Oh no, It’s one of THOSE things!

Wire file folder desktop rack.

Wire file folder desktop rack.

I’m cleaning off one of my desks. At the back of the desk, I found two wire racks.

“What is it?” I wondered. And then it hit me: this is one of those racks that supposed to hold file folders upright, at the back of your desk, so you can see them all.

Death on a stick. Look carefully: there’s another one of these racks, in smoke plastic, right behind the wire rack.

I bring these home, from the swap shed, from the thrift shop, & I think somehow, if I can see all the files I’m working on, I’ll be more on top of things.

Instead, what happens is that the racks get pushed to the back of the desk, or they get full of file folders that I never look at, and maybe they get dumped. They don’t serve their intended purpose, certainly, not in my house; not on my desk.

“Hi Ho, Hi Ho, to the metal bin we shall go,” just as soon as my local dump opens again after the ice storm shut down. That’s why I’m cleaning out today anyway–the ice storm. Can’t go anywhere else; might as well create some more space for myself.

One day, I will come to terms with my organizing style, and quit bringing these things home. That may or may not be now. Don’t make promises about what’s going to happen tomorrow, when I find the perfect matching set of desk accessories. For today this will go.

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Process Mapping Software

I’ve been testing process mapping software this week.  Will write a larger post about the process and my decisions along the way later.  I like Creately; even the free version has everything I can think of wanting.  Final test:  how does the link translate in a blog post?

These links shared from a free account; expect I have to upgrade (which I will do) to remove the watermark.

Sharing link (renders the map in Facebook):
Creately map of posting flow

Embed code (fixed image size, here 600 x 400 px):

Will share this version to Twitter and Linkedin to see how the embed code appears on those platforms.

More tweaks: need to upload logos for the social platforms.

Results:
Twitter doesn’t display an image.

Screen shot of tweet with an embedded map from Creately.

Screen shot of tweet with an embedded map from Creately.

Less on the new Linkedin.

Testing auto-share of an embedded process map from Creately.  This, from Linkedin.

Testing auto-share of an embedded process map from Creately. This, from Linkedin.

So, if I want the image to share to the social platforms from WordPress, I need to upload a real image, not an embed code.

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Year view planner

I’ve been cleaning out my studio; I found a 2004 calendar that I had saved for the pictures. At the back were two pages designed to show the full year, day by day.

2004 Year-view planner

I use a lot of outdated calendars as record books. They show up in the thrift shop stream. If all I need is the shape of the week, or the month, or the dates, I relabel the date-day information, and use the spaces for my purposes.

I tried marking the 2017 weekends in yellow highlighter, but the grey weekend markings of 2004 still showed up. I’m not completely sure I need to know when the weekends are for the purposes of this exercise.

I started making notes. My business would be different if I sent out a newsletter twice a month, so I marked that on the calendar.

The notes on the large yellow sticky, lower left, are about posting from my phone directly into WP, and from there onto social sites using the Jetpack Publicize tool. I have only recently started creating website content live, using pictures uploaded from my phone and dictating directly into WordPress. It’s easy for WordPress sites, but I don’t think I can do it for my Shopify store, yet. I need to look into that.

At this point, it was obvious I had a rough draft, rather than a finished plan, so I started making notes directly on the calendar as well as on stickies.

I don’t need to track individual posts on a year view planner, although I might track marketing activity, so that I meet my goal of running a paid ad every day.

I thought about creating 365 posts, distributed across the various websites I manage. I can do that in my sleep. I’m good at posts.

As I worked with the calendar, and thought about my business, and thought about what needs to happen, I had a nagging feeling that all I was doing was the planning equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Not to be too severe about it, but I do this already. I have great documentation of what I have done. Looking at my posts over a full year on one page, isn’t really any different than logging them on monthly calendars the way I have been doing for 3 years. Deep in my heart, I knew nothing would change. Deep in my wallet, I know a lot needs to change, quickly.

