How do you get back to your writing after a trip? This post may be too personal to make much sense to anyone, but if nothing else it is a reminder for myself. After my nine trips last year, this is what I learned:
* 1) If I try to wake up ridiculously early the morning after getting back from a trip and become really tough on myself,I burn out within a week, and it doesn’t help my productivity, because then I need a week to recover from pushing myself too hard.
* 2) I also found that letting myself ease into work too slowly doesn’t help me develop a working rhythm, because I will lie in bed for all the wrong hours and get more jetlagged than I already need to be.
* 3 Drink lots of water. Helps with jetlag and general mental and physical well-being.
* 4) Make moderation your motto. For me, this is getting to work by 9.30am and going somewhere pleasant. This is a favorite coffee shop or nice sunny spot in the library. Somewhere that you don’t feel like you are chaining yourself to your desk, but you are there because you want to be. Stay until lunch, and then if you want to go home and pay bills or do laundry, go catch up on those things.
* 5) Feeling overwhelmed when you get back is natural. Don’t look at everything you have to accomplish in the next month, or even the next week. Just focus on getting into the rhythm of work. Before you know it, you’ll be meeting your goals again.
* 6) Be gentle with yourself. Sending yourself negative messages doesn't help! You will need time to recover. Just take it one day at a time and develop your work rhythm first.
What do YOU do to get back to work after a trip?
fast summer food
At the risk of becoming a food blogger, I'm singing the praises of yet another recipe in this post. Well, its not really a recipe, since you can guess how its made and what the ingredients are: its a blue-cheese and tomato grilled sandwich. Oh, yes, there is a bit of salt and pepper over the tomato (and a tiny bit of butter for the grilling, which could be skipped if you used a nonstick pan). I decided to go for an even lower effort version than the recipe described, and just stuck the whole thing in the toaster oven and a few minutes later, I was in blue-cheese-heaven. Yum. I used Danish Blue cheese and an organic tomato from the farmer's market. I've never thought to melt blue cheese, until I read this recipe in Mark Bittman's new book, Kitchen Express. The whole book seems to be all about deliciousness without much effort, and what more can one ask for, especially in the heat of the summer?
Multiple writing projects?
Monumental paper has morphed into two papers. I should have seen this coming, but now I have three papers on the chopping block all at once. What to do? I seem to have trouble with the whole multi-tasking thing when it comes to writing. I've always done one paper at a time, even for term papers. Its like get into one thing and then my brain goes into some kind of obsessive mode in order to finish it. I don't do well with two papers at once, but now I have three ideas that are all set in motion and I'm feeling like it is so overwhelming to think about it all at once all the time. Someone suggested a spreadsheet, but yikes, I'm just not that organized about my writing. One at a time is not really an option because there is some time-sensitivity going on here. Any ideas from the blogosphere?
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