Disclaimer: It is likely that many of my concepts for TLQ posts will come from yoga classes. I'm sorry about that, if it bothers anyone, but I seem to get a lot of "theme" ideas there. Maybe it's because the teachers tend to repeat the same phrases over and over and over again. (A helpful teaching tip, I suppose.)
"Support precedes action" is one such phrase, and it clearly applies to yoga and other physical activities. When you move without support, you're flailing. Say you want to reach for something with your arm. You can just lift your arm right up and reach for it, of course, but if you don't recall--bodily, more than intellectually--the connections down through your shoulder and ribs, into your lungs, even to your feet--and your feet into the earth--your range is limited. Or you strain yourself, throwing your arm up farther than it's ready to go.
OK, that's a slightly silly example, since we all reach for things without grounding down into the earth on a pretty regular basis. But when you do invoke support, it feels different. Stronger and clearer. Better.
Many of us are about to jump into the action, academic-term-wise, and we're all bracing ourselves for TLQ action. What's your support? What do you need to have, as a foundation, to take the actions that you've set as your goals? And on even the most micro-level, what support can you invoke to help you act, even--especially--at those moments when it seems most difficult?
Is it stability in your household or relationships? Material support, such as grants or other funding? Clear thinking about what is and isn't your job? A clean desk? Or even just something like checking your posture, noticing the texture of the blank page of your notebook, or taking a deep breath before jumping in?
Below are the goals that you posted last week. If you didn't post goals, no worries; if you're new to the group, welcome! Responding to the prompt is, as always, totally optional.
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Daisy:
1: Do very minor revisions on just-accepted paper – this is TQR in a good way! (I’m halfway through but putting them on here so I can feel good about having something completed!)
2: Do long neglected sample sorting and shipping for New Local Grant
3: Finish half-done figures for LP
4: Pick 2 of the 4 conference abstracts that need writing and finish them
Dame Eleanor Hull:
1. Research: send off the MMP (already done); get back to work on translation (already done); upload a chunk to our shared Dropbox; read through the last article that I need to revise.
2. Teaching: prepare rough drafts of syllaboi for two classes; start daily teaching notes; review teaching journal for last year's version of the class I've taught before; prep first writing assignment for that class.
3. Self-care: stretch at least once daily; cardio six days; weights 3x; bake safe cookies.
4. House/Life: look at last year's tax return to figure something out. Pay bills. Package used printer cartridges to send for recycling. Shop for new laptop.
Elizabeth Anne Mitchell:
1. Decide if the sale airline tickets will work.
2. Revise the outline for chapters 3 & 4 of Prudence.
3. Get at least 1.5 miles of walking a day.
4. Call gastroenterologist. Sigh.
5. Go to dental appointment. Sigh.
6. Finish another foot (12 inches) of lace shawl.
Good Enough Woman:
1) Check local listings for second-hand bookshelves for the witch hut.
2) Plan for my mom's b-day.
3) Find a dinner recipe that might be good for the repertoire.
4) Prep one syllabus.
heu mihi:
1. Meditate some amount.
2. Draft out what I've already mentally composed for the conference paper; compile bibliography.
3. Read dissertation for next week's defense.
4. Bottle beer.
KJHaxton:
1. Finish marking coursework
2. write draft of opinion article
3. make contact with people about outreach events (e.g. reply to emails that got lost in the end of semester chaos)
4. tackle teaching admin for semester ahead.
5. finish knitting a hat
Topic: I need a clean desk above everything else--otherwise I will clean it, so I end up wasting the time I set aside to do some substantive work. After that, a clean conscience--I could use some talking off the ledge so that I don’t take on more than I can reasonably accomplish. And finally, a clean mind, where I am focussed and still.
ReplyDeleteLast week’s goals:
Decide if the sale airline tickets will work.
Yes. I felt too rushed, so I came up with parameters for times and price caps for expenses, so that the decision can be made in a more comfortable manner.
Revise the outline for chapters 3 & 4 of Prudence
Yes, with proposed amounts of time attached to each subsection.
Get at least 1.5 miles of walking a day.
All but last Tuesday, due to the confluence of a dental appointment and a cold.
Call gastroenterologist. Sigh.
Ended up not calling, because I tried peppermint oil--one last thing that my husband read about--and so far, it has worked.
Go to dental appointment. Sigh.
Yes, despite the cold. My poor hygienist kept her mask on the whole time. I apologized profusely, but she agreed it could have taken weeks to get me back in.
Finish another foot (12 inches) of lace shawl.
Only eight inches, but that is because, silly me, I believed the pattern maker when she said there was no need for a gauge in lace knitting. Well, I need a gauge because I knit tighter than average. I ended up frogging about six inches.
