#monday night and a workshop tomorrow afternoon an event all evening a meeting friday afternoon AND a party monday night

[clonewarsahsoka]

I have so many things going on I am so stressed and anxious and unable to process the passing of time

[eponymous-rose]

Weird question, but you seem really productive despite seeming to have a constantly fluctuating routine, with both your work and your hobbies. Most people think having a solid routine is the only way to increase your productivity but I've pretty much given up on having a routine since my life seems similar to yours--a lot of travel, weird and always changing work hours. Do you have any advice on how you deal with routine and productivity in spite of that?

Oh gosh, this is definitely something I struggle with a LOT, and I’m not sure I’ve found a coping strategy that works for me yet. But the small things that have been helping have been (1) keeping a routine in my planning even if the stuff I do changes dramatically (even if I’m traveling, I have a notebook where, every Sunday, I list all the stuff that has specific dates/times for the following week, I list the stuff where I still have to come up with a date/time, and I list the stuff I’ve gotta do that week for sure), and (2) finding multiple ways to approach the same goals that I can tailor to my level of energy/spare time on any given week (so this week I’m just not in a super exercisey mindset and can’t rely on having the motivation to run every day, but instead I’m making an extra effort not to eat out this week—lower-effort for my current state of mind, but all toward the same goal of feeling a bit healthier overall).

I’m also very cognizant of how little time at work is actually spent working, so I try not to feel guilty if the total number of hours worked is low as long as the work’s getting done. I’m an incredibly routine-oriented person, but it’s been a bit freeing to slowly and steadily teach myself that stuff just has to get finished one way or another, and the easiest way to do that is to just focus on specific goals and let the rest be flexible.

Anyway, yesterday I was thinking of this ask and was like, “You know, I’ll just write up what I do on Monday as an example, and I bet things will go hilariously awry.” And so they did.

So here’s what my weekly planning list looked like last night:

Dated Events:

Call with paper coauthor at 9AM Monday

Call with leadership academy planning committee at 10AM Monday

Call with peer mentoring group at 9AM Tuesday

Sit in on class at 11:30AM Tuesday and Thursday

Seminars Wednesday at 3PM, Thursday at 4PM, and Friday at 3PM

D&D Saturday at 6PM

Undated Events:

Coordinating abstract submission for an upcoming conference (early week)

Setting up Skype calls with a couple friends I haven’t talked to in a while (late week)

Assorted Priorities:

Book hotel for work travel in July

Accept journal article review request and scope out how long that’ll take

Review some materials sent out for my peer mentoring call

Revise my paper and submit the revisions before the Monday deadline

Get my driver’s license renewed (the joys of yearly visa renewal… your license has to be renewed yearly as well)

Put together a schedule for a biweekly Twitter feature highlighting new publications for the account I run for a subcommittee in my field

Respond to an e-mail about a conference in January about some weird deadline that popped up for next week

Come up with conference abstract ideas before the as-yet-unscheduled meeting

Fill out some action items in advance of my 10AM Monday call

And some more specific checklists for four research projects I’m focusing on this week

I purposely try to group conference calls together, because I currently share my office and feel weird doing video calls when she’s stuck in frame five feet away from me while she tries to work. So Monday seems like a good day to work from home, and I can squeeze in Tuesday’s call before heading to the office that morning. I’ll be in the office Tuesday-Friday, which means I’ll be able to attend those seminars and classes with no problem. I have most of my D&D prep done already because we ended early last game, so I can leave that until Saturday. The only thing I might have to shuffle to next week is the driver’s license thing, because it’ll take three hours and I have to account for finding a Lyft there and back. Okay. Aces.

Wake up this morning to find my internet’s out, and I also somehow left the hard drive with all my research on it at work. Hoo boy. But staring over my to-do list, I think I can set today up as a “big picture” day and not have to do any actual coding, so I’m still okay to work from home. I can also phone in to the conference calls instead of using the video call software. All good.

