Happy New Year! and emotions

Happy New Year!  Happy New Decade, in fact.  On my first ride to work this year, I heard a very interesting story on NPR about a series on PBS called “The Emotional Life.”  Dr. Daniel Gilbert talks about what makes people happy.  Read the transcript or listen to the story at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122207615.

Week in Review: December 13-21, 2009

Over the past week, I did a bit of background reading for my project.  I was delayed for a few days because I was waiting for two books on Connecticut history to arrive in the mail.  One turned out to be very brief, and it was a bit of a disappointment.  The other one is longer, so I’m working through that now.  My goal is to learn more about Connecticut’s constitutional convention in 1818, and it’s looking like I have gathered basically all of the secondary resources that exist on it.  Once I received them mid-week, I worked on reading these books.  I made it through the short one, and now I’m concentrating on the longer one.  Who knew that Connecticut does not have a recent history of the state?

I also spent time on my seasonal project, best described as “Christmas.”  I was able to get cards to friends and family written, addressed, and mailed this week.  On the 19th, I took stock of all that my husband and I had purchased as gifts and wrapped them up.  It’s one of those things that I don’t mind working on, mostly because I only have to do this once a year!  I am proud to say that my Christmas shopping has been finished for over a week, and we did pretty well budget-wise.  I’m looking forward to spreading Christmas cheer in a few days!

Now that I am heading in to Christmas week, I will be out of town after Wednesday.  I plan to suspend posting and the “week-in-review” until after I am settled back in Connecticut.  Happy holidays, and looking forward to exciting new things in 2010!

Masters and Servants

I sometimes have trouble motivating myself to complete certain tasks that I have placed on my to-do list, particularly those that I would just like to do for myself.  The laundry is a pressing matter and easily compels me to complete it; sitting down to read a book for my project can easily get shuffled to the end of the list.  This personal habit conflicts with my general drive and ability to complete tasks at work.  Why is there such a disconnect?  Sometimes I find it to be much easier to let myself down because I’m fulfilling my promises and obligations to others instead.

I found a short excerpt of Benjamin Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth” essay to be particularly apt in motivating myself:

“If you were a servant, would you not be ashamed that a good Master should catch you idle?  Are you then your own Master, be ashamed to catch yourself idle.”

“The Way to Wealth” is a really interesting piece of advice literature.  Published in 1758, it gathers many of the adages published in Poor Richard’s Almanac over the course of its first 25 years of publication.  Poor Richard cleverly reviews these for readers in the form of a sermon he’s quoting given by Father Abraham.  The maxims in the sermon cover a number of topics, including industry and productivity, frugality, credit, and consumption of goods.  This quote appears near the end of the section on industry, which the preacher espouses will keep food on the table and might possibly protect against lean times.

This is both a delightfully antiquarian and yet vividly illustrative way to think about obligations that we make to ourselves.  Unless we’re self-employed or the boss at our employment, we each have a ‘master’ who we devote some of our work time to.  When we choose to set personal goals to improve ourselves, we are exercising our rights to be our own ‘masters.’  Franklin’s essay turns my idea of only letting myself down on its head.  Rather than feeling good that I have at least fulfilled my obligations to others, I should feel just as bad to ‘catch myself idle,’ wasting time that I could be using to further my goals.  Since I first read this line a few weeks ago, I have reflected on it often when weighing a number of activities in my spare time.  It doesn’t always work, but I don’t think that channeling a little Ben Franklin is ever a bad thing!

Week in Review: December 6 – 12, 2009

On Sunday, I should have spent more time working on my paper than I did.

On Monday, I finally keyed in edits I made to a hardcopy of draft 3 last week.  Doing this reminded me (again) of how much I don’t know about Connecticut history, so I also purchased two books that will fill in this gap.  I also spent a chunk of my free time in the evening trying to get red ink out of two of my husband’s shirts because his pen exploded in his pocket Monday morning.  Sometimes, domestic responsibilities are unavoidable.

