Last week we thought about what we want out of this summer. This week the prompt is a two-parter… We will set our goals for the session as usual, but I would also love to set an intention for the session. What word or sentence can embody your intention for the summer, as a guiding principle, as a reminder, as a reset when things go off the rails? I have a feeling I might need one.
Here's the boilerplate from previous sessions about goals: Goals can be in any aspect of life, although the key focus is often writing tasks that are personally and professionally important but that never quite tip over into important AND urgent. Urgent things sometimes find their way in here too; that is completely okay, and process goals are also most welcome. If you've been thinking for awhile about joining in, we'd love to have you try us out this time around!
So, a few things to do this week - introduce yourself if you want to, set an intention for your session, set some session goals, do goals for the coming week (if you feel like it!), and in the spirit of the theme of the week, tell us a little about your favourite flowering plant and what it means to you. The photo is a set of cherry blossoms on my sour cherry tree that produced so much last year that I learned to make sour cherry jam which is delightful. Even better, we have a resident fox that visits the tree to eat fallen cherries...
Thank you all for being here and being wonderful company!
Hello and thank you for hosting! I'm JaneB, I guess I'm late career (I have no more than 10 years left, maybe less either by choice or by university reshaping) and I'm in a STEM subject area at a struggling regional University in the North of England (we're having another recruitment crisis). I'm late-diagnosed neurodiverse and in burnout, so I'm often grumpy and overwhelmed. Summer is my least favourite season because it's bright and hot and often sticky, my allergies are playing up, everyone is loudly enthusiastic and active, and as a fat person who gets heat rashes and hates bright lights that is just not going to be fun for me! I've always felt summer was overloaded with expectations of having fun and doing loads of exciting things. A bit like Christmas can be really! Basically I'm not built for it, physically or mentally, and it's over-stimulating and usually disappointing. That said, I have got better at approaching summer more gently and in kind-to-self ways over the last few years. Summer is never long enough, especially in a system where academics are expected to still work like normal just on slightly different things, but the change of pace and focus can be restorative anyway. So this is a great season for thinking about words and intentions, especially as I seem to have failed to set an intention for the year back in January.
ReplyDeleteI guess I want to incorporate various elements - peace, restoring balance, setting a good foundation for both the next academic year and for the longer term, working on myself and my space as well as my professional obligations. The idea of kintsugi is rattling around in my brain - the Japanese art of mending broken china/porcelain with lacquer dusted with gold. I like the idea of making a feature of the breaks rather than trying to pretend they never happened, and the fact that after kintsugi pieces are often more valuable than in their original perfect state also feels friendly. So perhaps something like "life and work kintsugi"?
SESSION GOALS:
I'm honestly not really ready to set these, but am I ever? I think my session proper doesn't start for at least one more week (we have one more "assessment week" and then official break starts, although obligations wander on into July and start again mid August) so I have time to ease into them a bit. Categories as usual!
SELF-CARE:
regular intentional movement, making, doing small things with other people and reading for pleasure. I want to do all these things an appropriate number of times a week. I also want to explore a wider range of kinds of making over the summer, and I have an aim of having a more habitual practice in all these areas by the time we start back with students.
HOME AND ENVIRONMENT: regular chore habits, plus working on the living room (shelf-box-sofa project), working on clothing storage/management, and working on my finances.
TEACHING AND ADMIN: it is summer, but...
Delete* I need to rewrite my final year honours module to fit into a different trimester (and fit around the honours project drama - modern students canNOT seem to work on anything else around the few weeks before the project is due, and I'm leaning into that because there's no point fighting it any more)
* I have a lot of minor tweaks to do to my other teaching (spread across four modules)
* I WANT to work through the practicals from another colleagues modules - they teach GIS mapping, and I want to be up to date on how they are teaching it so that I can better support my students (and know what I can expect from them so push them to deliver on it in assignments - most assignments should have a map included, and this is one of the tools we can ask them to use).
* I'm on a "task and finish" group (i.e. co-producing a report for Faculty) which might or might not involve a lot of work
* There will be extra work around trying to show we are taking the current recruitment crisis seriously (so much drama and stress and other people not so much dropping balls as yeeting them into orbit or dropping them into random abysses), but I don't know what will be my part. I'll roll that in with getting settled in to my new admin role
* I also want to get one of my MSc by Research students completely done (and working on publishing her work) and the other much closer to submission than they are now
RESEARCH:
As ever, balls in the air!
