I only made one formal resolution this year:
Stop going to the office so damn early.
Since my last promotion, I have been in the office well before 7 a.m. almost every morning.
I only made one formal resolution this year:
Since my last promotion, I have been in the office well before 7 a.m. almost every morning.
A massive snow storm pelted the metro area, which made me extremely grateful for the timing of my work trip to Texas.
I have never given Dallas much thought, so I was surprised by how massive and beautiful the city is.
We spent most of our time in Downtown Dallas and Uptown Dallas, which is where my client’s office is located.
Ironically, this description would work quite well for Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood as well. I also visited Oak Lawn, the metroplex’s gayborhood. I managed to find busy bars and a drag show despite it being a Tuesday.
There’s the excitement of a new city and actually working with my clients in person. There’s also the crush of emails and awkwardness of managing conference calls via cellphone.
The rest of the work week flew by, which is typical for me. I’ve been in my new job for about four months now, and (I think) I’ve gained a baseline level of competence.
Each promotion I receive seems to involve less formal training and more “figuring shit out,” which I think law school prepared me well for.
My prior positions involved a lot of remote working, whereas now I’m in the office from 6 or 7 a.m. to around 4 or 5 p.m. The volume and variety of work means that I’m never bored, and even a 10 or 11 hour day feels way too short.
The speed of which my weeks go by presents interesting challenges however – it’s easy to fly through an entire week without working out or going to the grocery store.
My challenge this week is figuring out what processes and routines I need to put in place so I don’t become thoroughly decrepit in 4 more months.
Perhaps keeping my waistline in check is as important as maintaining my inbox.
By afternoon, the pictures come – first of plane parts, then bodies.
Next, links to graphic Russian news streams, airing passports of children and AIDS researchers.
The news stream is also dotted with memorial posts to some actress I’ve never heard of.
Then come the flares of Israelis entering Gaza, and a White House lockdown due a suspicious package.
My favorite German tabloids quickly switch from soccer coverage to assigning blame. More gory pictures follow.
German Tabloid blaming the Russians for the MH17 crash.
It’s also a huge waste of time. I should have ignored the news and just gone to a horror movie during lunch – it would have accomplished the same thing.
Tim Ferris describes going on a “news diet” in one of his books. Ferris boosts his productivity and stays focused by skimming daily headlines instead of getting lost in stories.
The rationale for this news diet is that “news” – especially international news – is just a form of entertainment for most of us.
In this sense “entertainment” is akin to watching a horror film, documentary, or particularly lurid reality show.
Americans typically pay attention to international stories when there’s an element of tragedy or sensationalism. It’s a form of morbid entertainment.
Sure, it is more socially acceptable to be preoccupied with a foreign tragedy than the legal problems of a Bravo Housewife, but these events are equally irrelevant to the lives of most Americans.
I followed play-by-play coverage of the Crimea invasion from my computer screen. I also read endless coverage about suicide bombings in distant lands, drug cartel murders, substandard labor conditions, tax fraud, poor Emmy dresses, and celebrity meltdowns.
No article, picture, graphic live stream, or amount of “informed outrage” on my part is going to change the course of these events or have a meaningful impact on my life.
It’s a form of work day distraction.
It’s entertainment.
I’m acutely aware that I’m “goofing off” when I’m on TMZ or Buzzfeed during the day. Maybe it’s time for me to start considering trolling Reuters, BBC and Politico as the same type of behavior.
One of the great things about Twitter is that you can watch news stories break in real time. Simply create a “list column” of reporters in Tweetdeck and you’ll see a steady stream of retweeted photos and links.
Twitter is how I watched the Boston Marathon attacks unfold.
The problem is that vast majority of these Twitter reporters aren’t on-scene. Breaking events are an echo-chamber of unverified sources, theft, rumor, and doctored images.
Sifting through the crap is a highly entertaining exercise, but I don’t really gain any more information than I receive during the 5 p.m. MPR News recap on the way home from work. It’s just an educated way of goofing off, and probably something I should stop.
