Organization

In Which I Share My To Do List

By / February 24, 2012 / 2 Comments

This week and next week are filled up with deadlines. Many of them are self imposed, but sticking to them is important because some of them aren’t. Some things I have to get out of the way so that I can focus on other things. Other things need to be done so that we have money to pay bills. Then there are the things for the kids, who are the point of all the bill paying. All of this leaves little space for leisurely blog thoughts. Instead I present a list of things I need to do in the next seven days:
Create panel layouts, tag, catalog, and pack up art for the Lunacon art show.
Mail those packages to Lunacon
Determine if there will be a vendor at Lunacon to sell Howard’s books
Pack and mail books to that vendor
Fix broken images in the latest iteration of Sharp End of the Stick (SEOS)
Comb through SEOS making copy edits and evening out the strips
Put pipe boxes around all the SEOS footnotes
Place margin art in all of the SEOS white spaces
Assemble the SEOS cover
Test print SEOS
Clean my house
Do all the laundry
Plan for two birthdays next week
Scan art for ebay auctions
prepare ebay listings
Prep store for Howard’s 24 hour birthday sale
Monitor homework times
Help a gaggle of girls do their hair for a formal dance
Update Accounting
Take my 5th grader to a city council meeting
Critiques for writers group
Meet with my presentation partner and plan for our master class in May
Spend social time with family and friends

Things which almost certainly don’t fit this week, but need to happen as soon as possible:
Learn options for shipping software
Layout family photo books
Layout my annual One Cobble book
Layout a blog sampler book and design an actual cover for it

I’m hoping that by the time we get Howard on a plane to Lunacon SEOS will be off to the printer, the buffer will be building back up, the house will be clean, and all my other projects will be moving along nicely.

Stationery Box for Correspondence

By / February 21, 2012 / 3 Comments

I’ve been really enjoying participating in the Month of Letters Challenge. So much fun, that I have every intention of continuing to write letters even after February ends. However I did find that I needed a better way to store and manage my correspondence. I needed to be able to pick it up and carry it anywhere in the house because the availability of flat surfaces is highly dependent upon the activities of the kids. I needed a box.

This is my correspondence box fully loaded with supplies. You can see my set of colored fountain pens sitting neatly on top of a stack of stationery and next to the matching envelopes. The pink box surrounding them came with my stationery and is useful for keeping things separate. I have a second stack of note cards and envelopes. This leaves just enough space to tuck in a printed address list and a roll of stamps. Off to the side you can see the letters which were tucked on top of everything else and waiting for me to answer them. I can pick up this box and sit down anywhere with all my supplies. The hard surface of the lid becomes my writing desk. This is quite handy when I’m sitting on a couch or in a comfy chair rather than at a table or counter.

I made this correspondence box myself out of supplies I had on hand. In the end I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by heading over to The Container Store and buying a letter box. However I also quite enjoyed the process of creating one, so in the end I’m happy with the result.

I began with one of the label boxes we have laying around because I use these labels to ship merchandise.

I then coated it with modge podge and covered it in brown packing paper.

I didn’t think the box was deep enough, so I used some extra cardboard to add height to the bottom of the box.

I covered that in brown paper too. Then I coated the outside of the box with modge podge to make it more solid and water resistant.

The finished box is nothing special to look at, but I’m pleased that I was able to create it to answer a need without spending any money.

Preparing for a Local Convention

By / February 8, 2012 / 7 Comments

The other day Howard was talking to me and interrupted himself mid-sentence three times in a row to change the subject. It was amusing and fascinating to listen to him close off these nesting topics one by one. My day today is going to be a lot like that. I have lots of tasks ahead. Many of them are going to interrupt each other and I’ll just have to hope that I’ve placed enough memory triggers either in my house or in my brain so that I can come back and complete the interrupted tasks. A day like today requires lists.

Most of today’s work can be summed up in a single sentence: I am preparing for LTUE. That statement can be broken down into three basic categories: arranging for the kids, booth preparation, and preparation for a professional appearance. From there the tasks fracture into dozens of small details, which I am now going to list so that at 2 o’clock this afternoon when I’m standing in my front room with the feeling that there is something important I should be doing, I will be able to look at the list and think “Oh yeah, right, THAT.”

