PocketMod, planner for a pauper’s pocket

Found the coolest little portable pocket planner. Write your notes on it, stuff it in your pocket and toss when done. It’s called the PocketMod.

It’s an easy do-it-yourself - where you add the mini-pages that suit your planning needs then print it, fold it. It’s a bit of an origami puzzle till you get the hang of it… - make sure you print out the assembly instructions on one of your demos so you can review the process offline.

Postprandial plunge: to nap or not to nap?

Postprandial: following a meal

Plunge: to descend precipitously

Perhaps I exaggerate - but plunge was the only p-word that comes close to what happens to me after lunch most days… (and after as little as one glass of wine w. dinner) - I want to get horizontal and shut my eyes.

Supposedly it has something to do with blood sugar levels, but it doesn’t seem to matter whether I eat a low or high carb meal; I just get sleepy.

And then I resist it.  I sit at my computer trying to write, trying to compute, trying to think through a problem — gaining no traction but refusing to succumb.  If I get up and tackle a physical chore I can sometimes barrel through it, but at a detriment to my effectiveness.

Half an hour after a nap it’s as if I rebooted my whole system, and all the resource-hogging resident programs in my brain have cleared out.  My question to myself is this: why don’t I just go with the flow and make room in my schedule for a daily nap?

Napping is a high art in some cultures; there’s no shame attached to it. It’s probably good for your health, as a recent study from Greece indicates.   From that story in the NY Times:

Now, out of Greece, comes permission to do exactly that. A study of more than 23,000 adults shows that those who napped for about 30 minutes each week had a 37 percent lower risk of dying from a heart attack than those who did not.

So this should mean that all working Americans will receive permission from their bosses to close their eyes every afternoon at about 4 p.m., right?

Don’t bet your blankie on it.

This is hardly the first study showing that sleep is more than simply time when we really should be at work. Other studies, though few as extensive as the Greek research, show that short periods of sleep during the day increase productivity and creativity while reducing stress. And even without surveys, we know this from experience.

When you need a nap, you need a nap. Nothing — not caffeine, not a chocolate bar, not a pill — recharges the battery in the same way.

I welcome you to join me…

Pings and Productivity

An article in today’s NY Times about the perils of “pinging” - my word for the constant interruptions we face in our modern daily lives.

As the parent of young children, the pinging came from them: “Mom, I’m hungry (bored, tired, angry, mad at my brother, sick, in danger, have a dirty diaper); I need you NOW”. I don’t think I had a coherent thought for a seven-year period, except when they were in childcare. I was good only for low-level functions: buying and preparing food, cleaning up, running errands, arranging play dates.

Now, kids long gone (chatty husband too) the distractions are back. But most of them are (or should be) under my own control. It’s between me and the internet. Ping! I’ve got email! I do research for an article on Vitamin D (thank you google) and suddenly I’ve gotten from Vitamin D to auto-immune disorders to fatigue to distraction to this article - and now instead of further work on Vitamin D I’m writing a post about being distracted.

Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age has this to say:

What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.

The first step is to learn to speak a language of attention. The exciting news is that the enigma of attention has just begun to be mapped, tracked and decoded by neuroscientists who now consider attention to be a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention. Think of it this way: You can be “aware” that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can “focus” on an individual flower. The last piece, “executive attention,” is the ability to plan and make decisions.

Coincidentally I was dead-heading the amazing Westerlund rose earlier today in the garden. Hundreds of blooms in thick clusters. A few branches so heavy they had broken (below, the flowers on just two stalks). I was clip clip clipping but somewhere else in my head. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t present and began to focus on each spent head and the shattering petals that fell as I snipped. Such abundance! Wow.

I used to do most of my writing on my laptop, which I keep offline. It is so much easier to focus when there’s no place else to go, no emails to worry about. I talk about self-discipline, but talk costs nothing. I feel myself with a big SHOULD coming on: I SHOULD ONLY CHECK EMAIL ONCE A DAY. I SHOULD ONLY CHECK DailyKos ONCE A DAY. I SHOULD ONLY….

What will I actually DO????

Procrastination

Procrastination: putting off intentionally something that should be done,
from the Latin, pro (forward) and crastinus (of tomorrow)

Ben Zimmer at Slate.com says

How fitting that the word is lengthy and Latinate, taking its time to reach a conclusion. Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson once wrote that procrastination is “really sloth in five syllables.” And yet the word denotes so much more than mere sloth or indolence: A procrastinator meticulously organizing a sock drawer or an iTunes library can’t exactly be accused of laziness. Likewise, procrastination is not simply the act of deferral or postponement. It implies an intentional avoidance of important tasks, putting off unpleasant responsibilities that one knows should be taken care of right away and setting them on the back burner for another day.

Noting Ben Franklin’s dictum “never put off until tomorrow what should be done today,” Zimmer reminds us of MarkTwain’s response: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”

Which brings us to another great P-word perendinate, meaning “to put something off until the day after tomorrow.”

And - picture stories being worth 1000 textual declamations -join me in procrastinating a minute longer with cartoonist Lev Yilmaz. Laugh while you wince in self-recognition.

One of the main reasons I started this blog was to explore the P words that pave my path to Perfection. Procrastination is one of those words, and yet I’ve posted 60 entries on this blog without touching upon this pimple on the ass of Progress.

When I was preparing for a party last week, I reorganized a couple of kitchen cabinets, gathered a box of books for the second-hand store, and hung a bunch of pictures. Today, in preparation for an appointment with my divorce* attorney, I’m writing in my blog about procrastination.

John Perry, a Stanford philosophy professor whose public radio show Philosophy Talk is a favorite of mine, calls this “structured procrastination.”

I have discovered an amazing strategy that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

Ah. I feel better now.

*Divorce - I’ve been separated for 7 years from my almost ex, but we have yet to finalize it. This gives you some sense of my capacity for procrastination.