I also know that there is an entirely new product line waiting to be developed, and it has been waiting for either 20 years, or 6 months, or both, depending on how you look at it. I call it my greeting card line, although it is bigger than that. It’s about incorporating my answers on Quora, with my life philosophy, and perhaps a new body of work I am calling the Illustrated I Ching, and a lot of other new art. It needs to be created, developed, and marketed. It’s not getting done under the current system.

That thought first showed up on the purple sticky, and then I realized how important it was. I moved it to the page in blue Sharpie.

That seemed like a breakthrough, but after a moment’s reflection, I realized I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to get the new work done. Except I do know how to do that. I’ve done it before.

Three years ago, I faced a serious cardiac problem, one that didn’t have a great medical solution. Rather than going home to sit around and get sicker so that I qualified for a pacemaker, I changed my life, one day at a time. In the real world, that looked like showing up to daily exercise (one day off a month), changing my diet, giving up diet drinks, taking new supplements, and incorporating everything that showed up to have a healthier life (not repairing the riding lawn mower when it broke, for example, and instead, moving 1.5 acres with a push mower).

Art is no different. I am an Anne Lamont fan: her readers will recognize both “start with one bird,” (Pirsig fans will remember the same thought as “one brick”), and “write really shitty first drafts.”

In other words, Show. Up. To. The. Work.

I was done for the moment; I turned to email. I had to laugh. I had an offer from the good people at AppSumo, for a $15 large format full year planner for 2017 (special offer good through Jan 17), in exactly the same format. The calendar from Best Self (same calendar, purchased directly) uses a top and bottom layout to fit everything on the page. On one hand it shouldn’t matter, and on the other hand, it always does. I bought the planner and will cut it and glue it together so that I see the whole year at one level. The weekends will be correct for 2017.

Until it arrives, I will keep working on this draft version. I need to put time in my life for new work. It’s harder to schedule; it’s not clearly defined the way client work and teaching prep are. That’s the problem, and that’s why it needs to be planned into the year. If I don’t make the opportunity happen, it won’t, and it will be November and I’ll still be thinking about creating a greeting card line.

Stay tuned.

Vertical version of the image to use for Pinterest.

2004 Year View Planner.

2004 Year View Planner, rotated to make a better Pin.

Now What?

5 days into the new world order, and I am beginning to discern a path that might just lead me through this very dark and scary forest. It is possible that we may even be nearing the “end of the beginning,” although that is probably grossly optimistic. There are more shocks to come.

The idiots and mean people have revealed themselves, on both sides; the people screaming about blame, and pretty much anybody who thinks “they” are somehow different from “us,” and because “they did this,” “we” are justified in doing “that,” no matter who you think “they” and “us” are, and whatever “this” and “that” are.

The Buddhists from Lion’s Roar have shared their wisdom, and reminded me to return to the cushion, and pay attention to where my feet are. It feels like exercise isn’t working, and it feels like meditation isn’t working, but that’s a bit like saying sobriety isn’t working, just because I still feel crazy. Meditation is working. The noise between my ears could be worse.

I have found new Facebook groups of like-minded strangers to join. I have joined the corps of women wearing safety pins. I considered whether I could wear a safety pin every day for the next 4 years, and decided I could. And then some people tell me that wearing a safety pin isn’t good enough, and I should be doing something more, and I marvel at our need to tell other people how to live. Democrat firing squads stand in a circle.

I realized I needed to learn a little bit more about civil confrontation, and within 3 hours, Facebook came through with posts from Brexit about how to help people who are being harassed because of their minority status. It was exactly what I needed. I don’t like that I needed it, and yet I give a nod to the God of grace who sent that information to me.

My world is beginning to gel. We are crawling out of our bomb shelters, and sweeping off the stairs, and brushing the dust off each other’s shoulders. Look around, and see who is most vulnerable and most at risk in my circle. Look around, and set into motion decisions to cut ties with some other people. I don’t have the energy to be nice; I can only absorb so much meanness.