Arranging for the Kids:

  • Most important here is arranging for adequate supervision. This used to mean negotiation with friends, relatives, or neighbors for babysitting. Now it means sitting my children down and reviewing exactly how we treat each other when mom is unavailable to mediate conflicts. House rules will also be reviewed.
  • Planning their travel to and from school when I can’t help carpool — Done
  • Food. I need to buy microwavable food so that they don’t go hungry in the mid afternoon. I’ll actually be here for most of the dinner times. However I will also be brain dead, so I will be grateful to be able to shove frozen things in the microwave and push a button.
  • Bedtime. This only matters on Thursday. The other nights they can stay up late. I just need to plan incentives and review normal procedures with the kids so that they are prepared for things to be a little different than usual. It saves us from upsets when everyone knows the plan.

Booth Preparation:

  • In theory LTUE is the convention when we test out new booth set ups and displays. Every fall we say “we should do A, B, C next year. We’ll test that at LTUE.” Then every February I realize that it is time to prep for LTUE and I don’t have A, B, C ready to go. sigh.
  • Making bundles — We sell our books in discounted bundles. These must be assembled and shrink wrapped. Fortunately Kiki was in need of funds and happily took the job for me. — Done
  • Packing merchandise — The first and hardest step of this is deciding how much to bring. Fortunately we’re coming home every night so I can re-stock as necessary, but we still don’t want to run out of anything when a customer is standing right there. Everything we decide to bring must be packed into boxes for easy hauling by dolly. Loose merchandise gets lost or damaged.
  • Display stands and booth dressing — These are the A, B, C which I never get around to until almost show time. Today it means buying a foam core board so that I can make a vertical display for our t-shirt, grocery bags, and magnets. We also need to get our book stands and table cloths out of the storage unit. Also our table leg extenders so that we can raise the tables.
  • Planning where to park for easiest hauling of stuff into and out of the dealer’s room. It never works exactly as we expect.
  • Cash for change — means a trip to the bank.
  • Post-convention accounting, inventory counting, and unpacking — none of this happens today, but for everything I prepare today, part of my brain is sadly looking ahead to when I’ll have to clean up after it.

Preparing for a professional appearance:

  • I write notes out for all the panels in which I participate. Often I don’t even use the notes, but the process jiggles loose thoughts and stories which could be relevant to the topic. It means that my brain is primed to say useful things when I’m up in front of a room full of people. I list things I feel strongly need to be said about the topic. I list things which might be relevant or reminders of amusing anecdotes which fit the topic. I bring the notes to the panel and then I take notes as the panel progresses. My panel notes form the basis of a blog post later. Taking notes mid-panel means that when someone says a thing that triggers a thought, I am less likely to lose track of that thought before it is my turn to speak again. I’m pretty sure that I over-think this. Most professionals I know just show up with the knowledge in their heads and do fine. I just enjoy the advance planning. It is part of the fun for me.
  • I plan clothes and hairstyles. I don’t do this in detail, but I think generally about what I want to wear. Then I make sure that I do laundry so that those things are actually clean and ready for me.

There’s my list. Ready. Set. Go.

Office Project in Process

By / January 16, 2012 / 3 Comments

I’ve been nattering on about my office and I finally have some visuals to share.
This is the view from my desk chair facing the opposite side of the room.

You can see the serious lack of organization on the bookshelves and the fact that there simply were not enough shelves for the quantities of books. All of that stuff went into boxes. Then the shelves were moved out of the way. It revealed a bare and boring wall.

That’s okay though. Because the next step was to make the wall go away.

From the chaos of debris, you can infer exactly how much fun my kids had helping me destroy the wall. I recommend wall removal as a family activity, but only if you really want the wall gone. For the first time I can actually see what my enlarged office is going to look like. That back wall is going to be covered in wall-mounted bookshelves. It will be my library. In front of it will be a couch. But first we have to figure out how to remove the remainders of the wall and find someone to help us do framing and drywall work.