Next week’s goals:
Send guidelines to the senate committee for wordsmithing.
Finish two staff evaluations.
Revise the outline for chapters 1 & 2 of Prudence.
One more week of walking 1.5 miles a day.
Two hours on the grant for five days.
Another foot of the lace shawl.
My sympathy to all suffering frigid temperatures and wind chills. We have been under a wind chill warning of temperatures down to -25F for the past several days. Friday, it was painful to have my hands out of my mittens long enough to unlock the car. Stay warm, everyone!
So much progress on so many fronts! I'm reminded that we should not forget to focus on what we do accomplish, when we are much more likely to focus on what we did not accomplish.
DeleteI had to reschedule my dental cleaning due to being called for jury duty (thankfully I wasn't selected to serve) and it was a five week wait to get another appointment. Glad you got that done too.
I've been postponing responding to my own prompt because I feel that my answer could go in so many different ways. But what I fundamentally need, I think, is order: a clean desk, like EAM, but also a clear sense of what I need to do for each of my many ongoing projects and activities, and the sense that this is manageable. This morning, I'm going to take some time to get organized and look closely at what I need to do.
ReplyDeleteLast week:
1. Meditate some amount.
3 times!!!!!
2. Draft out what I've already mentally composed for the conference paper; compile bibliography.
Forgot to compile bibliography (I should be sure to check back in on my goals at some point during the week). Wrote a couple of paragraphs that I'd mentally composed.
3. Read dissertation for next week's defense.
Done. At last. Thank god. Defense is this afternoon.
4. Bottle beer.
Yes. It was a mess! But in 10 days I'll have 49 bottles of a possibly drinkable English Stout!
This week:
1. Meditate some amount.
2. Read first 6 chapters of Contest Book 1.
3. Bibliography for conference paper (hereafter Silence. My three projects this semester are Silence, Wonder, and Impatience. And those aren't even pseudonyms!),
4. Prep 1 syllabus/course.
5. Letter for student group.
Those are great project names. Three rounds of meditation sounds like a sustainable amount; well done. I hope the defense goes smoothly.
DeleteI'm going to go ahead and say congratulations on the defense! Such a milestone accomplishment.
DeleteI've started to copy my TLQ goals to my weekly calendar/task list in my attempt to integrate all facets of my life. Still a struggle. :)
Thanks for the MMP congratulations! When you posted this, HM, I had just been thinking about the way health/the things I do to stay healthy underpin all the rest of my life. I get frustrated because it takes a lot of time to do the exercise, stretching, and food prep I need to do; but if I don't do those things, I sleep badly and feel bad in other ways, and everything is so much harder. So it's worth it, but I do have to keep reminding myself of that. I'm thinking of drawing myself a graphic representation of parts of my life, like the food pyramid, with those things at the bottom, supporting all the rest.
ReplyDeleteRe the food/gut issues, I got the prescription I wanted from my doctor this morning (yay doctors who will listen; it probably helped that I printed out some MedLine abstracts, yay having professional access to databases), so I'll keep you posted as to whether this works. Fingers crossed!
How I did:
1. Research: send off the MMP (already done); get back to work on translation (already done); upload a chunk to our shared Dropbox; read through the last article that I need to revise. A whole lot of YES here (helped by posting late in the week).
2. Teaching: prepare rough drafts of syllaboi for two classes; start daily teaching notes; review teaching journal for last year's version of the class I've taught before; prep first writing assignment for that class. But mostly NO here, though I did start on the writing assignment. The relevant teaching journal is at school. I've reviewed some old syllaboi but haven't started the new (now TRQ).
3. Self-care: stretch at least once daily; cardio six days; weights 3x; bake safe cookies. Again, a lot of YES, including 2 batches of cookies because the first one went so well! :-)
4. House/Life: look at last year's tax return to figure something out. Pay bills. Package used printer cartridges to send for recycling. Shop for new laptop. Also a lot of NO: I paid the bills (except for writing a check to my brother-in-law), and didn't get to the rest.
This week:
1. Research: Daily translation work; upload two chunks. Make plan (or find old plan and review) for revising the last article.
2. Teaching: Syllaboi for two classes. Start teaching notes. Do some more assignment-writing.
3. Self-care: see doc (done this morning); make two more appointments when referrals come through; stretch at least once daily; cardio 6-7 days; weights 3 days.
4. House/Life: some financial and filing things. Keeping this minimal as I focus on pre-semester prep.
I really like the idea of just noticing things like posture and texture of a page: bringing a yogic awareness to other tasks.
