popcorn on the floor of the car – everything looked like a tooth, but nothing was.

I had assured her the tooth fairy would come anyway, and it was that recollection that had caused her to drop her bagel and race up the stairs. But I was at a meeting last night that lasted until 9:30, and got home exhausted. Only when Holly raced up the stairs did I realize the tooth fairy had not in fact come as promised.

Holly reappeared, looking crestfallen. “I knew I should have written a note,” she said. Then her face cleared. “Unless maybe…the tooth fairy left something for me in the car? Since that’s where the tooth is?”

“Maybe!” I exclaimed. “Put on your shoes and you can go out to the garage and check!”

Fortunately, my shoes were already on. While Holly searched for hers in the coat closet, I furtively grabbed a dollar bill from my purse and dashed out to the car and made it back into the house just as Holly was ready to head out.

She returned in moments, dollar bill in hand, beaming. “Good thinking, Holly!” I cheered. “Good hustle, Mom!” Tim whispered with an all-knowing smirk.

Score another point for the flame jumper. Tim was ready to head out to the bus; I kissed him goodbye and put on my barn coveralls to go feed the cows and let out the sheep. No problems there at all; they were happy to see me and waited patiently for their hay bales. The dog ran cheerfully by my side. All was peaceful in the barnyard.

After that, the morning was easy: run Holly’s bath, help her find clean dry clothes to wear, send her on out to the bus with backpack, lunch, and form saying what we can contribute to the class holiday toy drive.

All fires out, everyone organized and packed off, it was time to make myself a mug of coffee, sweep the sesame seeds off the kitchen floor, and get to work. “Work” meaning sitting at my desk writing and editing. Which after that kind of morning really doesn’t seem like work at all; it seems like rest.

Still, nothing that I’d done that morning, not even collecting the sample to bring to the vet, felt onerous. I’ve read that Quakers consider housework a form of prayer; they see cleaning and tidying as a spiritual as well as a practical act. Similarly, doing all the tasks that comprised my jigsaw-puzzle morning felt like I was putting into practice the things I’m grateful for: healthy children heading off happily to school, a dog whose presence improves our quality of life, good food for breakfast and lunch, animals whose needs are so easily met.

And as for the tooth fairy. Yes, that too is something I feel gratitude for: the trusting and confident fantasy life of children, and how much fun it is to be an agent of fairy tales for these few short years that they matter.