The Pounding has Begun

By / January 7, 2012 / 1 Comment

The house is filled with the sounds of pounding. Kiki and Link are deconstructing the shelves in the pantry which is destined to become part of my office. The shelves were made of chip board and 2x4s, so at first we were a bit daunted. Once I gave them permission to destroy the chip board things progressed much more gleefully. I’d love to help. I planned to help, but my wrist has been hurting of late. It is the kind of little hurt which isn’t actually a hurt. Instead it is a pre-hurt, a sensation that if I’m not carefully I’ll acquire a truly painful injury. I don’t want a painfully injured right wrist, so I’m standing back and letting my teenagers wield the hammers. They’re doing a pretty good job too. I’m impressed. Hopefully they’ll be just as enthusiastic about helping me clean up this glorious mess we’ve made. Next Saturday we hope to knock out the drywall and then I’ll have before and after photographs worth sharing.

Last night I was telling some friends that I am puzzled by this drive I feel to re-create my office. Somehow I know that it is the most important professional development thing I’m doing during the first half of this year. But it feels anti-logical. If I profess to be a writer, then I should be focusing my energies on writing. My friends assured me that organizing my work space makes perfect sense. Howard agrees with them. Yet it still seems selfish, turned inward, and somehow profoundly healthy. I need the reminder that common logic about how writing careers should be managed can be wrong for an individual. I must trust my inspiration and intuition, both of which tell me that remodeling my office is important. So we proceed.

Assigning My Days

By / January 4, 2012

Amazing how much blogging clears my head. By the time I’d finished yesterday’s post, I already felt better and more focused. I then proceeded to have a day in which I was able to complete tasks without interruption. Instead of having a head filled with little “must go back to” memory tags, I was able to finish thoughts and fold them away neatly. Space began to open up. I’ve decided that my first attack on keeping space open is to containerize. I have lots of jobs: Mother, Accountant, Book Keeper, Inventory Manager, Writer, Chauffeur, Cook, Laundress, Graphic Designer, Shipper, Business Manager, etc. I often refer to these jobs as hats that I wear. Most days I swap hats a dozen times or more. This is fine and will probably continue. However I’ve decided to assign days to all my business hats. On the assigned day that hat gets worn first. For example: On Mondays I am an accountant first. All non-urgent accounting tasks which come up on other days will be assigned to the following Monday. I write down the task and forget about it until I unfold my accounting thoughts on Monday morning. So here is my planned schedule:
Monday: Accounting
Tuesday: Mailing & Graphic Design
Wednesday: Inventory Management & Business Management
Thursday: Mailing & Writer
Friday: Mailing & Graphic Design
Saturday: House & Family
Sunday: Church

The schedule is graphic design heavy for the next few months. When I’m prepping for a shipping, then some of those Graphic Design slots will get re-assigned as shipper slots. When conventions are imminent then more slots will go to Business Management. The most important thing is that when I get a new task instead of just putting it on today’s list, I can tell myself “I’ll handle that on Wednesday.”

The schedule is going to be messed up, of course. It already has been. A sick child at 4 am this morning means that today I’m wearing the Nurse hat instead of the Business Manager hat. But many of the Business Manager tasks I’d assigned for this week will not be hurt by waiting another week. The few that can’t wait, I’ll sneak around the edges of taking care of my child.

I like this plan. Hopefully it will help me keep my head clear.

Launching a New Year

By / January 3, 2012

It is the first working day of the new year. The kids are all off at school, which should feel like a relief. My house is quiet and will be for the next five hours. I like quiet. Instead some voice in the back of my brain is crying out “Incoming!” and expecting a blitz of both homework stress and emotional drama to come blowing in the door with the children. They will come home to me with attached chores. Not that my children themselves are chores. They are marvelous people. But any person who is facing a challenge will reach out for support. I must arrange myself to either be there for them or to firmly tell them that they can handle it themselves.

