Tom & Alissa

I’m not trying to impart wisdom here. I’m too young and inexperienced to have much in the way of wisdom. But lately, a lot of people have made comments to me (in person and online) to the tune of “how do you do it?”, mostly because, well, I do work a lot, and I don’t miss deadlines, and I guess this isn’t normal. :) So that’s all this is.

I’m not a particularly high-energy person. I can’t remember the last time I woke up in the morning and felt rested, even after sleeping a long time. (Yes, I realize this is probably not a good thing!) I would almost always rather be on the couch watching mindless TV than doing anything else.

But when I moved to New York, and nobody was telling me what to do at any particular time, I realized that I could turn into a serious lump, the kind of person who only got off the couch to go to work so as to pay the rent, who always eats Chinese take-out and never does the laundry or makes the bed, the kind of person who always talks about doing things, but never actually does them. And I didn’t want to be that kind of person. Realistically, if I expect to do anything significant in life, I have to form good working habits so that I have some structure from which to deviate. :)

In that vein, I established some practices that I mostly live by, and I think these help me to keep doing what needs to be done . . .

I never say that “I’m just not motivated enough to do X.” Kids need to be motivated to do what they need to do, but adults are supposed to be able to do things whether or not there’s a carrot dangling in front of their face. Same for saying “I just can’t [do that thing I need to do]“. Yes, I can do it - I have the time and I am physically able. If I don’t do it, it’s not because I can’t - it’s because I’m choosing not to.

When I wake up in the morning, I usually want to roll over and hit the snooze button. Then I realized that the extra twenty or thirty minutes of sleep, no matter how good it sounds, doesn’t realistically make any difference, so I just get out of bed. (See above!)

In the last year or so I’ve become a little more crazy about my health habits, because I don’t really have time to be sick and I seem to be extra susceptible to it, especially in winter. So, I get up a little earlier in the morning to exercise for twenty minutes (which, by the way, if I can exercise in our tiny apartment, anyone can exercise), I take supplements (a multi, an essential fatty acid, and a gingko biloba, and Emergen-C if I’m feeling under the weather), I don’t drink coffee except on the weekends and instead drink a lot of green tea (no mid-morning crash), and I sorted out foods that I seemed to be sensitive to - chief among them dairy - and stopped eating them. I seek out vegetables and proteins and try to save any “bad” eating for the weekends, when I’m out with friends. I choose to take the extra minute and “just do” things that are easy to slack on, like flossing my teeth or putting my clothes away properly at night. ;) A little goes a very long way.

I “overcommit” on purpose. This is a dicey one and I realize it’s a slippery slope. I don’t take on more than I can possibly do (or at least, I try not to do that), but I do commit to work that I know I should do, but that will require effort I may gripe about later - article assignments, grad school, whatever. I take on a challenging workload because I don’t work well unless I’m under a deadline. (This, incidentally, is why I have the highest regard for novelists and people who don’t necessarily work under assignment. They do it because they do it, not because someone is tapping their foot and breathing down their neck!)

When I write, I just sit down and pound it out. I am the most scattered writer in the world, I think, but I write my thoughts down, and every time I have another thought I quickly start a new paragraph and type out the thought, because my brain doesn’t retain things from moment to moment and I don’t want to lose any of them. Anne Lamott says something in Bird By Bird about writing a “s***ty first draft”, and that’s exactly what I do. I’m confident enough to know I can do it, but only only gained that confidence by doing. (If you’re a writer, but you don’t write, then you’re not a writer.)

Oh, and I use Google Docs to hold all my articles, so that if I’m at work and I have a sudden thought, I can input it into a document and still access it from home.

I rigorously keep a calendar. I once kept all my appointments and things-to-do in my head, but that flew out the window ages ago. Last year I used a Moleskine day planner, which was great; this year I’m using a combination of Google Calendar, Google Sync, and my Blackberry. I check the calendar every morning and I make sure to cross things off my list as I do them, so I feel a sense of accomplishment. The calendar holds everything - workout, laundry, screenings, meetings and deadlines at work, grocery shopping. I’m totally comfortable moving things around on the calendar and rescheduling and even removing things, but it keeps me sane and lets me not worry about forgetting something.

Until my to-do list is done for the day, I don’t take a break beyond a lunch break (during which I’m often reading for class or an article). Taking a break to “goof off” makes me lose serious traction and the day goes haywire from there. Working till it’s all done means more time to relax after the work is done, which also means more time to spend with my husband.

I take a Sabbath. I wasn’t good about this in college and I definitely paid for it. On Sunday, I don’t worry too much about what I’m eating, I don’t work out, I drink coffee, I go to church and brunch with friends, I read books that interest me (rather than books for school), and I watch bad movies with Tom. Basically, I don’t do anything that’s “productive”, in the sense of crossing it off my list. All those things are wonderfully productive and regenerative in their own right. And though I’m not really happy to see Monday come, at least I’m not already completely exhausted.

Except the first and last principles here, these are just what works for me, my working style, and the way my life is structured. I realize that I work fast, my work is well suited for short bits here and there that add up to a whole, and I live in a small space with one adult and no children, which means relatively little housework. I don’t claim any of this would work for anyone else, though I suspect much might. But as I read about the people who do significant and good work in the world, it seems that they are willing to push past mental limitations and their own laziness to do more, and they just never say they can’t do something.

What disciplines, principles, or tools do you use to do the work that’s set before you?