* contribute to governmental advice reports
* keep up contributions to Big Project (which is doing my head in because, too many people and too little clarity and organisation)
* progress at least three writing projects from a list substantially
GOALS FOR THE COMING WEEK:
SELF-CARE:
* 3x20 intentional movement, 1 x making, 2 x small things with people, reading every day (with dinner, in waiting times)
* make a list of different making methods and projects I might play with this summer
HOME AND ENVIRONMENT:
* 75% of chores
* braindump the steps for the living room and clothes projects
* braindump smaller house and environment things I would like to get done this summer
* braindump where I want to get to with my personal finances
TEACHING AND ADMIN:
* last week of marking, I hope - finish the marking! And the reminding of colleagues on shared modules!
* meet with the MSc by Research student who is furthest from submission
* start writing the summer block list for teaching preparation tasks
RESEARCH:
* submit small group paper
* check in with student author of the paper that got the horrible review (my review luck continues to be bad. Former PhD student submitted their first paper last week and got it desk rejected in 13 minutes - with a letter that began "we have read your paper, and..." - I really don't think they could have! Fortunately they are a very resilient person who said "they can't have read it, and their reason is wrong. Oh well their loss!" and we resubmitted it elsewhere the next day (same publisher so limited reformatting needed)).
* continue calm systematic exploration of the laptop problem. No crying, no suppressing the urge to throw the laptop out of the window!
*write a start of TLQ session list of writing projects and their status.
FAVOURITE FLOWER:
I don't know if I have one. I like a lot of flowers and plants! I like simple rose-type flowers like cherry blossom or May or dog-rose or buttercup, but I also like little bells like heaths and lily-of-the-valley, and the many-small-flower towers of lavendar or enchanter's nightshade. If I have to pick one today, I guess Rowan is a good place to start - lovely flowers AND leaves AND fruits, a brave little tree which grows in hard places at the edges of woods and in the uplands and in hedgerows, and a tree full of stories and woven into folklaw.
I love kintsugi as an intention. It's such a beautiful thing, both literally and as a metaphor.
DeleteI also like having an intention that is visual as well as verbal, something where you could have an object or a picture to remind you of where to focus.
DeleteJust spent a lovely 15 minutes looking at pictures of rowan trees in flower! Just beautiful...
DeleteGood luck with marking and getting small group paper out the door! That will clear some decks for some of the bigger summer goals.
I'm stealing the idea of making a list of projects and their states this week. Many of mine tend to morph so what they were last year may not be what they are now, and most of the time I don't even notice... Good afternoon activity for my deck in the sun this afternoon!
Thank you for hosting, Daisy!
ReplyDeleteSession goals - a lot carry over from last session
1. Research/writing
i) Finish 30,000 word chapter asap and get irritating editor off my back. (I have kept to deadlines, he keeps deciding I need to add stuff.)
ii) Have a full draft of Big Article for people to read and comment on. This is top priority.
iii) Make some progress on a grant application, but this is lowest priority.
2. Teaching & teaching-related
i) Preparation for new team-taught module next year.
ii) Sign off final corrections on a PhD.
iii) Meetings with students about final-year dissertations for next year.
3. Life admin/house
i) Finalise summer travel
ii) Get a standing desk & proper adjustable chair.
iii) New chair for reading corner in spare room.
iv) Persuade kids to declutter their rooms?
v) Clear more garage space?
4. Self-care/fun
i) Exercise: run at least 3 x week when at home, find weights and/or pilates class
ii) Travel and meet ups with friends.
iii) Read, preferably in garden.
iv) Journal, also preferably in garden.
v) More creative stuff
Intention: be more focused. I am so easily distracted. No idea if it's peri-menopause, tiredness, grief brain, social media, overload or what, but it's a time suck I could do without.
Lots of great goals for session... I like that many of the life goals are the kind that makes life better, even if they are met incrementally! Best wishes for the travel and fun things!
DeleteFocus is hard to manage through all the distractions. My go-to strategy in the summer is to schedule tasks for specific times, put them on my calendar, and (here's the hardest part) actually do the tasks when the time slot comes up. If I manage that for a few days it becomes more of a habit, but the early days are a struggle!
Distraction/focus is really difficult even without close family around at home - colleagues can be a complete pain, too. And brain-squirrels. And literal squirrels.
