Month: April 2009

In the comments to a different entry, a reader asked for details on how I keep track of all the things I have to do. I wrote the following as my answer, then realized that it might be interesting as its own blog post:

My task tracking is a multifaceted system that has grown out of years of applied trial and error. It would probably confuse anyone else who tried to use it, but it works for me because the system and my life have grown around each other.

In my kitchen I have a big wall calendar which displays the entire year. The space for each day is small, so only the major events get written down. I don’t write down when the kids go to school, because that is normal. I do write down if they have the day off, or when they have after school activities. I have a different color of pen for each child. This allows me to tell at a glance the general shape of the day/week/month. This calendar is the one I consult when trying to figure out if an event will fit into our schedule. This poses problems when I am away from the house and I need to schedule an appointment. Enter my franklin planner.

The planner has monthly calendar pages that I keep up to date with the big wall calendar. At least once per week I try to make sure that all items are on both calendars no matter where they were originally written down. More detailed information about each individual day goes into the daily pages. Writing things down in there can get tedious, but the process actually seems to help organize the tasks in my brain, so I have not switched to an electronically based system. Each day gets a full page and here is where I assign all the small tasks of the day and check them off. I can also assign tasks to future days and then forget about them until I get to that day. The planner is used extensively when I am stressed or busy. When life is slower, I just use the calendar on the wall and track the remaining few things in my head.

Even the planner information is sometimes too generalized. I will write “XDM layout” which schedules a block of time, but doesn’t remind me which layout tasks I intended to tackle within that block. Enter my high-tech system of post-it notes stuck to my desk and the hutch above it. These help me remember where I left of working and serve as reminders of random bits of information that I’ll need again. I also use my email inbox to help me remember things to do. For example the notification email about LJ comments remind me that I want to respond to the comments. Things only stay in my inbox if I need to do something about them. The drawback to this is that when my inbox fills up, I start to feel stressed because it feels like I have dozens of tasks on my to-do list.

When life is busy (which is every day lately) I start each day by glancing at the wall calendar to get a general sense of the day/week. Then I go through my planner to see what specific tasks there are to tackle each day. After the kids are at school, I sit down at my desk. This is when I glance through the inventory of post-it notes, discarding any that have become irrelevant. Then I comb through my inbox and resolve things there. Then I can start working for real instead of just organizing the work.

When I write it all out like this it sounds like a tediously complex system, but as I said before, it is what has grown out of my experiences. Other people probably have much more streamlined systems. Howard tracks his tasks all in Outlook on his computer. Of course he also benefits from my efforts on the wall calendar and planner, so perhaps that is not a fair comparison. When all is said and done, I prefer to have some redundancy and the manual transfer of information from one place to another. It helps me to wrap my head around the schedule and to make sure that tasks don’t fall through the cracks.

Apparently the week saved the usual Monday frazzle and dished it out to my on Tuesday this week. At this very moment I am at the opposite end of the house from my layout work, because I need a break to straighten the kinks out of my brain before tackling it again. As I expected the stacking of tasks on the XDM project is creating extra layout work for me. I knew I would have to re-do things several times, but it is still tiring and frustrating tweaking a page that I know I’ll have to tweak in the same way again when the text gets changed. But I have to tweak the page now so that Howard can see which pictures he needs to draw. More satisfying are the whole document tasks where I put in a change that I know gets to stay. Like page numbers. All the pages have numbers now. Next up I get to figure out cross-references. Whee.

At least yesterday morning’s on-the-way-to-drop-kids-at-school rant entitled “It is not fair that I have to do things for you when you could do them yourselves and then maybe I’d get to eat breakfast once in awhile.” Oh wait. That’s more of a summarization of the whole rant, but it was longer and louder yesterday. ANYWAY. This morning the kids were all dressed lickety-split and smiling. (Except Gleek who spiked a fever and stayed home from school instead.) They got to school early and I got to eat breakfast too. I love it when the rant actually has an effect. Although now I worry that my extensive and detailed list will teach my kids that keeping score is part of what mothers do, when actually the opposite is true. Family works much better when no one is keeping score of the services and favors. And yet I also have to make sure that they learn to be responsible for themselves instead of just expecting me to do everything. So I sometimes do one and sometimes do the other. Then I get to worry about being inconsistent. Somehow it all works out and a lopsided balance is achieved.

