Operation Errand: Whack-a-moling for People Who Think Too Much
In which I lay out my five notes-to-self for the season, and recommend a podcast series on method in the writing of history.
December is the month in which life usually feels like one blooper after another. You fill in the wrong form (after spending 1,000 hours finding the bandwidth to open the file). You realize what an early January deadline actually means - and how an early January conference is an even bigger pile-up. You miss the window to see an exhibition that’s been on since forever (UHHHH!).
This past December was worse than usual, thanks to swapping a job for full-time writing anarchy, Muppet-style. I needed to set up a bunch of things and - more grossly - to catch up with errands. Many paperwork tasks had languished on the to-do list for months or even years while I worked on the trade-list book side-hustle alongside the four day/week job that I wrapped up in November.
The new life goal: prolific, untrammelled creativity - Stephen King meets The Muppet Show, perhaps. Getting the ducks in a row for this felt like Stephen King meets The Muppet Show, only in a different way.
The paperwork boredom setting and the paperwork anxiety setting are about three molecules apart in the pathway activation of my brain. Yet the heady relief and thrill of finishing errands is the biggest cookie of all, stored in a locked box whose key enters this universe only when the yucky stuff is done.
What to do?
In this season of New Year’s Resolutions, I made five notes to self - questions and instructions to help me focus on the big picture:
Note 1: In three months’ time, what will I wish I had done this minute - or today?
Am I actually doing something different from what I’m going to wish I had done? If so, am I falling out of alignment with my goals and values?
Behind this question is the deep structure of my lived universe. Body, soul, energy, and consciousness are finite, albeit replenished every day (to a greater or lesser extent). Work/errands are sinks into which time, mental effort, psychic energy, and attention fall.
As a side-note, I’m reminded of Annie Lowrey’s notion of a time tax, whereby ordinary people in the US lose aeons of time navigating bureaucracy in order to get support to which they are entitled.
Each of my sinks could be called a tax. I’ve opted for the graphic metaphor of a sink, however - low-tech, relatively unthreatening - it holds greater appeal that a metaphor derived from the sort of paperwork errand that, when underway, fills ALL THE SINKS.
Since I have a finite amount of time, mental effort, psychic energy, and attention per day, I should do my best to allocate it in ways that will support where (and who) I want to be in the long term.
Note 2: Don’t sow dragon’s teeth.
In Greek myths like the one about Jason and the Golden Fleece, if you plant dragon’s teeth, they turn into armed warriors overnight. Jason turned his sprouted warriors against one another by throwing a stone amongst them.
In contemporary life, administrative paperwork filed carelessly has a similar effect, with a difference: the warriors gang up on the gormless muppet who failed to file them in ways that would keep them toothless and unarmed for eternity.
File things in the right place from the start, so that errands don’t metamorphose into dragon’s teeth, buried in fungal caverns of virtual doom in which receipts hide, snickering with glee as I keep typing “Delta” instead of “United”.
Most of my reluctance to start an errand is wondering whether or not I filed things in the right place. Most things are filed okay, even well, or are at least easily findable. Yet that’s not enough to take away the reluctance to begin them for fear that I Lost Something.
This mindset creates a vicious cycle of errand-procrastination. On the one hand, it makes writing deeply attractive - NOT AN ERRAND! HAHAHA! On the other hand, carrying the weight of the awaiting paperwork circus comes at a cost (or a tax). And that cost is greater than doing the errands promptly - which is far easier to do when I know I won’t spend half an hour looking for the folder into which I hastily tossed the documents.
“Here, kill two chickens.” My friend Debbie’s parents kept chickens. Debbie’s dad did not look forward to the moment when the inevitable had to happen. Debbie’s mum got around this by handing him poultry when he least expected it, and saying “Here, kill two chickens.” He hardly had time to panic over the act or to dread it before he’d done it - no dragon’s teeth were planted, and nobody had to go spelunking in a fungal cavern in search of a chicken.
…all of which is to say that some errands can be completed the moment they appear, and before they have accrued dread.
But how do you do this when a bunch of stuff is late? Don’t the new things join the back of the line, that twilight zone of automatic lateness? I don’t think that’s where new things should go…. finishing a thing that is “late” is less fun than finishing a thing on time. (No cookies will be unlocked despite your efforts.)
If you have to finish something anyway, you might as well get what dopamine you can for your efforts.
I’m going to deal with new things immediately or early - for the satisfaction of turning fresh things around - and to do the late things in order of a combo of importance and urgency (as in which one is most likely to catch fire or become harder to do if I don’t do it now).
Side-note to self: one of the ways to make Note 2 possible is to commit to doing fewer things in the first place.
Note 3: Try to optimize everything, and you optimize nothing.
Make the hard call. Not everything can be planned perfectly in a single time-space continuum: writing, scheduling, travel, purchase decisions, desirable invitations at inconvenient moments. As someone said on the Internet somewhen, “‘No’ is a full sentence.”
Like Henry Bagthorpe, the irascible TV script-writer parent in Helen Cresswell’s hilarious children’s book series, The Bagthorpe Saga, I am someone for whom if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. A better way: decide ahead of time what’s going to be done merely to “meh” standard, or to “fine” standard, rather than to “as well as I could possibly do it.” Otherwise, chance, energy, and timing will end up compromising the things I care most about.
Note 4: “Everything is Lego. Atomize it!”
This is the mixed metaphor to rule all the notes-to-self: break everything into manageable portions. Then break each of those portions down again. Reimbursement claim to put in? List the stages before beginning:
1) Rescue digital receipts from the Inbox or iPhoto and stick them in a named folder (dragon’s teeth, unless I had already put them in a folder the moment I made an online purchase or photographed the paper receipt).
2) Photograph any paper receipts and stick them in the same folder.
3) Name all the receipts: “2023-01-15 train ticket to Paris” or whatever.
4) ….and so on.
I can tick each of these off as I do it. Thus the goal of the day becomes “collect brightly-coloured ticks!” not “do those boring and vaguely unsettling things that take ages.”
This works for writing, too.
Blog post? Make a list of sections. Writing a blog post section? Draft it, and use a “=” symbol next to a phrase for individual things to check or find or add. After the first pass, I can count the “=”, symbols and the next phase of writing, revising, editing, becomes finite.
Note 5: “Think about your donuts of the day.”
This gem was on the internet, one of a raft of sage pieces of advice from a five-year-old to a parent. The kid’s tips went so viral that the story ended up on CNN. All the gems are precious; you can read them here.
Imagining imminent treats (as opposed to threats) generates dopamine that helps me start potentially boring or stressful stuff - stuff which is rarely more than 10% as awful as thinking about it, anyway.
Sometimes the doughnut (yes, back to UK spelling) is simply getting to stop doing errands. Scheduling errand-time 30 mins to two hours before a Zoom call or before leaving the house or lunchtime assures my brain that I won’t make it do errands until The End Of Time, which makes it reasonably safe to start them.
Takes and recs
Marcia Chatelain Writes Anywhere She Can: in this episode of a great newish history-writing-method podcast series (with transcripts!), Drafting The Past, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Professor Marcia Chatelain has a wide-ranging conversation with host Kate Carpenter. We learn, among other things, about how Chatelain breaks writing tasks into chunks, moves her fingers on the keypad everywhere from taxicabs to her home office, and how her training in journalism and her experience teaching as a college professor inform her writing as a historian. Chatelain also recalls how her book manuscript confounded a few potential editors since it did not have a main human character: instead, capitalism was the main character. Also: American Girl Doll! You’ll have to check out the podcast to learn more.
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