ReplyDeleteSomething I found very helpful when I was dealing with family stuff in November-December was telling myself I didn't have feelings---not right then---feelings could be dealt with later, right now there were practical problems to solve. (Believe me, there were feelings, and I had them at home on my own time, but by that time they were counteracted by some good feelings about how much I had got done despite other people's unhelpful feelings.) OTOH, awareness of feelings is helpful (impatience, anxiety, frustration); OTOtherH, sometimes they need to be set aside for later processing. I'm thinking about how to bring this notion into play in work/research situations (we probably already do a lot of setting aside feelings in meeting-with-people work situations).
Much wisdom here. This is how I think mindfulness works best for me. Just being able to recognize that I have feelings is the first thing I need to do. I had one of those "I'm not getting anything done so I am a failure!" days yesterday, and instead of walking through being a failure, I acknowledged that I was stressed and thought of the next simple step to think of myself as successful instead. So I sent an email to a colleague instead of playing solitaire.
DeleteTaking a small next step is a great way to shift the mental scenery---and if you're stuck with one thing, do a small step for a different project.
DeleteI’m Linda, AKA humming42, grateful to be here again. I’m an assoc prof, teaching in the humanities at a mid-sized state school in a small US town. I inexplicably failed to post session goals last week, so I will do so below.
ReplyDeleteTopic: I really like the idea of support precedes action, and the way that you discuss it, heu mihi, reminds me why almost every session has “get back to yoga” as one of my goals. There are so many ways that yoga practice provides powerful metaphors for the rest of our lives, and this is one of them. Thinking about how I know I have set a foundation with my body at the beginning of a yoga pose correlates with an idea from Havi Brooks. The refrain “enter as you wish to be in it” is something I’m devoted to this year. I have enough time and flexibility that I don’t need to wing it: I can and should be prepared for class, complete service projects on time, and for heaven’s sake, meet my conference and publication deadlines.
So, session goals:
1 meet deadlines in all aspects of life
2 submit Jewel article
3 submit Buildings article
4 make significant progress on Tiny Project
5 write tiny pitch for Tiny Project
6 set and meet incremental deadlines for 2018 projects
This week:
(I have to report for jury duty Tuesday and hope it won’t wreck my week)
1 finish book and submit book review
2 write outline for Jewel article
3 edit Buildings draft
4 finish book and write review
5 write and post syllabi
The difficult thing for me is that, because I tend to seek external approval (for better or worse), the best support for me would be enthusiastic encouragement by family members (e.g., Yes! Take that time to do your writing. Yes, it would be great if you could publish that article. Go for it! Also, you haven't been swimming in a while. Why don't you take the day for yourself so you can swim or do yoga and still get some other work done. We'll be fine!).
ReplyDeleteBut I don't get this kind of support, so I struggle with how to move to action. But like humming42 (as she noted in her comment to my check-in last week), as I get closer to 50, I *think* I'm started to care less.
I think some writing support (a group, for example) would also be helpful. I feel a bit at sea as I work on my academic writing style.
Last week's goals:
1) Check local listings for second-hand bookshelves for the witch hut. YES, but I didn't find anything. Might just buy something from Tar-jay.
2) Plan for my mom's b-day. Getting reading to do the cooking and wrap gifts.
3) Find a dinner recipe that might be good for the repertoire. Added veggies to the lasagna and used whole wheat noodles. A good start.
4) Prep one syllabus. DONE
This week:
1) Print and Read Chapter 4, thinking about what could be cut.
2) Read one critical article/chapter.
3) Finish SF novel.
4) Find a plant-heavy dinner recipe.
5) Walk 3x.
6) Buy or order bookshelf.
7) Spend 1-2 hours tidying campus office.
I like the idea that support comes first. I need a good plan, to know what I'm doing and when so I can make decisions about what I need to do and when.
ReplyDeleteLast week:
1. Finish marking coursework - 50% complete
2. write draft of opinion article - 35% complete
3. make contact with people about outreach events - uhm not really
4. tackle teaching admin for semester ahead. - 50% complete
5. finish knitting a hat - done :)
This week:
1. Mark coursework and exam scripts
2. write draft of opinion article
3. make contact with people about outreach events
4. finish teaching admin for semester ahead
5. knit something else
reinforcing the health underpins all theme, I went to the conference, had a great time, acquired the conference crud, and rather than risk sharing it with my parents (both in their 80s) I came home instead on Saturday (an interesting drive, made in hour long hops with stops for tea or little naps in corners of car parks...) and have taken to my bed like a delicate creature from a novel (only with a lot more spluttering, tissues, hacking and general materiality than novels where ladies take to their beds generally cover). Whether that helped or not, it DOES so far seem to just be the feverish-cold-with-nasty-cough version of the conference crud, not the full-on chest infection version.