Last week, I was saying I just wanted this to be over. I was wrong. “Over” is worse, and it’s far from over. It’s going to get very very much worse before were done. I’m hoping that what we’re experiencing is an extinction burst – that flare-up of bad behavior that happens just as you are about to learn something new. However, an extinction burst for behavior that’s been going on for thousands of years isn’t going to end by January.

A couple weeks before election night, I found out some unsettling details about people I knew in real life. I know a lot of people who have challenging histories, and I like to think of myself as someone who can handle anything, and yet I’m having trouble understanding this particular story. I want to cut these people out of my life. I can’t find a path to understand or forgive the behavior, even though I know it is the consequence of drug addiction, and what they did is what drug addicts do.

Similarly, I don’t know how to understand the people in my world who created the situation through their votes, or through their nonvoting, or through their write-ins. I’ve known some of them for years, and I cannot believe that I completely missed the misogyny and racism and hatred that I logically believe they must harbor if they voted the way they did.*

Are they really happy the Klan is marching in Raleigh tonight?

As far as I can tell, they treat me like an equal to my face, but is the only reason they’re not groping me because I’m so big?

I don’t know about this stuff. Really don’t. I don’t know how to move forward knowing that some of the people I know want to build a wall, or think condoms don’t work, or think being gay can be educated away. I don’t know how I’m going to find a way to talk simply to someone who could not be bothered to vote. I don’t know how to think about it.

I don’t have to solve that one today. For the time being, I can fall back on manners and good behavior, and trust that I will find an answer.

I look around. One friend is planning a new project to teach kids in elementary school about the United Nations. My knitting groups are knitting for peace. I’m sure I’ll hear more in the days ahead.

A few weeks after 9/11, I talked to a journalist from the Wall Street Journal who was writing about how lives have changed as a result of the attack. At that time I knew I had to leave the corporate world and make more art. I did that. And now I know I need to take that art in a new direction.

I can support my friends in their projects. I can be helpful. I can talk about my experience this past week and create space for other people to acknowledge their experience, when their immediate circles are telling them to get over it, and to move on. No one can tell you to move on, although plenty of people do not know this.

What I cannot do is spend four years mired in anger and agitation, getting upset about each new outrage. There will be outrages every day. It’s this administration’s stock in trade. Keep us distracted from our work. Keep us too upset to do our real work.

I have been working in the shorter term over recent years. It has been a long time since I was engaged in something that had a multi-year project plan and a remote deadline. However, I have made long-term changes in my life more than once. I moved from tech to art. I changed my health in 1986 and again in 2014. I know how to do this. I know how to take one step, and another, and another, and simply keep trudging, even if I don’t see tangible progress from one day to the next. Over time, the needle moves.

I know what I know. The world needs my art. Continue with the work I know I need to do. Nothing has changed, except that now it’s even more important.

We have come to treat “Keep calm, and carry on” as a throw-away slogan, almost as a joke. It wasn’t a joke when it saved a country. It was guidance to a nation suffering under daily bombing raids. The Germans counted on the bombs destroying British morale, and were wrong. Instead, the people kept calm, and carried on, and did what they would have done, had that crisis not happened, again and again and again.

That’s what I need to be doing—my work. Keeping calm is not diminishing the shock and horror; it is simply not allowing myself to lose energy uselessly, and instead, channeling my efforts into something tangible, something that might actually make a difference.

Someone said, “turn to books written before Gutenberg,” and there are no end to the references I can find for support in those works:

The I Ching (various translations including Wilhelm and Wing) tells me that the times are shocking (#51):

During sudden changes, adjust your tempo and move ahead, remembering that while conditions may alter, the goal remains the same. The Superior Man double-checks his premises, confronts his weak spots and adheres to the rules and ideals of the Work.

Surviving this terrifying force will give you confidence in your ability to deal with all that follows…. If these times inspire you to make any major changes in your life and your relationships and in yourself you will meet with vitality and success.

51_shocking-001

Proverbs 3: 25-26

Have no fear of sudden terror or of assault from wicked men, since Yahweh will be your guarantor, He will keep your steps from the snare.

