Okay, after this paragraph I’m done talking about my recent health hiccup. I’m boring myself at this point, and God knows how you feel. Doc says I’m recovering nicely, my energy and mobility are good, and Diet 2.0 is relatively painless. (Although I have yet to experience a craving for grilled cheese or lasagna or anything else not on my approved foods list. Keep your arms in the tour bus, is all I’m saying.)
It’s time to get back to building this Life on the High Wire. I’m the queen of goal setting (it’s true – I even own a little tiara made of spreadsheets and To Do lists), and have an unnatural love of planning ahead. I have a three-year plan, a one-year plan, and a To Do list broken out into months and seasons.
(Despite how this sounds, I’m not all that uptight, I’m actually pretty easy going. Right? Right!?)
Goals are good because they keep us focused on what we want, and if we break them down into baby steps, we have a solid chance of success. No problems there. But what I’m finding is that, in some cases, there’s such a thing as planning too far ahead. (You’ll need a lot less time to complete your applications for grad school, for example, than you will to save for a down payment on a house.)
I was hired in April to teach Intro to Creative Writing at Queens this fall. Being the Queen Planner, I decided that having never taught this class before, it would be a good idea to take my time and get my lesson plan together over the summer. Research best practices, find sample syllabi, read a few collections of fiction, poetry, and playwriting to help me decide on my book list.
Yeah, right.
Where am I at on this project? I did manage to order my books for class last month, because there was a June deadline (we’ll come back to that in a minute). I went with perfectly wonderful collections I’m already familiar with: Amy Hempel, Li-Young Lee, and Sam Shepard. Easy and excellent. But I've been fretting about this damn syllabus for months.
Why haven’t I done more than order books? More pressing concerns came up, like work, my dense but fascinating History of Literary Criticism class, a couple small writing projects, this blog. Oh, and surgery. (Doh! I wasn’t going to mention it again.)
Technically, I don’t have to have my syllabus done until the first day of class. And the truth is, I don’t need months to prepare. I’ve taught before, so that part’s not new. I’m a writer and reader, so the concept of creative writing isn’t new either. (Though on some days, you’d never know it by the drivel I produce.) I came up with some good curriculum ideas for my job application, and I can start with those.
You know what will happen? About two weeks before classes start I’ll freak out. I’ll jolt up in bed at 4 a.m. and think, Crap! (Not really “crap,” but you get my drift.) I have 20 students arriving in my classroom in two weeks, and I have no idea what to tell them about the next three-and-a-half months! I need to get my crap [Ed. note: “crap” not actual word used here, either] together!
And then what I’ll do is make some coffee, go online and research, get some books at the library, and figure it out. Because I have to. (Again, note the way we get things done when forced, because of deadline or otherwise.) I’ll draft a lame syllabus first. Then I’ll revise it. And revise it again. And by the time the first day of class rolls around, I’ll be ready.
The point is, I did not need to put this project on my To Do list way back in April and cause myself needless months of anxiety. I could have just written on my calendar for mid-August: Write the Damn Syllabus. Then I'd have been able to focus with abandon (can you do that?) on everything else that really did need to be worried about this summer.
So, there is such a thing as too much lead time. Procrastination can be your friend. And if all else fails, take it from me: enthusiastic cursing gets you that much closer to your goal.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
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11 comments:
I'm so with you on this, Deonne.
I think maybe part of it is that, at this point in our careers (life?) we really don't need as much time to "get it together" as we used to, but we don't recognize this in ourselves (or we are just too hard on ourselves to believe it).
So many times I've beat up on myself for not starting something really far in advance, only to discover, when I did get around to it, that I really needed only say, a week (or a day), not a month(or a week) to do it.
With me, I have found if that lead time thing is too far out, I really will procrastinate and to it to the max. I do much better with a short leadtime/gotta get it done NOW deadline. Otherwise I'll dance all around the blinking thing and find a zillion excuses to do something else. At least with writing, you can manage to fill gaps easier than in the world of manufacturing. And the parts are a whole lot more flexible. Maybe that's why I like writing and words so much. Lots of other vendors to go to rather than relying on a single source.
In response to your enthusiastic cursing.
Before I wrote you this comment, I wanted to use a word I didn't quite fully understand. So I looked it up. It applies to your cursing, and what better reference than a 15th century Monk for origin. The word abstersion. The meaning the act of wiping clean, a cleansing, a purging.
I find when I procrastinate, it is usually to finish something else, not so high up on the priority list instead of going about the real task at hand or while the higher priority task is waiting to be placed into the state of conclusion. This abstersion of lower priority items. This I think is the relevance behind your anxiety. As we all know, we are in a state of constant motion or to place it more beautifully, constant momentum which can be drifting in sleep or splashing about the waves.
To take literally as to what you are implying is if you were able to wipe away the crap that is in the way of constructing the high priority syllabus into a together kind of presentable package., i.e., the construction of a (Damn) usable syllabus with the aid of enthusiastic cursing, then you would arrive at your goal closer and I'm guessing less painfully sooner than later. The curse of the crap being the lower priority to do list items, be they having made the list or not.
Then abstersion is what you need and no better anectdote than the words of my friend the Monk Francois Rabelais quoting from his five volume book Gargantua and Pantagruel, "But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all the torchculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipebreeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, ...".
Has this anything to do with procrastination? I hope if it warmed your heart and stimulated your brain, then it wasn't "as harde as I imagined to perceyue the processe and dryfte of this treatyse"
Oxford English Dictionary 1526
Lisa - Yes, one of the benefits of getting older! There are a few categories of activity I can pretty much count on pulling off now, regardless of how much lead time I have.
Anon - Love the writing/manufacturing analogy.
Tusk - Bumfodder! You've added an entirely new set of curse words to my repertoire, thank you. And I agree that we do the less important stuff as a way of avoiding the more daunting task.
Since I started grad school I've gotten better at letting the small stuff go, since I have way more big stuff to do than hours in the day. I look forward to post-grad life when I have time to do the low-level tasks I shouldn't be worrying about in the first place!
I recently read a theory on why we work better closer to deadline. The internal censor (remember Annie Lamott's radio station KFCK?) is drowned out by the ticking clock. "At this point, it doesn't have to be perfect or even great--it just has to be DONE!"
I simply love Anne Lamott. (Although lately my life seems to have been tuned in to another radio station, KWTF.)
That theory makes sense, and I'm always surprised at how good the result is, despite the waiting-until-the-last-minute-ness of it. We don't give ourselves enough credit for actually knowing what we're doing.
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