On Wednesday, I had an entirely free day!  Because of the snow that hit the northeast, I did not go in to work.  I took some time to gather some materials for my paper, looking at my bookshelf and pulling out the books I have taken out from the library.  I am gathering a list of background reading that can help to support my project, particularly the historical memory aspects of my project.

On Saturday, I set aside working on my project to finish Christmas shopping.  Perhaps not the progress I’m constantly striving for, but progress in some way nonetheless!

Ways to Not Accomplish Your Goals

Mr. Hunt saw “I Can’ts” as lazy men who made excuses in order not to be functioning members of society.  I see “I Can’ts” as some of the activities that prompt me to tell myself that I can’t work on my projects.  While each individual may have their own set of culprits, I’d like to highlight some of the top “I Can’ts” in my world.

• Watch TV, and lots of it.  Convince yourself that you won’t possibly be able to concentrate on work when the football game is on and you would rather watch your fantasy football stat tracker.  Tell yourself that it’s okay to watch reruns of your favorite shows because relaxing on the couch feels so much better than dragging yourself up to your office.  If I would keep a better list of next actions (a la Getting Things Done), I could probably be more productive because I’d have some options of things to do when my brain is too fried to work on something more intellectual.
• Work at a job that includes a two-hour round-trip commute.  Now, I fully admit that I took my job knowing how long my commute would be.  I also admit that I then purchased things that now compel me to keep said job so that I can pay my bills, and I am unwilling to move any closer to my place of employment.  I also fully admit that this experience has been a lesson in how long I am actually willing to commute in order to be employed.  I wouldn’t change the past if I could do it over again, but I will also never take a job that requires me to spend this much time on the road unless it’s the last job on Earth!  All kidding aside, I have never found an incredibly satisfying way to make my commutes more useful than listening to NPR so I at least have a sense of what is going on in the world.  Those two hours are a pretty huge waste of time, and depending on the weather and the traffic, they can also zap my energy as well.
• Constantly feel tired.  Put so much energy into other activities in your life that you have little to none left for anything else.
• Convince yourself that you are not going to be able to do the task well enough in the time that you have, to the point where you just don’t do anything at all rather than do something poorly.  This is an incredibly tough “I Can’t” to try to battle.  How does one get over being convinced that not doing something at all is better than at least making baby steps?

Week in Review: November 29 – December 5, 2009

This is the first installment of a feature that I hope will appear each week.  My “week in review” is meant to track what I have been up to and when I have hit roadblocks.

This week, I realized on Sunday that my latest rewrite of my paper was not going to go anywhere.  I spent Thanksgiving vacation reorienting my paper to focus on a small part of the overall story I want to tell.  For this project, I thought that this rewrite would make the project more manageable, and then I would be able to complete it more quickly.  It turns out that the reorientation is not going to work as I had hoped.  While I did write a bit of material that I will be able to keep, I will have to complete another revision.

On Tuesday at work, one of my coworkers lectured me on how I need to finish my projects.  She did not know about my procrastination problem, because at work I am the one who is on top of things and basically always completes what is asked of me.  I think that the idea that I could put these projects off for so long blew her mind.

I have done work on draft 3 of my paper throughout this week, and I actually think I have crafted an introduction that is going to work.  I have also found a number of places where I need to do more reading before I can write anything further.  This has been my roadblock with this project for a long time, and I’m at the point where there’s nothing more I can do than get some books and dig in!

After working a number of very long days, I let myself relax on Friday night.  I put aside doing anything too productive to spend time with my husband, who I hadn’t seen all week!

The “I Can’ts”

“The ‘I Can’ts’ are numerous and ubiquitous.  Their numbers are astonishing.  A curious statistician estimates that about one-half of the children born into the world, are furnished by Nature with a remarkable lingual facility for the utterance of this brief and cowardly sentence.  Neither time or experience enables them to abolish from their vocabulary these fatal words, and from the cradle to the grave, they drag a slip-shod life spent in accomplishing nothing from the fact, that they lack the energy and will necessary to accomplish.”  Freedman Hunt, Worth and Wealth (1856).