We are called to return to the work, whatever that is. Donald says he wants to drain the swamp; that won’t help people clean off the mud and learn to live in a dry house. I have spent the past 30 years helping people move away from the edge of the swamp.

That’s my garden and I need to cultivate it.

*And so I ask N=1, and he explains how he perceived the events, promises, and rhetoric of the two campaigns, and what he thinks will happen next, and I can at least see the logic. Must. Keep. Talking.

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Why Use a Manual Typewriter?

My favorite thrift shop had a manual typewriter on display. The lady behind the counter said, “One just like that sold just last week—I can’t imagine why anyone would want to use a manual typewriter!”

I said, “Maybe the power goes out a lot where they are.” And then, “Maybe they just like the way they think when they use a manual typewriter,” and the people at the counter looked at me a little strangely.

I guess they hadn’t noticed that the tools they use affect how & what they think.

Gold plated claw hammer, given to my aunt Mildred Tiede, when she retired from the Stanley Works after 50 years of service.

Gold plated claw hammer, given to my aunt Mildred Tiede, when she retired from the Stanley Works after 50 years of service.

I know my thinking varies, according to the tool in my hand. The way I think varies with the light in the room, too.

I always start the day on paper, with a fountain pen, by candlelight, if I’m up before dawn. When I get ideas for art, or presentations, I may reach for a gel pen, and sometimes, a pencil.

I have never had a thought that made me reach for a ballpoint. Now, I won’t let them in the house. Rounded up every ballpoint pen I could find two years ago and donated them to the local elementary school for the kids who can’t afford pens.

I can write on a keyboard just fine, and I type using all ten digits as fast as I can think. Nevertheless, I create differently when I dictate. Some stories appear more easily if I talk to the screen instead of typing.

I am uneasy about the idea that children are not taught to write longhand, and that they go straight to the keyboard. They are missing something, and we won’t know what it is for years.

If I want to get all the good ideas out of my head and into the real world, I need as many tools as I can find.

If your only tool is a hammer, you’re a pretty limited carpenter.

(Yes, that is a gold plated hammer. It was given to my aunt, Mildred Tiede, on the occasion of her retirement from Stanley Works after 50 years of service.)

Dragontree Planner Review

I collect planners. More hope is sold in the planner aisle at Staples than at Max Factor… The NEXT planner will solve my problems…. the NEXT planner will make me organized.

(Heck, I get as much benefit from last year’s calendars as I do from a new planner; they all have value. Often, I don’t need alignment between numbers and days. I only need the shapes of time. Different story.)

I saw the Rituals for Living Dreambook+Planner from The Dragontree on Instagram; looked interesting. The PDF version was an affordable experiment. The layout of quarters and months and weeks looked a bit new to me. I printed off the various pages that contained information I wanted to know, as well as one each of the quarter, month, and weekly layouts, so I could see in detail how they were set up. I hate reading PDFs online.

Selected pages from the Dragontree Planner.

Selected pages from the Dragontree Planner.


(Yes, that’s the way my desk looks much of the time.)

Good: Lots of information about how to think about planning; a mindful approach to integrating work and life; I like the content about creating rituals.

I like undated books; you can skip weeks if you don’t need them, and the unused pages don’t time out.

Less than great: The text is teeny weesny itty bitty, making me think the designers have not yet reached the age of needing reading glasses. This might be less of a problem if you purchase the professionally printed copy; I bought the PDF and printed onto ordinary paper with an aging inkjet.

Note Saturday and Sunday share a space. That’s not the way I live. My Saturdays and Sundays deserve (and get, in my regular planner) equal attention and respect as M-F.

No page numbers on the printed copy.

The bolded text on the daily (week-view) layout interferes with my own writing. ALL-CAPS heading, in bold, in tiny type, on my printer, are nearly illegible and therefore, merely blobs. (Most PDF-print-it-yourself tools face some version of this problem.) Rituals list is in all caps. Would be better for me if it weren’t.

Summary: I purchased the planner as a suggestion for tweaks to incorporate into my own planning system (a glued up amalgam of Outlook printouts and numbered pages in a hard-bound book, with add-ins), and I learned some new ideas.

