How to start this post?

Today, it has been five years since my father passed away—suddenly, from a fast relapse into an aggressive leukemia that took him at age 47. Next week Tom and I will celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary, so even if you didn’t know me then, you can sense how difficult this week was, five years ago. And how it’s still tough five years later, and will be in five more, and fifty more.

Last night I was thinking about this anniversary, of sorts, and wishing I went to the kind of church that lit candles in remembrance of our dead. He is my only “dead”—I have all four grandparents, still, and all other relatives.

What I can do now, five years later, with less pain, is remember all of the things that I can see that I inherited from him. I didn’t inherit anything material from my father. He didn’t have much, and he didn’t live long enough to acquire much in the way of heirlooms, and the things of value he had—his guitars, mostly—went to my little brother, and I’m glad for that, because he plays guitar like a rockstar.

So when I think about my inheritance from my father, I think about the things I learned from him, the things that shaped me into who I am. Most of them weren’t things he said to me: they were things he embodied, things he lived and practiced in front of me.

From Dad, I learned that fathers are good. Last year at the Glen Workshop, I workshopped a long essay about this very week. Several of the participants said they’d read the first two pages and thought, Oh no. Another story about a horrible father. And then they were surprised to discover it was about a wonderful father. Our culture is saturated with stories of bad fathers, and not for naught: there are many, and they have destroyed many lives. But my father was good, and he was good despite growing up in a home without a father. He struggled and didn’t know how to do it right a lot of the time, but he tried his best, and from him, I learned that our past does not dictate our future, and that calling God my Father would be something I could do and be glad about.

I learned to delight in creation and culture. Creation, in the real “nature” sense: Dad loved thunderstorms. He’d pop popcorn and sit on the back porch, like it was God’s cinema. This week, as the hurricane blew by and I realized with gratitude that at least for us, the effects would be minimal, I allowed myself to think about how excited he would have been to sit and watch the lightning and the wind and the rain. And culture, in the real “human” sense: Though Dad never put words to it, I first learned about common grace by sitting in his van as he drove me to some choir practice or another, listening to Prairie Home Companion or Nickel Creek or talking about a movie we’d seen.

I learned to love the church. And not some idealized version of the church, either, but the real thing, the kind made up of broken people who love one another. Dad’s life was the church, though he never worked in traditional full-time ministry. But there was nothing he cared about more, outside his family, than the people in the church. You could barely get him out the door before everyone was gone; the pastor’s kids would have gone home before we did. And he stuck it out at a very specific local church through some really bad times, and really good times, and from him I learned what it was to commit.

I learned to love learning. Dad only took a few college classes and I don’t think he was at school much in high school, either. He drove long, long hours for work and didn’t have much time for reading. But he checked books on tape out of the library and learned everything from basic Russian to Civil War history, and he knew the strangest random facts about everything from science and math to history and literature. I remember studying for the GRE and being staggered at his vocabulary. He never stopped learning and loving new information. So I learned, too, that learning doesn’t stop after graduation. (Or in my case, graduation, and graduation, and graduation . . . )

I learned to love coffee. Which probably means I owe every one of my accomplishments to him.

I knew, beyond any shadow of any doubt, that he was proud of me. They say when you lose someone, it’s a little like losing a limb: you keep going to scratch it and it takes a long time for the itch to finally disappear. Well, I no longer expect to see him when I go home, but I will say this: every time I write something and it’s published, every time I get asked to do something exciting to me, every time I’ve started some new pursuit and done well at it, my first impulse, still, is to call him. (The same holds for every time I discover a new band I think he’d like.)

It’s no small thing for a girl to have a father who knows her and loves her unconditionally, and makes that fact known to her. It’s the rarest of gifts, and it’s the sort of gift that gives a girl confidence to go out and chase down a dream. It’s the sort of gift that makes a girl have high standards for the other men in her life. It’s the sort of gift for which I am grateful, every year, on August 30, and every other day, too.

I’ll tell you a secret: I’m kind of a productivity freak. I love new software and systems for keeping track of what I have to do and where I have to be and what I have to buy. The Productivity category in the App Store is my favorite. I’m a nerd.