Today was a Monday and I was not frazzled by 2 pm. I think it has been more than a month since I’ve had a not-frazzled Monday. It feels good to be more balanced. It was particularly good to leave my office by 2 pm and be done with business stuff for the day. It gave me time to pay attention to the house and the kids. I even had some time to think about the family trip that we intend to take in June. I’m sure this new balance will be unsettled once the XDM project switches phases from drafting into editing. At least I figured out that my insanely busy week will actually be the week after spring break rather than concurrent with it.

I am pretty sure that I had other interesting thoughts during the day, but apparently they all went to bed. Perhaps I’ll find them again in the morning.

Kiki sat next to me on the couch, carefully shading her latest drawing with colored pencils. Gleek was just past her, curled up in the comfy chair that has somehow come to be called “the Daddy chair.” She had a friendship bracelet pinned to her knee and was carefully knotting row after row. Patch was on the floor in front of Gleek. He was coloring a maze which I had printed from the file of coloring pages on my computer. Link sat on the floor next to Patch, directly in front of me. He was playing with some lego figures, carefully constructing adventures in brick. Howard had been on the short couch, but had just left the room on an errand. In front of all of us was the television broadcast of General Conference (the twice-per-year conference put on by our church), piped to the television from my small laptop computer. The sound for conference was coming from a different computer behind us and was a few seconds ahead of the picture. This is what happens when you wait until five minutes prior to the start of broadcast to discover that the laptop won’t pipe sound to the speakers. So we got the two video streams as closely timed as we could and tried not to be distracted.

It was joyful to look around the room and see my children peacefully occupied while listening to the talks. There was a time when that scene would not have been possible. When making my children all remain in the same room and be quietly occupied for two hours was about as likely as a hummingbird surviving a Utah winter. But somehow we kept inching toward where scenes like the one this afternoon became possible. We worked on reverence at Church. Then we worked on praying together as a family. Then we worked on having a weekly family night. Bit by bit we practiced being the family we want to be, rather than giving up on the family that we were. Bit by bit Howard and I learn how to be better parents. Bit by bit the kids learn how to control themselves, to think of others, to appreciate their siblings. Bit by bit we all strive to make the family work. And it does. Because we all believe it is important.

It still isn’t perfect, because we are all imperfect. After conference was over, I sent all the kids outside to get some fresh air. They all grabbed their padded swords and began playing a live action version of Brawl. Within ten minutes there were siblings frustrated and yelling at each other, as is to be expected with such mismatched capabilities. But that too is part of building a family. We must know that we can be furiously mad at each other and that does not ruin the family. Because we calm down and forgive and let go. Because we talk it through when we can’t let go. Because we keep practicing this forgiveness thing until we get it right.

And today we got it right. We called them all inside for a dinner with all six of us sitting around the table. It was a special dinner with rolls and chicken and mashed potatoes. The kids love this meal. While plates were loaded I asked them all what they liked best about conference, and they all had good things to say. This made me glad, because it was my idea to make them all sit in front of the television for two sessions of two hours each. In all the years prior to today, we’d listened on the radio. This worked so much better. The visual component was really helpful even if having the picture and sound out of sync was a tad distracting. And so I think we’ve found a new piece to stitch into the pattern of our family. Bit by bit we add pieces and create something beautiful.

For everyone who wondered how we’re all doing after the excitement of Howard’s split lip, we’re all fine. Once the kids saw daddy come home after the emergency room, they all spent a moment examining the wound. Then they ran off to play without a worry in the world. We did have a family movie night watching Bolt, during which we served ice cream. The timing was comforting, but that particular event has been scheduled since last Tuesday. Well, the movie was. The ice cream was a result of the shopping trip that Howard and I took post-stitches.

This morning Howard is doing just fine other than the fact that his lip is swollen and hurts some. We expect most of the swelling to be gone by tomorrow. I’m hoping for a less eventful day today. We have two sessions of conference to watch and I’m intending to make a really nice dinner with home made rolls. There may even be another showing of Bolt.

First I will say that in the grand scheme, Howard’s injury is minor. He has three stitches and some very colorful bruising. For the rest of the story and my thoughts on why I am a better mother than I am a paramedic you can click the link. If you are sqeamish about blood, you may want to skip it.
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Howard’s split lipRead More »

This weekend is my church’s General Conference. This is a major event that is broadcast all over the world via radio, television, and internet. Today I am listening via Radio while doing housework. Tomorrow I will sit down with the kids in front of the television broadcast and we’ll all do quiet activities while listening.

