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By Sandy, November 29, 2011

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.  ~Benjamin Franklin

I’ve always hated that quote.

It sounds so bossy and goody goody to me. I’ve never been a morning person. Night, when everyone has gone to bed, has always been my time, a time to read, reflect, and rest. I always get my second wind around 10:00 or 11:00 P.M. One of the reasons I went into academia was the possibility of setting my own hours, not being chained to the routine of 8:00-5:00. Because if there is anything I hate more than getting up early, it’s having to get dressed and drive somewhere early.

Recently, I’ve decided to revisit the possibility of getting up earlier. For me, it’s a process of trial and error. I’m finding that I absolutely love getting up at around 7:00, and I’m going to experiment with 6:30. For those of you who have to get up earlier than this for work, I sympathize and apologize if my quaint resolution fills you rage. I offer you this consolation: as a teacher my work is never done. There is always a pile of papers to grade or another class to prep. My inbox is always packed with student emails and advising questions. These things press on me even after I get home from teaching. I often fantasize about having a job that has no homework. A flexible schedule is nice, but it also comes with a price.

6:00 or 6:30 is my ultimate goal, because this will give me about two hours of solid writing time before Oscar gets up. This morning I got up at 6:55 and wrote nonstop for an hour. It was an astonishingly productive time.

Steve Pavlina recommends 5:00 A.M., as do many other self-help gurus, but I find that getting up too early ruins me for the rest of the day. I’m completely exhausted from about 10:00 A.M. on and can barely keep my eyes open after supper. So far, 6:30 is great. I haven’t pushed myself to get up at 6:00 yet, but I will. That, however, will be as early as I go.

I changed my mind for a variety of reasons. Most of the successful writers I know get up before their children. Sylvia Plath called it “the blue hour.” She wrote her best poems between 4:00 and 8:00 A.M. I can see why. I have found that this is really the only time when I can write without interruption, and constant interruption is death to good writing.

There’s another quote from Benjamin Franklin about the early morning. This one I like:

The early morning has gold in its mouth.

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By Sandy, November 3, 2011

Fall is a season of harvesting, and giving thanks for the harvest. I am lucky to live with a gardener who brings all manner of wonderful vegetables into our home, after all of his hard work through the spring and summer.

I am also harvesting a lifetime of studying and working, having applied for tenure after five years of being tenure-track and after over ten years spent earning degrees. Now I wait, as the final decision for tenure won’t come until spring.

I am still working on my book about using new media in the language arts classroom. It’s a long, tedious, difficult learning process. I am lucky to have a kind, patient, and helpful editor.

Finally, we are expecting another baby in the spring! We are thrilled, but also anxious and hopeful that everything will go smoothly. If there was any child in this world who was meant to be a sibling, it’s Oscar.

I’m 14 weeks pregnant and due April 30, 2012.

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By Sandy, August 18, 2011

I’ve been struggling lately to get done everything I need to get done. I need more time, but who doesn’t? I constantly admonish myself with that old adage, “We all get the same twenty-four hours.” Some people are just better at managing it than I am.

I think having a schedule will help me.

I was recently rereading one of my favorite old self-help books, Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want. The author, Barbara Sher, believes strongly in the power of a schedule. She believes you should schedule everything, including frivolous activities, or what she refers to as avoidance patters. For example, if you tend to surf the internet instead of writing or grading, she believes you should actually write it into your schedule. Pencil in an hour of grading followed by an hour of web surfing. Most of us don’t want to admit to our avoidance patterns, whether it’s napping, reading magazines, playing Facebook games, socializing, or whatever. She writes,

“Setting a definite and regular time for getting certain things done makes it much likelier that you will do them.”

I tend to live, not by a schedule, but by inclination and deadlines. This is a recipe for procrastination, stress, anxiety, and failing to achieve short and long-term goals. That’s because inclination is pretty fickle. For me, it usually goes like this:

1. Collect papers
2. Tell myself I have a week to grade them and so why not get started on reading that new novel I just picked up
3. Stare at pile of papers all week, feeling anxiety in the pit of my stomach as I turn away from the pile and mindlessly read blogs to quell my anxiety
4. Wait until the last possible minute to grade, staying up late, or grading frantically before class begins
5. Lather, rinse, repeat

This is not a healthy cycle.

The idea is, if I have a week to get my grading done, maybe schedule 30-60 minutes each day to grade, followed by the frivolous activity of my choice.

I have a friend who schedules each week and each day, right down to when she wakes up, does dishes, tidies the house, feeds her son, etc. I am full of admiration for this, but it won’t really work for me, because I don’t have a consistent schedule. During the school year, I teach two days a week, have one class online, do drop-in academic advising, and travel to supervise student teachers. Some weeks I see student teachers and some weeks I don’t. Some weeks I have meetings and some weeks I don’t. On certain days, students will call or email asking for an appointment, and if I have time to squeeze them in I will make an effort to do so. Sometimes a colleague or student will drop by to chat.

So, I’m thinking of solving the problem by making a new schedule each week or even each night before I go to bed, blocking out certain times for writing and grading, and not allowing myself to be free during those times. It’s not a perfect solution, but one that I hope will work for me.

I would also love to set aside time to write very early in the morning, and very late in the evening, but this requires a kind of discipline I don’t know if I have. Maybe if I actually write it down, like Barbara Sher recommends, I will be more likely to do it.

How do you manage your time? Do you use a schedule or go with the flow?

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By Sandy, April 14, 2011

I spent the morning being very productive. How could it have all gone so wrong?

