{"id":271,"date":"2005-02-06T12:34:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-06T16:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=271"},"modified":"2005-02-06T12:34:00","modified_gmt":"2005-02-06T16:34:00","slug":"managing-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=271","title":{"rendered":"Managing work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After an &#8220;I&#8217;m overextended!&#8221; panic entry last week, a far-flung colleague recommended David Allen&#8217;s <cite>Getting Things Done<\/cite>.  I looked at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidco.com\/\">associated website<\/a>, and it&#8217;s clear Allen is a &#8220;workflow&#8221; consultant whose primary m.o. is a set of streamlined (and updated) to-do lists.  I&#8217;m familiar with to-do lists and have had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/tasks\/\">mine<\/a> on the left side of my web page front matter for a year or more.  I&#8217;ve managed the time crunches over the past year quite adequately with to-do lists.  When I feel overloaded, that&#8217;s my crutch:  &#8220;Okay, time to make a to-do list.&#8221;  I get through the crunch, relax, and &#8230; the to-do list drops off my mental landscape.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nI don&#8217;t like to operate in a crisis mentality, and that&#8217;s what I associate a list with.  Though I haven&#8217;t read the book (I may if I have time when it comes into the library!), I suspect this mental association is the secondary issue with getting mildly behind (apart from being overcommitted&#151;the list I drafted this morning has 18 items for today, and I just thought of a 19th).  I think of to-do lists and my heart starts racing.  So many things!  When I operate by the seat of my pants and routines, no problem.  Some things get dropped, but my life doesn&#8217;t feel like a set of pressures and neverending deadlines.  And closing in on 20 years in academe (including grad school), I&#8217;ve done quite well by this method.<br \/>\nThe challenge:  can I relax when I think about to-do lists, enough to work with them and keep them as part of my routine rather than as a stopgap measure?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I feel overloaded, that&#8217;s my crutch:  &#8220;Okay, time to make a to-do list.&#8221;  I get through the crunch, relax, and &#8230; the to-do list drops off my mental landscape.  I don&#8217;t like to operate in a crisis mentality, and that&#8217;s what I associate a list with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-comments"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-4n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}