Freedman Hunt, a nineteenth century businessman, opened his book Worth and Wealth with this paragraph on the “I Can’ts.”  Hunt’s book was aimed at an audience of “merchants and men of business,” some who may have already have achieved success, and others who may have been seeking it.  He minces no words in cutting down lazy, good-for-nothing fellows who rely on “I Can’t” as an excuse for nothing being productive members of society.  It’s worth pointing out that Hunt references this affliction as coming from within, as something instilled by “Nature,” and not as something created by external distractions.  Hunt continues, “Regarding everything they do as a hardship, looking upon labor as an evil, it seems to be a sort of moral duty with such men to do as little as possible, and get all they can for it” (26).  If only dear Mr. Hunt knew that people of this ilk exist in every generation… but I digress.

A twenty-first century advice book would more likely examine the roadblocks that stand in the way of otherwise productive people’s motivation, but when turned on its side, Hunt’s advice gets at the heart of procrastination.  “He is always for delay.  ‘He has’nt time, or he has’nt tools; he lacks means, or he must have more help:’ you ‘had better wait,’ or he knows ‘it is impossible;’ anything rather than do it.  ‘I’ll try!’ never comes into his head, as it did into Captain Bragg’s; to try being just what he wishes to escape from; while to say ‘I can’t,’ is the easiest, as well as the meanest method of accomplishing his desire” (26).  Regardless of the time period, for someone who has decided that they can’t, the reasons are always numerous and pressing.

Hello world!

I’m probably breaking many important rules of launching and writing a blog.  First, I have created a concept and named a blog based on a project I can’t yet totally devote time to.  My eventual vision is for this blog to bring a variety of historical advice literature to the masses – some amusing, some maddening, some amazing, and all a little bit educational.  People have been writing and sharing advice for centuries, and the print revolution of the nineteenth century provided a quick and easy way to share household hints, get-rich-quick schemes, and moralistic platitudes with a wide audience of readers.  I find the things that earlier advice literature authors say (and don’t say) to be as instructive about how early Americans were trying to live as our current advice lit is about twenty-first century Americans.  In 100 years, people will read Getting Things Done and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People with the same kind of fascination.  However, for reasons that will become clear in following postings, I am unable to consistently research and write postings on interesting 18th- and 19th-century advice literature and its applications (or non-applications) in the 21st century at the level of quality that I would feel comfortable with.

Instead, I am launching this blog under different auspices than “Hints on Health and Wealth” will someday function, but readers will find that I am not straying too far afield.  I have a problem, a very troublesome problem.  I am a chronic procrastinator.  Well, not at everything – I accomplish my tasks at work in a timely manner, because the hard and fast deadlines there compel me to get things done.  My laundry gets done because my husband and I only own so many clothes and towels.  My house is usually acceptably clean because I am an insatiable clean freak.  It’s my personal goals that I find hard to act upon – even though they are things I am interested in!  More often than I would like to admit, when there are tasks that I promise myself that I will do, I simply don’t do them.  And it’s not because I don’t want to finish them.  Too often, the TV beckons, or something needs desperately to be cleaned, or I hit the snooze alarm just one… more… time.

So because of my chronic procrastinating, I have two projects that are long overdue.  And I am certainly not proud of this.  I am (or I try to be) a high-achieving, ambitious person.  A reliable person who completes work to the best of her ability.  Instead of living out these descriptors, I have let my focus wander to a number of other projects while hiding those that I hadn’t finished.

But no more!  This is my very public pronouncement of my greatest flaw and an upcoming project, as well as one of my steps towards changing my behavior.  Those among you who are very perceptive might say, “But Amy, isn’t this just another distraction?  Another way to avoid your other projects?”  And that is a valid point.  I am looking at this blog as a worthwhile tool to track my progress in a public forum as I learn self-discipline rather than a distraction.  With some intriguing nineteenth-century advice literature thrown in.