First, I answered a slew of work emails, most with dumb advising questions that as an undergraduate I never would have dreamed of asking a professor. I spend about two hours each day answering these types of emails, and for awhile today this led me to contemplate the downfall of civilization.

Then I had a brief conference call with two university colleagues. It went surprisingly well, and I said very smart and helpful things, which is rare for me. All the while Oscar ran around the house making elephant noises.

Then I crafted a long and quite stunningly well-written email for the two said colleagues, and they were suitably impressed. With a sense of accomplishment I moved on to scrub my toilet, because nothing else can make one feel as virtuous as cleaning the toilet. I cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed, dusted, washed dishes, made lunch, and tried to teach Oscar how to put together his rocket ship puzzle. He has already mastered his elephant puzzle, his new favorite toy, which I bought at Bookman’s for $1.

I got Oscar hooked on elephants to help him get over his previous obsession with whales. Why he is drawn to enormous mammals is beside me. At night, he sadly waves bye-bye to his elephant puzzle and falls asleep making elephant noises.

After Oscar was down for his afternoon nap I should have just kept going, should have never sat down, really. Even so much as sitting down while Oscar is napping is asking for trouble. But I couldn’t resist. I thought, I’ll just sit and read the latest issue of Good Housekeeping, the one with Heidi Klum on the cover. So I sat and read about how she single-handedly runs a multi-million dollar empire while raising four beautiful children which she could not possibly have carried and birthed from her perfect body. Worse, she’s one of those annoying celebrities who claims not to exercise or diet. She keeps in shape by “chasing her children.” These kinds of statements make me want to both laugh and cry. During the past two years I chased an extra twenty pounds onto my body. I guess I should have eaten more chocolate.

At some point I felt the seductive pull of the afternoon nap. The afternoon nap is a vice that should be listed right up there with being addicted to crack cocaine. It will destroy lives. One minute I’m snuggling up on the couch with a throw pillow and the next minute my day is completely over.

Now I’m drinking coffee to get rid of my post nap hangover, and contemplating my to-do list.

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By Sandy, February 1, 2011

Lordy, am I tired. Tired of work, tired of meetings, tired of diapers and dirty dishes. Sick to death of revising the same damn book proposal again and again. I’ve been writing this proposal since last March, when I wrote the first draft during my spring break. Since then it has been revised and resubmitted to my editor seven times. I no longer remember why I wanted to write this book in the first place.

Ask any writer, editor, publisher, or agent and they will tell you that success in writing and publishing is all about persistence. I believe that. I also believe that there must be hope for my book, or the editor would have rejected it outright. She has put tremendous time and energy into working with me on these revisions, which means she hasn’t given up on either me as a writer or on my idea. This gives me hope, but it doesn’t change the fact that I feel like I’m slogging through a lake full of concrete.

I need to reboot. I need to rediscover my passion, my enthusiasm, and my love for this project. Although I hate to admit it, I also need to focus and work harder than I have ever worked before. It’s time for me to dig deep and find it in me to revise this proposal once again and write this book once and for all.

The original meaning of enthusiasm is to be inspired or possessed by a divine presence. Some people go to church to be possessed by a divine presence. I read.

Specifically, I read about or watch movies about people who have achieved greatness.Watching the process that leads to excellence is when I am possessed by the holy spirit. Educator Sir Ken Robinson addresses this in one of speeches:

“An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak. When you’re present in the current moment. When you are resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing. When you are fully alive.”

There are two things that are guaranteed to make me feel fully alive. One is reading great writing, and the other is writing. Lately, I have been reading about hard work, brutally hard work, and how it can lead to success. It’s an old-fashioned idea that’s making a comeback.

In Amy Chua’s controversial new parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother she argues that “nothing is fun until you’re good at it.” While I’m not here to debate the merit or lack thereof of her parenting strategies, I would agree with this quote while making one slight amendment. I would say that nothing is fun until you’ve practiced it consistently. For me, this has been true of everything from writing to running to video games to yoga. As a teacher, I would argue that many students hate reading because they don’t do enough of it. You have to be fluent, moving past the point of reading and decoding one word at a time, before you can get lost in a story.

The reason I struggle with writing, the reason it fills me with gut-wrenching anxiety, is because I don’t do enough of it. I don’t throw myself into it wholeheartedly, embracing the challenge and loving the fact that it’s hard. I recently read an amazing blog post titled, “Blood, Sweat and Words: How Badly Do You Want This?” in which the author talks about how Mark Wahlberg spent five years trying to get his movie The Fighter made, a movie that was just nominated for a number of Academy Awards, and that he trained as a boxer during that entire five year period. This reminded me of Natalie Portman’s performance in Black Swan, a movie that she trained for eight hours a day for over a year, starving herself and learning to dance as well as someone who had spent a lifetime learning ballet. Her award-winning performance is extraordinary, and I take strange comfort in reading interviews in which she says it was the hardest thing she ever did.

In Geoff Colvin’s book Talent is Overrated he argues that it takes ten thousand hours of hard work to master a skill at the level of a world-class performer. Working at it for three hours a day, that’s approximately ten years. I can’t think of anything that I’ve worked at consistently for three hours a day, except watching television.

It’s time for my writing apprenticeship to begin.

There’s an amazing scene at the end of Black Swan in which a dancer who doubted herself all along finally grows wings and becomes a swan. She is possessed by a divine spirit, she has enthusiasm.

I can’t wait to fly.