Before the children arrive home, there is work. The first week of January is always crazy. I have to tie off all the loose ends from last year while simultaneously launching this year’s focus. Top of the list this morning are the loose ends of: accounting, royalty calculations, emails, costumes for a school play, the never-ending query process, and house cleaning. In the category of launching we have: tax accounting, emails, organizing Howard’s art workload for the next weeks, planning for presentations, knocking out a wall in my office, and merchandise considerations for the coming year. At least five of these things are vying for the “first thing I do” slot.

My head is full. It has been full for more than a month. It is going to be full for at least another month more. Because my head is full, and because sleeping has been trickier of late, I’ve been making stupid mistakes. Not many. They’re all small. I catch them before anyone else notices them. Mostly. I fix them and life moves onward. Yet the accumulation of mistakes worries me, because I look ahead at all the things I’ve got to do and I know there are going to be more mistakes. I’m going to mess up something, but I don’t know which thing, so I can’t plan ahead to allow for it. I never considered myself a perfectionist, but this state of brain proves otherwise. The thought of making some stupid mistake, and disappointing someone who counts on me, is enough to make me want to curl up and cry. Logically I know this is ridiculous, particularly since I often set the bar for “other people’s disappointment” in places which are long before those other people would actually notice that I’d failed them.

In all the mess of swirling thoughts, a story keeps surfacing. It was told at church some time in the last three weeks, but I’ve lost any other context for it. There was a young woman who had to attend a church leadership meeting. She went begrudgingly, expecting to be told to work harder. Instead the man in charge said “You are all busy. Instead of improving your life by adding something, take something away. What thing can you eliminate from your life?” That last thought is what keeps coming back to me. What things in my life can I let go? I love clearing out and discarding physical objects, the process of clearing mental space ought to be similarly satisfying.

I had an argument with Kiki about organization yesterday. She feels like all of her things and space are jumbled. She would dearly love to have more space in which to spread out her things. I contended that learning to live inside the space you have is an important life skill. Then I tried to show her that perhaps she was holding on to too much. If she would just sort through, store, and discard then she would have the spaces she needed. Kiki argued back that she needs all her things. She needs six bottles of hand lotion because they all have different smells. She needs the clock and the ipod player, the nail files and the lip glosses, the seven pads of art paper and the thick files of reference art. Everything. She can’t let any of them go. The only resolution we reached was to realize that we were arguing needlessly. Kiki knows how to sort and make use of space. She’s done it before, she’ll do it again when she is ready. Mostly we just needed to walk away from each other and deal with our own things. Today I can’t help feeling like my mental/emotional space looks like Kiki’s bedside shelf, stocked with six bottles of hand lotion and multiples of almost everything. Then I become the one who is saying “But I need all these things!”

Do I really? What can I take out of my life to create the space I need to handle everything else?

I don’t have the right answer yet, but I’m fairly certain I’ve found the right question.

Answering this question will require me to re-think the things I am holding on to. I’ll have to look at the items in my brain and realize that some of them are only still here because I haven’t bothered to look at them in months. That will be like Kiki’s bag of candy, none of which she wanted to eat, but which she’d kept because they were gifts from people she liked. Candy doesn’t make a good keepsake. Some of the things in my brain have long outlived their purposes. Perhaps I could start letting other people decide when they are disappointed instead of me deciding that they are before they’ve had a chance to notice anything. I know that I want to get rid of all the useless anxiety, but it is so tangled up with everything else that I can’t start there. It is also possible that I need to containerize. Twenty small things loose on a shelf are a mess. Those same twenty things placed in three containers are neat and handy. Just as Kiki is the only one who can make sense out of her spaces, I am the only one who can make space in my brain. I’m trying to keep too much.

Thus “Brain organization” becomes item one on the To Do list. It is the sort of item that makes a difference for everything else. Perhaps I can apply a rubric similar to the one I use when sorting through books. As I look at each item on my list I can think “Do I really need this? Does someone else really need this? Does this have to be done by me rather than someone else?” If the answer to all three is No, then it doesn’t belong on my list.

What can I take out of my life to create the space I need? It is a question well worth answering.