ReplyDeleteThis is not the start of the New year I wanted, but on the plus side, I'm already scheduled to be on leave this week, I have a cosy bed, I am a little pessimistic about my ability to get colds and similar so I already had a stash of necessities - two kinds of cough medicine, balm tissues, appropriate teas (although I drank SO much tea on the drive home I'm actually a bit off it right now!), apple sauce and canned soup and the sort of lightly salted kiddy crackers that are perfect for nibbling on to settle unsettled stomachs when you don't really feel like eating anything but know you should.
So... deliberately NOT thinking about goals until I feel less peely-wally, but at least this round of ick comes with less guilt than normal so that's a win!
Get well soon! I'm glad that you can take some time to heal and relax.
DeleteLate but giant check-in…
ReplyDeleteLove the idea of yoga inspired prompts! I have honestly never thought about support in this context at all, kind of a revelation… And a timely one too, since I have no office right now. The heating pipes all froze over break, then we had a storm that knocked out power for days and they froze some more, and then getting power back on fried all the circuits in my area. So I’m squatting in a sample storage space, at least it is my own samples! So, I would say to be productive I need a warm office space, and at least some semi-uninterrupted time, and my own chair and desk which after years of tweaking is now at the perfect height. I must say I have a new appreciation for how much I count on my office, I work very badly at home. So my wish for next week is to have the giant hole in the wall fixed, the heat on, and if they really want to push the boat out, electricity!
Last week’s goals:
1: Do very minor revisions on just-accepted paper – this is TQR in a good way! (I’m halfway through but putting them on here so I can feel good about having something completed!) DONE
2: Do long neglected sample sorting and shipping for New Local Grant DONE
3: Finish half-done figures for LP WORKED ON THEM A BIT
4: Pick 2 of the 4 conference abstracts that need writing and finish them DONE
This week’s goals
1: Finish figures for LP
2: Finish other two abstracts which are now TRQ
3: Sleep off back-to-school bug
And part 2:
ReplyDeleteHumming42 asked about keeping track of three grants/project with different focus areas…I have to admit it is a constant challenge and a work in progress.
My main grants are in three very different geographic areas with different focus areas, so I have a central file for each project under the most obvious place name. Within the central file I keep the original proposal/contract right in front, with sub-files for students, data, written work, and side projects. When a project starts to get to the journal write-up stage I make a separate file for the paper, which has data (copied, never moved entirely), graphics, and production files formatted for the specific journal. All conference abstracts go into a central file once they are submitted, all presentations go into another central one when they are done, that makes them easier to track down after a few months have passed and I’ve forgotten where they went.
I also keep a colour-coded spreadsheet calendar for deadlines and deliverables for each grant, but put them all on the same page so I can always see them together – I’ve found that keeping separate pages for different grants makes it too hard to plan for all of them because one tends to plan for the things you see, not the ones in the next sheet over… Also prevents all deadlines converging in an unpleasant way! I think this has probably been the most helpful thing to do. This includes student deadlines, planning for field seasons, accounting deadlines, and conference/abstract deadlines so that things do not get lost. The key for me is WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN, ALWAYS… Even when it is dead obvious! Love my notebook - it gets colour-coded too but for levels of urgency; offensive shiny pink for today, yellow for tomorrow, green for this week, and other colours to keep me amused.
Keeping data management the same for different projects is helpful – so for all projects I make data sheets exactly the same way, in the same format. When I get new data I immediately put it in the preferred format and I’ve started making notes right in the data sheets to remind me what I have or haven’t done for processing, even the standard things that I think I will remember. The most difficult part to keep track of is data that comes in increments from various labs, and get filed in strange places – I used to do it by method, now I go by geographic area, it seems easier to find. I have to be very careful not to just file and forget, this used to happen a lot, now less so but I did spend a good hour hunting for a data sheet today that predated my system. Having been through the paper-submission thing a few more times than at the beginning I have a much better idea of what is needed for data production files every time (in my field and for my specific grants every speck of data has to be published and accessible so this is a big deal), so I’m better now at anticipating what needs to be done right away and will pay off during the paper writing phases for projects.
I find it too confusing to jump to different projects in a day, I tend to work on one at a time for a couple of days, of course depending on deadlines and urgency. My biggest challenge is finishing things completely – too many pieces get worked on until they are 95% done, but then going back and finishing the last little bit takes longer than it should because I have to get back into it and remember the details.
Work in progress, but getting better at it!
Hi Everyone! I'm excited to join!
ReplyDeleteSupport I need: some self discipline!
Goals
1. Big one, for sabbatical, think about an adventure (or two)
2. Read a book of poetry (for fun)
3. Finish writing a review letter
4. Prep for writing a second review letter
5. Practice violin: work on bowing, especially!
6. Exercise at least a bit every day (shoveling counts...)
Thanks, all!
Welcome, Bardiac! Many of us are looking for self-discipline.
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ReplyDelete