DeleteI have always found I either struggle a lot with focus or hyperfocus on one thing and neglect everything else, and I've had to find ways to progress without being able to reliably focus - the worst thing I can do is spot that I'm losing focus and berate myself/feel annoyed about it! In my toolkit are attention-getters (e.g. associations between environment and task which help me keep bringing my focus back - that can be music, a specific drink, a scented candle or wax melt, a place, a tool - for example I play the same song/album/soundscape on low on loop when I'm marking, wherever I am marking, this winter I made a cup of apple and cinnamon tea with honey in a specific mug every time I had an hour to spend on the grant application, and that was a good transition cue), downhill-slope parking (whenever I leave off a task, or have a good brain day or a period of hyperfocus, I jot down the next few things I need to do on it, however trivial. Then when I'm struggling to get into a task or having a squirrels everywhere or bad brain weather day, I can just start chipping away at those things - and even if I do things off a lot of different tasks because I am hopping around, I know I'm not spinning my wheels pointlessly, and that helps. I also have a "Friday List" - you know that Friday feeling when your brain is ready for the weekend at lunchtime but you're still at work until 5? that's the perfect time for stuff like filing, getting the font size consistent on a slide set, CPD modules, working on the ViLE - I don't waste good brain time on those things, I set them aside and do them in fuzzy brain time), acceptance (no one works at 100% all the time. That's a LIE. When I did some management training they talked about assuming people actually produce during 72% of their work hours, about research showing that creative work is best done on a 42 minute working 17 minute goofing around type schedule, about appraising workers over the week or month not the hour or day. And that was management training, so not designed to coddle the worker or give them what they wanted. So things like pomodoros if they work for you, or treats, or midday naps, or random circuits of the garden or doing a crossword, all fit into that sense of pacing, of allowing the human brain to be HUMAN not a machine), noticing the little wins (I keep a done list in my good notebook and to-do lists on postits/scribbled in my diary/on their own pages for longer projects/on a weekly task list. Because it's very easy to look at the to dos and think "I did nothing" and for me at least hard to see the dones and think "I worked enough this week" - this group, and our rhythm of sessions and weekly check-ins, is very much in this part of the toolkit).
I could go on - it's so much a work in progress! - but be kind to yourself. You're still going, getting up, writing, doing, living, every day.
Flowers: it's like being asked to choose a favourite book. Or child. But I will go with cherry blossom, because seeing it against a cloudless blue sky is one of my biggest joys. I love the variety: on our street, the trees have that very white blossom that hangs in clusters, but when I was growing up, we had a huge tree in our front garden that had the frilly pink kind. There are trees I look out for in spring: some white with a hint of pink, but others also a dark pink.
ReplyDeleteI also love magnolias, and bluebells and hyacinths, as much for their scent as their colours. Spring flowers generally, and their promise. I am a walking cliche.
This week:
1. Finish 30,000 word chapter and try to draw a line in the sand with editor.
2. At least one day on Big Article
3. Teaching prep: check draft timetable for next year has everyone's teaching in correctly, suggest some seminar readings to rest of teaching team.
4. Plan archive trip for end of June ahead of funding deadline next week.
5. House/life admin: book trains for summer travel, sort out insurance, book annual leave, optician's appointment, organise daughter's birthday party.
6. Self-care/fun: run x 3, read, journal, fill hanging baskets and patio pots now it seems to have stopped hailing at random, enjoy surprise trip away with friend this weekend.
Your part of the world has such very beautiful spring flowers that it makes sense you'd respond to them, cliche or no!
DeleteDuring my first year in the northern hemisphere I arrived in a place in bitterly cold January, and I still remember how absolutely thrilled I was with the spring... Flowers were everywhere, trees had flowers, I had never seen so many different ones out for so long (my home area has a 3-day spring and then it is crazy hot for the next 6 months). Never forgot that sense of wonder, so cliches are there for a reason! Enjoy!
DeleteEspecially the spring ephemerals, the fleeting joys - whether that's snowdrops or bluebells or cherry blossom. Just about the only good thing about spring for me (my least favourite season, between the academic stresses, the weather and threat/dread of summer, all my allergies waking up with a bang, the annual ugh I have to wear less clothes, the climate change signs- a downside of living somewhere with four strongly marked seasons is that the changes in them are increasingly hard to ignore. But the flowers are very much a bright spot!
DeleteIntroduction: late-career medievalist, now the only one left in English, at a no-longer-so large midwestern university which I generally call LRU, Large Regional University; 3 cats (Basement Cat, Reina, Morgana), 1 husband (Sir John Hull), a few thousand books(titles available on request).
ReplyDeleteIntention: divide and conquer!
Session goals: Complete 2 conference papers and 1 Festschrift essay, revise 2 syllabuses for fall classes, stay in shape, go on 3 trips with my husband, take care of necessary house and personal maintenance. Deal with special-issue editing tasks. Urgently finish way overdue essay.