The Calendar for Next Year

By / December 27, 2011 / 4 Comments

I’ve already got my wall calendar for next year. It is sitting rolled up in a corner of the living room. I had to order it off of the internet. Year-at-a-glance wall calendars have become a specialty item rather than being readily available at my local office supply store. I admit, this fact made me pause. Perhaps my decade-old system is out of date. I stopped using a paper planner last year and now rely instead on electronic tools. But I am not yet ready to abandon all my familiar methodologies merely for a sense of progress. It is useful sometimes to stand in front of the calendar and picture the sweep of events across weeks and months, all of it written out in colored ink.

So I have my calendar. Some time in the next five days I will pull it out and transfer information from the year past onto the year to come. Birthdays, anniversaries, schedules, and events must all be inked onto the new year.
But not yet.
I’m not ready yet.
For the next few days I only have those last 2011 odds and ends to finish up. Right now I can view and entire year’s worth of completed tasks recorded in multi-colored ink. I suppose I should feel accomplished about that. Mostly I feel tired and not quite ready to put together the list of things-to-come for next year. I’ll be ready soon, I think, but not today.

Blog posts I’m not going to write today, but may at a future point write

By / December 7, 2011 / 9 Comments

1. Details of my realization that the week after shipping week is often family member melt-down week. I was the star on Monday. Tuesday featured Gleek and Patch. Today approached normal, but I’m still playing catch-up with accounting, house cleaning, and homework.

2. A great big thank you post to all the people who helped out with our shipping event. They are worthy of praise, warm fuzzies, and treats.

3. The reasons why my shipping system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. The end result may look almost exactly like what I currently have, but the process will either replace my weird Jerry-rigged system, or will demonstrate to me that I just need to continue making-do. This whole thought makes me tired.

4. An intensely thoughtful post about how a hard school year is not necessarily a bad school year. This post would include the definitions of “bad year” and “hard year.” Short version: a bad year results in coping strategies which need to be dismantled. A hard year leaves one exhausted and drained, but positioned well for things to come.

5. My answer to the question “So, are you ready for Christmas yet?” This question pops up everywhere in casual conversation and, while I have a chit-chat sort of answer, the true answer is long. The true answer involves my whole approach to the Christmas holidays, the shape of our traditions, and why I’m just leaving the boxes of decorations out where the kids can decorate, or not, as they wish.

6. A long blog post responding to a discussion on whether the introduction of children into one’s life is the end of creative output for the next few years. Short version: No. It is just the beginning of a whole new set of decisions to make about priorities and how hours should be spent. Answers to these questions will (and should) vary according to person and circumstances. This post would also cover how beginning parenting is a learning process and multiple learning processes have trouble running in parallel. This could be why those established in creative careers seem better positioned to maintain them despite the arrival of small children.

7. A post describing how I’ve been deliberately seeking out things which are visual rather than wordy. This is followed by thoughts about how many photography images on the internet are photoshopped into a better-than-real perfection. This is not just in advertising or photos of people. The internet is full of better-than-real landscapes, product photos, and animal pictures. Then there are thoughts about what feeding ourselves a steady diet of hyper-perfect dream realities does to our psyches and expectations for our lives. This one must draw on psychological research, the Dove “Real beauty” adds, and several articles I’ve read lately.

8. Thoughts about self-promotion and whether there is any benefit to collecting followers, “likes”, etc. There is a definite benefit to having truly committed fans who are willing to support the creator and the work, but people who follow or “like” in order for a chance at a prize are not committed and will vanish as fast as they arrived. Again, this one will have links to articles and supportive research.

9. A post about the office remodel that I am slowly inching my way toward. This includes thoughts on how physical spaces affect the way I view my work and how form can re-shape function in odd ways that will linger for a long time unless one deliberately shakes out of old habits. It is possible that this will include an anecdotal story about a roasting pan. I would try to make my planning-my-shiny-new-office ramble into something relevant.

10. A look forward into the next year and the shape my professional life needs to take. I would view upcoming events with an estimation of whether or not I’ll be attending. I continue to strive for creative balance, pushing, shaking up old habits of thought, and yet being very careful not to spend much time in anxiety land. This would include thoughts on stress, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, anxiety, and probably a measure of whining.