Until last year, I was pretty good at keeping on top of those systems, but it all kind of went to pot when the fall semester started. I had a hard time keeping track of my schedule, because it varied so much, and I just wasn’t used to what teaching was like.

But now I’m experienced (haha), so I’ve spent a fair amount of time this summer thinking about how to implement practices and disciplines, using those systems, to bring more order to my life next year. And that’s important: I’ll be a full-time student, full-time professor, part-time editor, and frequent freelancer, plus I’m coordinating the writing program at King’s and chairing a committee and advising a student house, and presenting at least one conference paper, and finishing this book I’ve been editing all summer for contract, and finishing a proposal for (and hopefully starting work on) a co-edited book, and probably other stuff I forgot about. Also, my husband and I like to eat dinner and have clean laundry and relatively clean floors and dishes, and we also like to spend time doing things we enjoy together, like watching movies and going to performances and drinking good beer.

I can already predict what will go by the wayside if I’m not careful: cooking, and exercising, and packing lunches, and reading poetry, and all the stuff that makes us sane, rounded human beings. But building on things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve read both articles on discipline and books like Desiring the Kingdom, I’ve been committed to developing some disciplines and habits that automate the process of getting through the week with a maximum of fun and minimum of crazy. It seems like trivializing it a bit, but bear with me: I heard N.T. Wright speak on virtue a couple years ago, and one thing he said that stuck with me is (and this is an inaccurate paraphrase) that developing virtue and character are kind of like forming grooves, so that when it really counts, you automatically go on the right track. It’s hard to learn to ride a bike without using training wheels; it’s difficult for an EMT to administer CPR if he has to pull out the textbook and read along. But if it’s innate, if it’s developed through practice, then the skill is there when the rubber meets the proverbial road.

And, I guess, discipline and living well is character just as much as integrity and honesty and kindness. So that’s what I’ve been considering as I think about this subject.

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I kind of hate hearing that perennial question: “How do you do it all?” I dunno. I just make lots of list and do the things on those lists. I think my work is less taxing than, say, raising small human beings full-time, or being a farmer or an investment banker. I don’t own a house and don’t have to spend my weekends doing things to maintain that house, and because I live in a one-room apartment, it takes about twenty minutes to clean it. A lot of my work bleeds into other aspects of my work (teaching writing, for instance, is awfully useful to an editor, and editing makes writing go more smoothly . . . ). And I like pretty much everything I do, which makes it seem fun, not exhausting. And academics know that the rhythm of academia helps tremendously in alleviating tedium and boredom.

But in case you’re still tempted to ask, here’s a few of the things I’ve been working on in order to actually “do it all” with a minimum of crazy. I’m not solidly in the saddle quite yet. But maybe something here will be useful to you. And I’d like to know what other people do, too, because there are many people out there who work as hard as I do and lead organizations and write a book a year and raise four children and take care of a house and probably are superheroes in their off-hours, and still manage to train for marathons and read the paper.

I switched back to using Remember the Milk. I’ve tried at least a half-dozen different task management systems (including Wunderlist, Google Tasks, Things, Toodledo, TeuxDeux, and the good old-fashioned paper method) over the years. All of them have ended up having some strange deficiency (maybe it’s ugly, or overly complicated, or not extensible enough, or – and this is very frequent – doesn’t have repeating tasks), and this summer I decided to go back to RTM, which is still the greatest I’ve used. It is accessible from basically any device in the universe. It lets you keep infinite numbers of lists and organize them in the way that works for you. You can set specific times at which tasks are due; you can set them to repeat; the web interface isn’t gorgeous, but the iPhone/iPad apps are; and it’s only about $25 a year for the Pro version, which seems awfully reasonable to me. It has smart lists that let me do things like easily see what I need to do next today, or what I need to buy at the grocery store (and I can repeat items on that list), or “low hanging fruit” – tasks that will take less than fifteen minutes to accomplish, or things I need to write before the end of the week. Plus, its icon is a cow.

I set hilarious things most people do automatically as tasks. I actually still cannot remember to do the simplest things in the morning or at night. Remembering to pack my bag for the next day is a Herculean effort. So I just set a repeating task for 9pm every night for those things, and my phone yells at me if I don’t cross them off before bed. Since those tasks are easy to accomplish, it gives me that nice I-finished-something frisson. It makes my morning so much easier if I did those three things at night. And if I stick to it, I also don’t miss deadlines. (As an editor, I hate deadline-missers. As a professor, I generally don’t accept late assignments. So I have an extreme aversion to missing deadlines myself.)