If you think you will be using this planner for important work, you might do well to buy the professionally printed version. (Read someone else’s review to see if the paper suits your taste. I can’t speak to that part.)lanner

Knitters Do Math

I had my hula hoops in the infield at the 2016 Clyde Fest, Bynum ballpark, on Saturday. When you’re in a 10 x 10 tent at an event like this, lots of your friends will stop by and talk to you.

I got on the topic of 8020 with one of my friends. He was familiar with rule. He knew how to apply it in politics. I explained how we taught it in the social media class at NC State, using the Pareto principle to evaluate the most productive part of the marketing budget. I talked through the example we use in class, doing the math in my head. I suspect he was about to have an interesting Sunday as he thought about applying the 8020 rule to parts of his business he hadn’t thought about that way before.

He had stories of his own, where he had been able to do some ballpark estimation, and save enormous amounts of door-to-door work.

We joked about how few people are able to do math, and how complicated they make it.

(You may never have considered that hula hooping is an example of physics: it’s all about angular momentum.

L = m * v * r, and bigger radius, bigger mass, means you can have less velocity and still keep the going. In short bigger is easier.)

Then today, I sat down to look at ring 9 of the that I’m knitting as a fundraiser for the Pulse shooting in Orlando Florida. I’m not thrilled with the way the designer has laid out the final round. I’m in ring 7 now, so I have a couple of days to think about what I want to do.

The shawl is designed to incorporate 49 heart motifs, one for every person who died at the club that night. So far I’m working on 42, 6 in the 1st 12 in the 2nd and 24 and the 3rd ring. I need to knit 7 more. At 24 stitches per heart, and 576 stitches per ring, that leaves a lot of space in ring 9.

The designer selected intarsia with blocks of one color for the hearts and one color for honeycomb in between them. Intarsia requires knitting back and forth and I don’t like doing that; I like to knit forward all the time which you can do on circular needles.

I thought there must be a lacy heart pattern somewhere in my collection of books about knitting. I went through them today, and I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. Marian Kinzel, in Modern Lace Knitting, has two heart patterns but they are too big for what I want.

Working out the details for a section of 53 smaller hearts.

Working out the details for a section of 53 smaller hearts.

I started sketching and counting and doing math and subtracting 24 stitches per heart for 7 hearts. I wanted 53 additional hearts, one for each person who was injured at the club. It came out to roughly 8 stitches a heart. If I knit them side-by-side, that wasn’t going to work to all, but I’m a designer. I played and I figured out a way to do it. I need to check the details and I need to test a swatch to make sure to work the way I think it will.

I took a picture of my work and posted it to the work in progress blog posts I’m creating for the shawl on Karen Tiede Studio. And then I realized why it was so easy for me to talk math on Saturday. I do this stuff all the time. Knitters, and textile artist in general, do math every day of the week, when recalculating warp and weft, when we’re figuring out whether we have enough to finish the round, when we need to know we need to make changes in a pattern to fit us or because we don’t like the way it’s going.

Teach your children to knit. You can sneak some math and at the same time and they’ll hardly notice.

Working on Ring 7, with 24 hearts, in gold mohair.

Working on Ring 7, with 24 hearts, in gold mohair.

What did I come here for?

Once more, with feeling.
You go into Facebook for some business reason. It’s your job. You see something in the feed… you click… and five minutes later, you need a string or a trail of breadcrumbs to figure out what it was you were actually supposed to be doing.

What did I come in here to do?

What did I come in here to do?

I need to write stickies to myself to remember exactly what event needed to be created, or post boosted, or something.

80/20 Curtains in the Guest Bedroom

(This is a bit off my normal topics on this blog, but hang with me.  The drapery lesson works for productivity readers, too.)

I’ve been studying how the 80/20 rule can be applied to productivity, and to participation on social media platforms, and in other parts of life, for a while now.  Today, a Saturday in July, an example of 80/20 on effort and payoff jumped in front of me.