11. An exploration of how my mind is pretty much always this full of 5-10 different thoughts about which I could blog. I fill notebooks. Though lately I’ve been trying a one-notebook approach which has been an interesting switch from my previous methodology of scribble notebook, blog-post notebook, and official journal. This post would probably also include an update on the progress of my River Song journal, which is still accumulating, but much more slowly.

12. Thoughts on calendars and the various holidays all over the world. I recently made a list which had limited space and I had to choose which holidays to include. I would have liked to include them all. The reasons that people declare annual celebrations are fascinating to me. I also find it fascinating that no matter the tradition or geographical location, August appears to be a holiday dead-zone. I wonder why that is.

13. Working on building relationships with kids individually and thinking of them as people rather than collectively as “my kids.”

14. Those blog posts continuing the series about financial structures for creative people.

15. I’m sure there was something else, but I’ve forgotten it now. If it is important, it will come back to me. I’ve had to learn to trust my brain to circle back around to important things.

I’ll Think About Christmas Later

By / November 22, 2011 / 1 Comment

Last year I was in charge of our church Christmas party. This was a dinner for 300 people with decorations and a program. I had a committee whose help was invaluable, but I did not spread out the work nearly as much as I should have. The party was declared a success by all those who attended. I’m glad they told me, because I was far too frazzled to be able to tell if any of it was working. This year I’ve been assigned to order and prepare 120 lbs of ham to be served as the main course. (This is 14 whole hams.) In comparison to last year, this sounds easy. Oh I’ll still be part of the set up and clean up crew. I’ll still be busy all day long on the day of the party (Dec 10). I suspect that my skills and knowledge will be thoroughly tapped to help resolve crises. An event this size always has a crisis of some kind, no matter how well the committee plans. Already we are all glad for the notes I took last year. I wish I’d taken more. I’m going to be quite tired when the party is done, but there is a chance that I’ll actually be able to experience some of the party rather than running it the entire time.

It would seem that this Christmas season will be easier than the last, but life doesn’t tend to lower the difficulty rating. If the party were all, that would be easy. However I’m also the Scout advancement chair and I’ve been informed that we will be holding a Scout court of honor three days before the Christmas party (Dec 7). It is my job to do all the reports and paperwork in advance of this event. It is also my job to organize a Board of Review for the scouts who are advancing (On Dec 4). These arrangements are not all that difficult, in theory. I’ve never done them before and experience tells me that any job I’ve never done before will present me with unforeseen complications. Naturally I’m feeling a little stressed about it because part of my brain is trying to foresee those complications and prevent them. Only to foresee the unforeseeable is a bit of a paradox. Whee.

This is not all. One day prior to the Boards of Review which are mine to arrange, we’ll be hosting a shipping party to send out the calendars (Dec 3). That day will be completely consumed by the shipping of packages. We’ll be hosting this event in our house since Dragon’s Keep is unavailable on Saturday. This will require a smaller volunteer crew, longer hours, and a complete cleaning of my house in advance of the event. The two days prior to the shipping event (Dec 1 & 2) will be consumed by printing postage and the aforementioned housecleaning. The days prior to that will be focused on helping Howard do all the necessary sketching. Monday November 28 will be the day that Janci and I sort all the invoices, figure out what sorts of boxes we need and then place the order. Before that I need to go into the store reports and make sure I have enough dice sets, Emperor Bundles, and magnet sets assembled. If not, then we’ll be using our Thanksgiving weekend to make more. I’ve run lots of shipping events. It is routine, more or less. Of course each one presents it’s very own unforeseen challenges. (See earlier note on the unforeseen.)

On top of all of that, we’re cooking pies and rolls for Thanksgiving dinner, one son needs a hair cut, three children need new pants, the leaves need to be raked, there are non-calendar orders to be shipped daily, three pallets of books need to be relocated from our garage to the storage unit, the kids are going to want to put up the Christmas tree, and I want to put up the shelving in the garage so that the food storage can be moved out of my office.

When I line it up, all of it fits. In theory. If I’m working at top efficiency. But if I seem flaky or distracted in the next three weeks, now you know why.