I am a committed Google Calendar user. Why Google Calendar, you ask? My computer in my office, which is owned by the college, is a PC. I have an iPad and an iPhone; my husband’s computer is a Mac, and I own a wee little netbook as well. Google Calendar talks to or displays on all of those devices without a hitch, and its interface just got updated and is nice and clean and pretty, so I don’t even mind aesthetics anymore. I use it for everything, and I have lots of different calendars in it, some of which are shared. So personal appointments and meetings and things go on one calendar. Another has things Tom and I are doing together outside of work hours, like plays and performances. TKC business goes on a separate calendar, as do writing deadlines and things of that sort. I even take the time to type the group exercise classes at the various locations of my gym into a calendar, so I can quickly look and see if I can fit a class into a particular day. It’s a little bit of set-up, but once everything is in there, I don’t have to think too hard about what to do the next day. I just get up and look at the calendar and it tells me what to do. I, for one, embrace our robot overlords.

And I keep all my documents in Dropbox. I am ever so grateful to live in the digital age, where being an editor of a journal that publishes almost daily doesn’t mean carting around stacks of articles. I put them all in Dropbox, along with anything I’m writing and tons of archives and I don’t even know what else. It means I can find them wherever I am. This is the one tip I need to start giving my poor undergrads, who are still emailing documents to themselves. Dropbox makes my life approximately eleventy billion times easier.

Also, Evernote and Instapaper. Evernote lets me quickly file away research for articles, recipes, receipts, whatever, just by clipping from the browser or emailing it to myself, so when I sit down to write something or do taxes, I can quickly pull up everything I need. Instapaper lets me save articles to read later much the same way. And they talk to each other now!

I use more software than I think, actually: Mint, for budgeting/finance tracking, WordPress for sporadic blogging, the absolutely phenomenally amazing Flipboard iPad app for reading the web painlessly, and a lot of Gmail filters. The key here is that these all replace some process I’d otherwise have to do myself, and not a process (like baking bread or washing dishes or going for a walk) that adds some kind of humanity to my life.

I am trying (and often failing, but trying) to get up earlier. I hate getting up in the morning. I love staying up super late. But when I am up late, I am probably not working. I am probably doing something completely worthy, like watching The X-Files or reading The Hunger Games. But I do need to also do things, and I have a lot I’d like to read that isn’t dystopian YA novels, stuff I could read in the morning quite happily with a cup of coffee. And so I am trying to become one of those people who gets up really early automatically, at the same time every day of the week, without thinking about it, no matter when I went to bed. It is hard. But I am trying.

I outsource. It’s not cheap to outsource stuff in New York City, and I still do my own cleaning, and would probably feel the disapproval of some Puritan New England ancestors if I didn’t. But I do send my laundry out most of the time (which is, thankfully, fairly cost-effective here), and I love love love love that FreshDirect exists and with competitive rates. Little delights me more than buying groceries from my iPhone while I’m waiting for someone to show up to a meeting. (Plus: it cuts way down on impulse buys and makes it easier to budget for groceries!)

I schedule blocks of time in which to do things. I think this might sort of derive from some combination of the Pomodoro Technique and GTD, neither of which I’ve ever really read about in any detail.  But, for instance, I am blocking out a full day and a half (a luxury, indeed, afforded by dear academia) for writing for my MFA program. I plan all my lectures at the same time each week – during office hours, happily. I have chunks set aside to answering Comment emails, corresponding with authors, and editing articles. And I plan to spend an hour or so each weekend chopping vegetables and fruits and putting together a couple of dishes to have during the week. It’s somehow much less odious to get things done when I have the block on my calendar.