After listening to two hours of talks, several of which addressed faith in the face of adversity, my stresses seem pretty small and unimportant. When so many people are dealing with the stress of not having enough work, it seems ungrateful of me to complain that I have too much. Especially when my problem can be solved by giving the work to someone else and paying them to do it. This makes me far less stressed and makes the other person less stressed about lack of income. Everybody wins. I really want sales to continue to go well so that I can continue this trend. We would love for Schlock to be able to support multiple households.

There are six more hours of General Conference to go. I’m looking forward to it.

This was a good layout day. I figured out how to make a table of contents and how to put automatically update page numbers on all the pages. I also helped refine even further an already fun visual joke for the book. We have one week until the drafting of the text is done and the editing of the text must begin. However I may have found a way to make the editing of the text not drive me insane. Hopefully my idea will fit into the budget.

In only mildly related news, I’ve been watching episodes of CSI NY when my brain just needs to rest. I liked the first couple of seasons a lot, but season three was weak. In season four I really started enjoying it again. It took me awhile to figure out why. But when the hero used a hand scanner to take images of a body and the coroner took those images into his holodeck where he then did a virtual autopsy on the floating 3D image of the body, that was when I figured it out. Somehow CSI NY went from being a law enforcement drama, to being a science fiction law enforcement drama. Everyone in the show is carrying around flashy technology which only exists in hideously expensive forms or which is only theoretically possible. Nothing is done by hand, it is all from some high tech source. It is like they pushed New York into the future by 20 years. So now the show is like watching Star Trek the original series. They even have a Captain Kirk. And yet somehow the puzzles still work and the technology is not deus ex machina. So yay for unrealistic entertainment.

The Good:
My shrinkwrap system arrived. I now have the capability to shrinkwrap all those boxed sets we’re going to be assembling. The system is not terribly efficient, but the price tag and storage requirements are much nicer than the $2500 L-bar system with conveyor belt heat tunnel. Besides I suspect that the kids will have fun wielding the heat gun (think fancy hair dryer.)

I have also place orders for magnets and posters. It feels good to be collecting the things I need for shipping in June. There are boxes and packing materials to order, but first I have to do the math to figure out how much I’ll need.

The Bad:
I have figured out that my insanely busy week working on XDM layout, will coincide exactly with my kids’ spring break. I need to put some thought into how to manage all the kids at home while I am working frantically. Hopefully I’ll find some solutions that don’t involve endless videos and treats. Advance planning will be necessary.

One of the hazards of my existence are the Howard/Sandra emotional stress feedback loops. It goes like this. Howard is stressed because of the amount of work he needs to do. Sandra is stressed because of the amount of work she needs to do. Sandra is also stressed because she is worried about how stressed Howard is. Howard gets even more stressed because his wife is overstressed and not handling things well. The additional stress radiating from Howard, piles on top of the stress from Sandra, and the circle continues until we manage to get enough work done to unravel the mess. Or until someone collapses into a ball and cries. (By someone, I mean me.)

BUT, occasionally out of the feedback loop mess, a miracle occurs. Sometimes seeing the stress of the other person causes us to kick out of our own stress. This happened last night. Howard was so stressed that at 8 pm he decided he needed to escape the house. He also decided that he needed to spend time being a Daddy in a place where there were no business distractions. So instead of putting the kids to bed at a reasonable hour, Howard packed up the three oldest and took them to the movies. It was the right choice. Kiki, Link, and Gleek had all been sad that Patch got to see the movie last Friday. They danced with delight at getting to sluff bedtime.

Once Howard left the house, everything was quiet. I looked around at the cluttered mess and realized that if it was still cluttered when Howard came home, he would walk back in the door and just pick up his load of stress. The house needed to be different when he got back. So I set to work. I picked up, vaccumed, dish washed, swept, and laundered for a good ninety minutes. The house was transformed into a place of order. (So long as you don’t examine the closets too closely. Shh!) When I began the task, it was just another thing on my list to get done. But as I got working, I found that my own mood lifted. I felt great and so I did more cleaning than I had originally intended to do. When it was all done, and the house was still quiet, I sat down. I felt so happy and peaceful. It was as if I had cleaned up all the stress and put it away with the clutter.

It worked too. Howard came home and the surprise of clean house prevented him from picking back up all of the stress. Today has been so much better than the last few days. Howard and I have both been very busy, but it has been the happy-invigorated busy rather than the I-dare-not-stop-or-it-all-will-fall-apart busy. Also, the more I work on the XDM project, the more I love it. This is going to be a fun book. Today is a good day.