Today is our busy day
16Mar2006 Filed under: Writing Author: DawnI was up last night coughing my insides out and then the terrible baby-toddler-child decided to wake up all bright and perky at 5:30am. My good cheer at this moment is only due to the sunshine and the promise of weather worthy of a park day. (Usually during Noah’s gym class we’re huddling on the linoleum floors of the rec center with the other moms — today we will run free and Madison will nap beautifully!)
I am looking for Brand New Ways of whoring myself out for money because of some craziness on the job front (all will be revealed — I hope — by Monday). For kicks these days I’m lying awake nights plotting budget cuts and quick-cash schemes. It’ll all be fine, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about us! But the uncertainty is wearing on my nerves.
You may remember that I found nifty planning software for my Mac but being lazy as well as cheap, I never did register it and now it sits uselessly in my applications file. Happily I figured out (after how many years using OSX?) how to make iCal do the things I need it to do — namely to give duedates for my to-do list. It’s saving my life. I can color-code everything so it looks like this:
If there’s an essay idea I want to make time for, I put a green to-do there to remind me. If I need to follow-up with a query, I put a light purple note on the day I want to email the editor. It’s saving my life. That is, when I remember to look at it. Trying to make that a habit again — I got out of practice for awhile there.
For those of you with busy lives (i.e, all of you) what tricks do you use to keep your brain and its contents intact?
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About Me
I have two kids and a delightfully odd husband, Brett. My children are Noah (born to us in 1997) and Madison (born to her first mom, Pennie, in 2004 and brought to our family through a domestic, open adoption). They are my inspiration and also the reason I don't get more done around here.
I'm a writer and sometimes I get published, which is a nice thing. I write for joy, I write for money and when I'm very lucky, both things happen at the same time. My work appears in national publications including Yoga Journal, Disney's Family.com, Utne, Wondertime, Brain Child and Salon. Currently I am working on a book about my daughter's adoption and seeking representation for the proposal. I also own Smart Cookie Communications with my husband.
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meira
March 16th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Doesn’t iCal have an alert thingy– whereby you could set it to ring or something to remind you to look at it? I thought it did.
Marisa
March 16th, 2006 at 9:29 am
Are you kidding? I take it that brain right out of my bag and plug it into my computer. It’s called a Palm Pilot, and it’s set up to give me alarms for everything from deadlines to grocery lists to birthdays to videos I want to rent. I honestly can’t fathom how I ever functioned without it.
MFA Mama
March 16th, 2006 at 10:35 am
Seriously? Way too much coffee and tons of Post-It notes. Your system sounds better, but too much work for me
Meagan
March 16th, 2006 at 11:00 am
For some reason, electronic or computer-based organization doesn’t work for me. I really need something that I can carry around with me AND that I don’t have to flip around too much inside to get to where I need to be. So for now, what’s working best for me paper: I have an ordinary week-at-a-glance calendar used in combination with a monthly calendar that goes in my purse so that if I’m out and about I can jot down an appointment easily. Once a day I move what’s on the monthly calendar to its appropriate place in the weekly calendar. At the same time I keep a running to-do list paperclipped to this week in my weekly calendar-I try to keep it to five or six items and then when some bump off, I add more for the next day. I keep everything together because for me, the fewer places I have to look, the better. So assignment deadlines go there, as do the different chunks of each assignment and on which days I should do them, my column deadline and if I have a topic I’d like to cover in a certain week, I jot that down too; queries, haircuts, dental appointments, phone interviews–everything.
I look at it every night before I go to bed, and leave it lying open on either the dining room table or my bedside table so I can’t help but look at it first thing in the morning. If I had one consistent workspace I’d probably leave it there instead but right now I tend to end up working on my laptop whereever it works best with what the kids are doing that day.
Your system sounds like it works really well too, Dawn–I may have to incorporate the color coding into mine, only since I’m doing it on paper, that would mean I’d have to have a bunch of highlighter pens laying around and the kids would probably take off with them and then I’d be lost! I went through a lot of different ways of keeping on top of stuff before I settled on this system–I think the most important thing is just, like you said, making sure it’s something you’ll actually look at.
Alexa
March 16th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
I too love the lovely iCal. Especially as I like to plan months and months and months in advance, like a crazy person. I also have a little notebook full of lists I carry around with me. And my most sophisticated system is for my writing ideas: whenever I think of one I scribble it on a post-it note/napkin, fold it, and put it in the back pocket of my purse. Every Saturday morning I dump them all out and transcribe them onto a list…genius, I know.
shannon
March 16th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
You’re inspiring me to try ical again. Right now I just have stickies all over the desktop with lists.
Not especially helpful.
Elizabeth
March 16th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
I have never found anything that works for me. A paper calendar - I forget to check,
A computer program, I forget to check in with.
I do have postits all over, whereas once upon a time (young age) I could remember everything!