Luckily, the internet comes back right before my first call of the day. Said call is with someone who also happens to be a dean, so she has a tendency to get held up at meetings, so I take that delay to look at the action items for my second call (I mean… if you send me action items at 8PM on a Sunday I am not gonna touch them until Monday morning).

When she did make it online, we chatted about the new paper, and she strongly encouraged me to send it to our other coauthors in case they have suggestions. We’re submitting on Monday, which is way too short-notice to read a 20-page research paper, but they already read the pre-revision version in great detail, so I shot them an e-mail that included a summary of the substantial changes and a note to the effect that if any of them want more time to look at this stuff, I can beg the editor for an extension on their behalf. Minor crisis averted.

Second meeting is very intense and structured. Everyone has to volunteer to organize and lead two webinars in the next three months, so I go ahead and volunteer for the two April ones so I’ll get it out of the way early. Aaand the first webinar is at 1PM this Friday. Okay. I’ll work from home that morning so I can do last-minute prep, then head into the office in time for the 3PM seminar. No biggie. One organizer puts together a draft schedule, and I send a quick e-mail suggesting a different use of one of the ten-minute time slots. One of the other organizers requests another conference call tomorrow instead of e-mails. I tell them I can only do after 4PM, if I leave work early. Eh. We’ll see how that works out.

After the call, I get through a bunch of small tasks in maybe 20 minutes: hotel booked, Twitter posts prepped, review request accepted (not due until May 20, so plenty of time on that), conference deadline e-mail chain started. I spend the rest of the time before noon getting sucked into an article someone sent me about the myths surrounding undergraduate grade inflation and then reading up on the peer mentoring materials for our call tomorrow. A couple other minor e-mails pop up (scheduling the precise date of a conference mixer in January, that kind of thing) and I manage to deal with them right away.

Lunch! Clearly working from home means I should take the opportunity to indulge in some fine cuisine, some leisurely cooking that highlights—

I heat up a microwave meal (chicken couscous) and watch YouTube videos for an hour.

Back in it! I write up some abstract submission ideas and make a valiant attempt at setting up a time to talk about them, but it looks like that might have to wait until next week. We’re still a ways before the deadline, so that’s okay.

Mmmmmmm someone on Twitter mentions a conference in Germany in September and a workshop in Colorado in July that both look like a good fit for my research. I’m in a situation where I have a big chunk of travel funding that’s going to disappear unless it gets spent in the next year. Oh no. But also oh yes.

Just in case, I put together a couple point-form ideas for stuff to propose that I can bring to the people holding the purse strings.

The rest of the afternoon is spent putting together weekly goals for four of my research projects: each one involves a collaboration with a different person, so I’d like to be able to send each of them an e-mail with at least one new thing to share about that project this week. Just in case that doesn’t happen, though, I rank them from most to least important. Worst-case scenario, I don’t have to send any of them this week, but it’ll make next week tougher if I don’t.

It’s only about 3:30 at this point, but honestly, I’m feeling a bit exhausted and overwhelmed (some of the e-mail chains have gone through five or six replies at this point and keeping it all straight is giving me a headache), so I opt to get some groceries and call it a day.

I may have added some stuff, but I got a lot crossed off today! Here’s how that last checklist looks at the end of the day:

Assorted Priorities:

Revise my paper and submit the revisions before the Monday deadline

Project #1: come up with a new exploratory figure and send to Person A.

Project #2: summarize the early results I started last week and send to Person B, along with an ask to see whether he’d be up for me presenting this stuff in Europe in November.

Project #3: improve on figures I showed last month and send to Person C.

Project #4: prepare a rough outline of the next paper to send to Person D.

Not having my work hard drive means I was able to just focus on the stuff that wasn’t specific to research today. In all the chaos of today, I’ve set myself up well for a research-heavy rest of the week where I (hopefully) won’t have to worry about non-research stuff or big changes to the schedule and can just burrow into research, emerging for occasional seminar/webinar breaks. A good Monday, all around.