This blog is about to have its nine year anniversary, so I figured I should dust it off and say hello.
I started blogging as a middle school student on Diaryland and Livejournal. I moved to WordPress sometime during college and never looked back.
I wrote longer posts during my freshman year that eventually tapered off into picture posts with vague captions. My junior and senior year were all about applying to grad school, then law school.
My blog really took off during law school and received a couple thousand hits a day. As with many law school blogs, things slowed down significantly after I started working in the real world.
Part of the silence around here is laziness. There’s also some paranoia from the lack of anonymity that my social networks afford.
Maybe I’m just too old to gush about my date-of-the-moment or lack thereof online.
That seemed okay during college, but it feels a little sad now that everyone’s getting married…
Last month was probably the busiest month I’ve had since law school finals. I was in a different city every weekend, constantly stuck at airports, and stringing together 14-hour workdays during the week.
Oh, and attempting to move out of my old apartment.
My sleep schedule was awful, my love handles entered Precious-territory, and I had stress-related neck pain that caused the bottom part of my jaw to go numb.
In short, it was not cute.
I renovated my approach to work this month and my life has become drastically better. I made five simple changes and wiped a lot of unnecessary stress from my plate.
After watching a Claremont Colleges TEDx talk, I dusted off my old Moleskine notebooks and started carrying at least one with me at all times. Productivity coach David Allen recommends writing down every nagging “to do” or worry so it is not hogging mental bandwidth.
This casual note taking allows me to be fully available for tasks as I do them. It’s like anxiety meds that you don’t have to creep into CVS for.
“Don’t use your mind to accumulate stuff and avoid it. If you do not pay attention to what has your attention, you will give it more attention than it deserves.”
Every morning I do the most irritating or dreadful projects first.
If I don’t get them out of the way first, they are just going to stress me out throughout the day.
I inevitably find myself starting these put-off projects around 6:30p.m. at Dunn Brothers, completely burnt out and hating life.
I also get annoyed because procrastinated projects are rarely as awful or time-consuming as I expect.
It reminds me of that Brenda Ueland quote from If You Want To Write:
“When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won’t do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years – the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.”
The gift and curse of being a content strategist is that there always a million things I could be doing. One moment I’m writing a press release or article, another moment I’m tweeting or syndicating content on Google Plus.
I do my heavy writing in the morning when I’m feeling fresh and invincible. As the day progresses, I switch to more tedious and less mentally-challenging tasks like scheduling out tweets, looking at analytics, or clicking through workflows. This allows me to maintain productivity even if I’m tired.
I prefer just eating at my computer and continuing to work, but I’ve stopped doing this. If I work through lunch, I’m completely burnt out and drooling on myself by 3 p.m. – what I do instead is drive somewhere to pick up lunch. The quick drive is usually enough of a break for me to feel refreshed throughout the afternoon an into the evening.
Instead of working until my head hits the keyboard, I try to enforce a hard stop at 13 hours. I then go to the gym for an hour and cook myself dinner and eat while doing some non-work activity – like blogging for myself or watching Top Model. (Or both!)
The most important part of this “me time” is that I do not allow myself to feel guilty about it. The work laptop is closed and off my mind until 6 a.m. the next day. I do break this rule occasionally for my California clients, but for the most part, if it’s not a true “fire,” it can wait until tomorrow.
Exercise and unwinding before bed are also apparently good for you. I am no longer staying up at night fretting about a procrastinated task or big project – that’s what the Moleskines are for.
I left the keys with my neighbors and I’m officially a St. Paul boy now.
As a kid, I was really into John Grisham. I wanted to be the power-lawyers in his books – working long hours in big cities.
The law degree happened (at a decent school), and so did the long hours (albeit in advertising.) And so did the yuppie lifestyle…
It’s nice to be here, but I decided tonight that this is just another step (rather than an end-point.)
My friend Tyler came over and we rehashed my crazy apartments and exes. We both decided that I’ve come a long way, but I still got some work left to do.