This week's goals:
-Write (or transfer) 3000 words for Overdue essay.
-Write 1000 words for First Conference Paper
-Contact 2 (or am I up to 3?) writers with reviewer comments
-regular PT exercises, otherwise rest cranky back (maybe try a short swim, short walks)
-finish booking 3rd summer trip
Flowers: so difficult to choose, but maybe bougainvillea--although I think technically their colorful bits are not flowers but bracts . . . so maybe I could choose an actual flower as well! Or, hey, how about one tree, one bulb, one tuber, one annual, one perennial? Hawthorne, snow glories (those teeny blue ones), iris . . . no, still going to have to think some more. There's also the question of what do I love to see outside and what might I give house room (if not for cats who like to chew up greenery)--violets always delight me in spring but I don't like their scent indoors, peonies are so lovely but I'm not going to bring ants inside. Columbines, maybe, for annuals (but they are self-seeding so can be treated as perennials).
DeleteDefinitely cannot pick just one flower, I know the feeling... You have a busy summer planned, but many satisfying things on the list!
DeleteDivide and conquer sounds like an excellent intention!
DeleteOh, and since I did set goals last week, here's that report.
ReplyDelete--gym x4 or even x5, of which swim x2: x4, including swim x2
--yoga/back exercises daily: x4
--work on W x4, M1 x2 (30-60 minutes each session): YES, met goal of 3000 words on W, 1000 on M! That felt huge!
--get PR and some other editing things out of the way: NO
--book last bits of travel (for August trip), file travel voucher for April trip: NO, neither one.
But I wrote 4000 words!
Yay 4000 words! That is a win!
DeleteI am a mid-career professor in a physical science field, at my somewhat under-staffed dream university in a lovely place. I am becoming official department head in a few weeks. There is general administrative and financial chaos, which of course comes with a huge amount of work and worry. I really need research to go well this summer! Teenager is graduating high school in a month (I’m not ready). I have two slightly nutty cats.
ReplyDeleteSession intention: Breathe… Breathe before worrying, breathe before reacting, breathe before jumping in to offer help/advice/comments, breathe and enjoy the beauty of summer, breathe and appreciate the moments…
Session goals:
One new first-author paper ready to submit
One student paper ready to submit
Get reasonable start on new project
Help student finish up thesis work
Regular exercise, and some kayaking
Trip with kid
This week’s goals
Get three talks ready for conference
Data processing for other people’s talks
Do a million interviews
Organize student assistant’s work for the next month
Three fun things with friends
My favourite flower is... well, basically all of them, which is why you are going to get pictures all summer long! My challenge is whatever I post has to be from the week preceding, no trawling through phone for old pictures, a nice "look for something cool each week" theme... But, I do have an extra soft spot for lupins… Love them, they are gorgeous here in the summer, and they grow wild. Will share pictures when they show up. Or where I grew up the equivalent was cosmos, they grow wild everywhere in the early winter and provide amazing colour to all the brown winter fields...
Both lupins and cosmos are lovely! I always associate lupins with high altitude, but they grow elsewhere as well. Commiserations on the department head position, but I'm sure you'll do well at it. It's definitely the sort of job that expands to fill all the time available, so do slot in some protected time for your own work and play!
DeleteUgh, head of school and child transitions all at once, that sounds like a LOT! Hope the research elves are playing along!
DeletePutting this here a week late so it's here! Thanks, Daisy, for hosting! I'm Susan, an almost retired faculty member in the humanities, who wants to keep hanging out with the cool people here!
ReplyDeleteFlowers. I adore lilacs, for the scent, and because they remind me of the northeast where I used to live. But I also love roses, and planted lots at my now former house. And lavender, for the scent. (I think scent is my thing.) But in March, daffodils bring joy, and peonies are glorious and... For the trees, dogwood and redbud, but even more acacia. (ENOUGH.)
Session goals:
Intention: welcome new adventures
Otherwise, given that I really don't know what retirement will be, I'm keeping these VERY general.
Teaching and admin:
1. Finish my time as graduate chair without leaving too many unfinished tasks
Research:
2. I am expecting to spend much of the summer dealing with copyedits of Big collaboration (a collection of 30 essays on my historical period I am coediting). We have been told that we'll start getting copyedits in early June.
3. Keep up with research on Rest of My Life project, especially preparing for the keynote I'm giving at a major conference in November
Life:
4. Move into new home (I have one)
5. Enjoy summer travel and research
I'm looking forward to seeing how your retirement goes! Taking notes . . .
Delete