I am learning the value of practices and automation. I sort of hate the idea of having devices that tell me what to do all the time. Maybe it’s my quote-unquote free spirit or my general millennial dislike of having people tell me what to do, but I want to take it easy and be all yoga-y and buck the New York system of insanity. But what I’m realizing (yet again) is that I need the systems and the automation to be spontaneous. Not having to think too hard in the morning about what to do when I get out of bed (early!) means I can think about other stuff, like creative ideas for projects and what I want to make for dinner that night. Spontaneity and creativity happens within the bounds of discipline and automation. It’s easier to move things around for special events and activities if I have them in place to move around. I know this, of course. But I need to remind myself frequently of it.

I am sticking to the practice of Sabbath. One day I don’t want to be automated or productive is Sunday. And actually, having that day in my week makes the automation of the other six more palatable. I might live by my robot overlords six days a week, but on the seventh, they rest. And so do I.

Note what I don’t have to deal with: childcare of any kind, mowing the lawn, rigid 9-to-5 schedules, or insane business travel, though I did my fair share of that last spring and will do some more this year. I have a summer off from teaching and a long Christmas break. All of my employers are aware of each other and all of my work complements other work. I don’t have to have a “day job” to be a writer because all the stuff I do is related, in some way, to what I love doing: writing, thinking, and talking about the world.

That’s why this works for me. My friends who have young children have vastly different lives, and I am in awe of them. But I think the ideas of automation and keeping track of yourself are actually profoundly helpful for “doing it all.” (And taking breaks, too: I wrote this on a break from a summer editing project, believe it or not!)

What do you do?

I prefer fiction to non-fiction because it’s better written. From the time I was young, it was my favorite ficiton writers who inspired me to write non-fiction as if it were fiction. Not faking information or changing information or exagerrating information–the storytelling technique. It was all drawn on my enthusiasm from my favorite fiction writers–Carson McCullers and John Cheever and Hemingway and Irwin Shaw, a wonderful forgotten writer. And of course F. Scott Fitzgerald, my favorite writer of all-time.

- Gay Talese

What does it say about me that I think the squat little pug dogs are the cutest?

From XKCD:

When I was a teenager and had first discovered the Internet (I am not that old, but I grew up in a very rural area and we had dial-up till I graduated from college and moved away – and yes, I earned an entire technology degree on dial-up! Good times), the warm weather seasons were a time of guilt because I had things I had to / wanted to be doing indoors, but I continually felt as if I should be outdoors.

After all: growing up in a perpetual land of snow and ice means you feel as if you ought to be grateful for good weather when you find it.

But this post is simply out of gratefulness and to say that now, thanks to the Apple gods, I am answering email and editing documents and basically being productive outdoors in a bench in a park. And thanks to the urban gods, it’s a safe family park that my tax dollars pay to landscape and mow and maintain.

Being a grownup rocks.

Last week, or maybe the week before (I think the week before) we ended up at a small discussion with Mark Ruffalo (and Gabe Lyons) about his new film Sympathy for Delicious. And he said two great things Tom wrote down and I think are worth preserving: “It’s a fable; none of it happened, but all of it’s true,” and (obviously paraphrasing the Stones), “Sometimes you don’t get the healing you want, you get the healing you need.”

I am a terrible journal keeper and have been a fairly bad blogger the past few years, as you doubtless have noted. But on Saturday I stumbled across a journal I kept during a period in my life that I only know now would be wildly significant: It begins with my work in Papua New Guinea the summer before my senior year of college, continues through that year as I landed a job and graduated, then moved to New York, and ends later that fall, after my father was diagnosed with the leukemia that would kill him a year later, and after I broke up with my college boyfriend of just shy of four years. Of course, not long after that I started dating Tom.

That year and that journal reminded me of the sorts of things you experience and think when you are twenty-one, and I think I ought to re-read it once a year or so to remind me that I will also look back on myself when I am in my mid-thirties and laugh and sigh at me now. The difference is I no longer think I really know anything, in the grand scheme of things, and that I am very careful and precise about what I’m willing to set down, because I know how it will follow me. I’m less willing to stick my neck out over lots of things than I once was, or perhaps just more certain when i do so. It’s not that I’ve become less fond of risk; it’s that I’m more selective about where I’m willing to be risky. I hope.

But seeing that journal, and thinking through those times, and pondering what I would have done differently had I only known, reminds me of that line from “Goodbye to All That”: Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.

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Unrelatedly, I forgot to post a link to this piece I wrote at Comment: “Idols, Icons, and Facebook.”