What I didn’t expect is that this ambition thing comes with a permanent sense of unrest. I can barely enjoy achieving goals because I’m already working on the next big thing.
Minneapolis was fun, but I’m too busy in St. Paul to reminiscence properly. These are my first world problems.
So winter finally came.
Well, snow did. We had a few sub-zero days but today we were well into the 40’s. We manage regardless of the temperature.
The colder it gets inside the cozier it feels inside, so it’s not so bad.
This is why I don’t whine about my 5:30 a.m. personal training sessions, 7-hour IRS Vita training, or picking up 19 hours of overtime at work. I’m more productive than ever and understanding the purpose of growing/learning pains makes the process easier, and even fun.
Short-term discomfort is necessary to achieve long-term gains. Understanding that discomfort is part of a greater process gives it purpose and makes it easier to work through. Sometimes I wish I had this mindset back during college, but I trotted out of undergrad and law school just fine.
“Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.” – Brenda Ueland
Living in the present is something I’ve done a lot lately because my schedule finally filled out. I go to bed early, wake up for personal training at LA Fitness around 5 or 6 a.m. and then go to work. Evenings are filled with dog walks, tax training, or a second trip to the gym. Then it’s a beverage and a T.V. show.
The Netflix show of choice was Damages but now I am onto The Kennedys, which is ironic considering one of my favorite books is Libra.
Some changes are in order though. I need to get back to the Jillian Michaels / natural foods diet and redouble my efforts at the gym. I want to lose my stomach so I can walk around the office with semi-high-waisted pants like Leo in Revolutionary Road. Minus the cigarette of course…
I also need to get back to my Ableton time. It’s been too long and I need to finish my album.
Things pleasantly busy though, and I feel fortunate.
My second-round interviews for the job are also this week. The position sounds amazing and I just hope the second-round interviews are as fun as the first-round interviews.
These certainly are exciting times, even with the lack of high-waisted pants.
Oh, and randomly, here’s my song of the moment…
That random break and the great people I’ve met along the way have allowed me to create a career for myself. That is why I try to recommend my qualified friends for open positions as strongly as I can without being obnoxious.
Besides this week’s Microsoft Store drama, things were profoundly uneventful this week. I now know why middle aged people are fat – all I want to do after work is drive home, walk the dogs, eat fattening things, and go to bed. That’s all.
It’s terribly frumpy but I do not care.
My landlord probably posted a new ad on Craigslist because this morning my phone gets bombarded with calls from hoodtastic prospective tenants.
Some of the callers hang up on me when I tell them the building income requirement. Others hang up upon learning that their felony record and two month old unlawful detainer is a problem.
I am in Dinkytown when my phone rings for the 5th time. I am en route to buy a $30 xeroxed reading packet for my Weimar Cinema class. It’s my elective, and my only other class besides the tax clinic.
I need a FAQ page on this blog. I usually respond to questions via twitter, but my new readers keep asking the same question: “Why don’t you write more about dating or work?”
My answer: discretion. This blog is fun, but not sloppy.
Contrary to popular belief, there is a filter here…well, sort of. One trick I learned as a resident assistant in undergrad is that clean living is the simplest way to avoid projecting dirt, so I try not to do anything that I would have a problem with broadcasting on the world wide inter-web.1
That means that there is less to filter, which my life easier, because filter refills are expensive…
Amber is raging about the office today. Amber’s father is a dog breeder and coaxed her into running a Twin Cities kennel club, which apparently1 has caused some drama:
I went to Barnes and Noble after work. I wandered the store looking lost and bewildered. If I wasn’t in my work clothes they would have mistaken me for an invalid that ran away from his court-appointed guardian.
This was the first time in months that I was in a bookstore for pleasure. I used to love Barnes and Noble, but today everything looked ridiculous. There were aisles romance novels, get-rich-quick, find-jesus, John Grisham-bootlegs, and Jillian Michaels1 with her dominatrix glare.
Oh and Twilight. The horny-teen-vampires were everywhere. Harry Potter has been replaced by werewolf abs.
