Catching up on what is good

A reflection on blogging, success, failure, and clarity

When I started this blog with a daily challenge, I thought it would be somewhat difficult to keep up with. My life felt very full and hectic and busy. I was starting another semester with my eighty-whatever new best friends, and I have young kids. I always had more than enough to be behind on already. I decided to try the whole daily blog idea in part because I thought it might help me be less of a perfectionist.

Every idea doesn’t have to be amazing. Every word doesn’t have to be ideal. I would write and I would let it go. In my more pessimistic moments, I thought it could be something else to be perpetually failing to do as well as I felt I should.

As it happened, I found daily blogging to be easier and more invigorating than I expected it to be. I liked having a small challenge, an achievable task. Other areas of endeavor that I find myself engaged in simply don’t provide much of an opportunity for completion, let alone success. Teaching, academia, parenting—these are long-haul projects full of endless effort, complexity, and balancing. By giving myself a context in which done was good enough, I was able to taste completion and success regularly. Salutary.

After a brief hiccup of pandemic productivity, I hit a wall and let myself stop. That was the only thing to do, even if it may not have been the right thing.

It was certainly contrary to the spirit of the daily post idea but aligned with me personal reasons for undertaking such a project.

I’ve definitely learned something even if it’s not always clear what.

I’m going to keep at it, in a haphazard way, consistently inconsistent, and I’ll see what happens.

The Annoyance of Wasted Effort

Lost Effort

I have wasted writing effort in many ways. I nominate as the most annoying way to waste one’s time writing the experience of completing a document, saving it multiple times along the way in a trusted way, and then having it mysteriously frozen, unable to open, from thenceforth, into perpetuity. I realize that this is far from the most disheartening writerly experience, but for a frustrating pesky irksome tiresome and pointless kind of waste, it is unparalleled. 

That’s why this post is not about what it is like to read too many books at a time.

Take Time to Do Nothing

I’m taking my own advice. The pressure to use our newfound free time is absurd. Also, as someone now without childcare who is working remotely full time (and my job is significantly impacted because a majority of it is face-to-face teaching that is now online), I don’t have more free time. In some ways I have even less.

But it’s true that time itself is different. Our entire way of life is upended, and of course ways we structure time are changing. Try to relax into that. To truly be our “best selves,” we need to process and adjust and develop our long-term perspectives. Overwhelming productivity is actually going to slow down that process.

For a related take on this, check out Rachel Charlene Lewis’s “All the ways the internet is pushing hustle culture during the quarantine.”

Time of Day

Time of day matters. And 2:30 pm is not the time. Afternoon is just a lull, a dip, and 2:30 is peak afternoon lull.

It is not the right time for anything, except maybe the last caffeine drink—or decaf that you’re half pretending has caffeine—of the day. In fact, that is exactly what it is the time for: a coffee! A cappuccino! You can do hot or iced. You can add a flavor or a sprinkle, or not. Your choice.

2:30 is not the time to take on a creative or complex project. It is not even the time to try to have a thoughtful conversation. A plan, an idea, a question with the power to inspire as late as 1 pm will have had its potential and significance mysteriously drained away by 2:30. There is no away around it, so you might as well lean in. If you can’t schedule a nap at 2:30, try to schedule your most pointless meeting for 2:30. Or use that time to do a simple, repetitive task like laundry or responding to surveys.

Set yourself up for success by matching up low energy times of day with tasks that require minimal output. 2:30 is where time management and energy management meet.