New sheers in the guest bedroom.

New sheers in the guest bedroom.

The guest bedroom has needed new curtains for a long time.  The existing sheers were sun-damaged and falling apart.  Found the fabric at a thrift shop in Cary before Christmas (it’s after the 4th of July now).  Draped the new fabric over the old curtains as a test, and then never got around to making the time to measure and hem and trim and actually do the work of turning yardage into curtains.

Today is a Saturday; lots of desk-work to be done but a good chance I could get stuck inside with rain on Sunday.  However, Goldsboro is a town that closes on Sunday and if you want to buy anything from a specialty store, you need to shop on Saturday.  I looked at the project to make a list.

The fabric came from a thrift shop, approximately 14 yards in two pieces.  One piece was nearly exactly the right length for one panel.  What if I cut the larger piece into equal lengths? There’s an extra piece about 2 yards long.

Cut fabric to length and let it hang. No hem (yet.)

Cut fabric to length and let it hang. No hem (yet.)

It was easier to cut the old curtains off the rod by slicing the rod pocket than it was to take the rod down, take it apart, and slip the curtains off.  There is no re-use value in this fabric; all the sheers that were here when we moved in have gone into the trash.

Draped the new fabric over the old rod.  Adjusted the length.

Drape yardage over existing curtain rod avoids rod-pocket measuring, pinning, sewing, pressing.

Drape yardage over existing curtain rod avoids rod-pocket measuring, pinning, sewing, pressing.

Done.

Effort saved:  measure, cut, press, pin, stitch, unpin, press, hang.

One of these days, I may heat-seal the cut edge of the fabric to prevent fraying.  It doesn’t get much stress, so that can wait a bit.

Even more eventually, I’d love to buy and apply the beaded fringe from the Cloth Barn discount store.  The 4.5 yards of trim this window needs would cost about $45; it would take several hours to apply.  You can see a test swatch of the beading in the picture of the full window, in the far window at the sill.

It can wait.

For the time being, the guest bedroom has new sheers that match the color scheme, for an outlay of $10 (the fabric) and 20 minutes.

The “complete” project would have cost $55 (with beaded trim) and HOURS.

This is what the curtains look like in the early morning sun, the next day:

New sheers in the early morning sun, showing pink & gold chameleon effect.

New sheers in the early morning sun, showing pink & gold chameleon effect.

You decide.  Financially, it’s 80/20 exactly.  Effort-wise, it’s at least 96/4 (second iteration).  Not bad for a hot Saturday morning in July.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: the Book

Lots of baby went out with this bathwater.

I found Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport, at the Wake County Library new book shelf last week. Picked it up. Easy enough read; can’t say I read each and every word because many of them made pretty much the same point: Passion does not correlate well with career satisfaction.

Be So Good They Can't Ignore You cover photograph

Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You cover photograph

Would have written a review on Amazon but there were enough reviews there already.

Two points I didn’t see in the 3-star reviews:

Richard Nelson Bolles didn’t advocate for selecting a profession based on passion. I would argue that his entire output was built on a solution to the mismatch between “passion” and career satisfaction; that people who had a passion for God and serving (the clergy) found themselves profoundly out of step because the demands of their work in a church / congregation did not match their innate skills and talents.

“Practice” alone won’t make you love something if you hate the something in the first place. None of the “genius = 10,000 hours on task” gurus have found a good answer to what makes it possible for some people to spend 10,000 hours developing a certain set of skills, while others simply can’t bring themselves to those tasks.

Gee. A book by a professor, with notes, but no bibliography or suggested reading? so I can’t quickly determine if the author has read any of the Gallup Strengths information or the Myers-Briggs type information. Face it: No amount of 10,000 hours in the world will make a 5’7″ person a starting basketball center. There ARE innate gifts, and they are best followed, and this isn’t about “Passion.”

The book would have been more helpful to me if the author had said more about what his own “practice” looked like. What does it look like to “practice” any of the thousands of essentially routine, boring, “feel like a number” jobs in the American workforce? I haven’t figured it out yet.

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