All of the magazines looked terrible. J-Lo was famished. Ashton Kutcher was airbrushed. Paula Deen was cracked out and Oprah looked tired.
I bought Writer’s Digest and drove home. The magazine is still in the bag. I am tired and can’t be bothered.
I leave for Miami on Thursday, so my days consist of getting up, going to work, coming home to walk the dog and sleep. No one is forcing me to work full time over the break, but I have a job, and that job is contingent on me being a student. Without any guarantee that my company will hire me after graduation, I cannot justify working less than full-time now.
Barbri expenses are around the corner. Rent. Emergency fund. Coffee. I’m a chipmunk hoarding acorns for a long winter.
Plus work is fun. I’m with classmates and students from other schools. Someone is always has a story about a professor, family member, interesting case or class. There’s coffee, constant laughter, and yes, a paycheck. Novels and magazines can wait. Things are fun right now.
1 And you know I own a Jillian Michaels book (see here)
Amber does not appreciate the fashion sense of one of her classmates, Zeb.
Zeb is a 2L at Amber’s law school and is about my weight – not obese, but too big to wear skinny pants and man leggings.
Amber: “So I’ve seen his ridiculous snow boots and I’ve seen the skinny pants. But what amazes me is that I’ve never seen Zeb repeat an outfit! So he has a huge closet full of clothes and EVERY SINGLE PIECE is ill-fitting and inappropriate.”
See also:
I had a “do not park” moment at work today: I was listening to RuPaul’s “Looking Good, Feeling Gorgeous” when I decided to look up the lyrics. It’s okay to take a break right?
My computer did not approve of RuPaul because I had just finished reading the lyrics when my computer shuts off.
I spend the next five minutes trying to turn it on and then 30 more minutes on the phone with tech support.
Tech Support: “It just turned off?”
Me: “Yep. And every time I try to turn it back on it sort of starts, and then shuts right back off.”
Tech Support: “That’s weird. We’ll fix it Monday.”
So I guess the 20 hours of work I was going to put in this weekend are not going to happen. More time for Tax law?
Jack is the only other intern at work today, so of course I have to trip right by his cubicle. My cases become airborn and crash everywhere.
I’m scrambling to pick up the cases when Jack spins around in his chair with a huge Cheshire Cat grin:
Jack: “You do that a lot don’t you?”
Ugh.
I pull two apples from my bag at work:
Me: “Ugh.”
Jack: “What?”
Me: “These aren’t organic so you can see the pesticide residue at the top of the apple. Jillian Michaels would not approve…”
Jack: “Ew, yeah. You’re gonna to have to wash those.”
Me: “But the sink is so far away… I should just…”
Jack: “Don’t. Just go and wash them. Stop being lazy.”Fine.
So I’m walking down the hallway to the bathroom to wash the apples and decide that it would be a good idea to juggle them.1 I haven’t juggled anything since third grade so it was only a few moments before I launch one of the apples down the hallway and give chase…
The apple flies past the cafeteria doors and I almost plow into a janitor before snatching up the apple like a baseball.
Janitor (calling by back into the cafeteria to another janitor):“Hey, Marty! The interns are playing fetch again!”
I grunt, flush, and scurry away…
1 It’s Saturday, so the office is fairly deserted. I don’t juggle fruit during the week…
I came home from work yesterday and opened my car trunk to fetch my laptop bag.
I love the trunk of my car. It’s clean and smells amazing because I spilled an entire bottle of febreeze in it…
In my trunk is a big plastic bin where I keep my car-stuff: windshield wiper fluid, sanitary wipes, car brush…etc.
The lid was off the bin and I noticed the label for the first time:
Now, if I had seen this last week I would have sat in the middle of my driveway and laughed. But after reading Termination of Parental Rights1 cases for the past week, I thought, “Oh, that label is a good idea!”
The thinking like a lawyer bit? I think that happened today.
1 Aka, real-life horror stories. Seriously. These cases are a hot mess… the parents are a mix of Amy Winehouse and 50 Cent, minus the record deals.