You know what they say about the best-laid plans. But I've always placed a lot of pride in my ability to set goals for myself and then achieve them. I can't escape my midwestern upbringing, my nose-to-the-grindstone attitude. So I made those plans anyway.

My dad once told me that if you want something done well and on time, you give it to a busy person. Well, I'm a busy person. So when I want something done well and on time, guess who does it?

But the last few years have made me re-evaluate some of my attitudes towards work and in particular over-work. I know I'm not the only one going through this -- we're approaching two years with the background panic of a pandemic that we can't quite get under control, of the constant uncertainty and the continued grinding of the capitalist gears. In academia, the posts early on were rampant: we should all be grateful for the pandemic--it's how Isaac Newton came up with calculus, after all! I won't get into the criticisms of these various posts, of how they both encourage extremely unhealthy behavior and manage to drip privilege at the same time, of how they utterly miscalculate the uneven burdens of this pandemic. That's already been done, and extremely well, by others. But even though those critiques have been made, the attitude still lurks under the surface (and in some places, it doesn't even bother to hide): that we should be able to just put our heads down and get our work done. That we shouldn't let anything slow us down. 

Even before the pandemic, I was already starting to reassess my priorities. Graduate school burned me out. I limped to the finish, gasping through my zoom dissertation defense right around the time everyone was saying the lockdowns would end in about two weeks. Maybe four. I already knew, even before I understood that we were in for a long, slow struggle, that I didn't want to live as I had in graduate school.

I wanted to actually live. 

I shifted my job searches, focusing on small liberal arts colleges where I could actually be more fully myself, where the people I talked to had values that aligned with my own. I got one of those jobs, and I started it this fall, and I have been deliriously happy ever since.

But I apparently didn't get the memo about overwork. As happy as I am, the first semester as faculty is no joke. I've worked more hours per week this fall than I have since my first year of graduate school. I've done this intentionally, because it matters to me that my students--who are all bearing the burden of returning to campus after a year and a half away, to expectations that have really not adjusted to take into account the burnout of the last year, to constant fear of outbreaks, and to a pre-existing culture of stress and overwork that has led to a mental health crisis at colleges across the nation--know that I am here for them. That I'm in this fight with them. That if they give me their best effort, I will meet them where they are and help them get through to the end.

I don't regret this at all.

But maybe I should have considered my own energy levels when I signed up to write 50,000 words in November, the busiest part of the semester.

I made it, in the end, to just over 15,000 words. The first 15,000 words in my new project, a gothic horror that shares absolutely nothing with the trilogy I've spent the last decade of my life on, aside from the inevitable thematic questions that have sunk themselves into me and won't let go. I'm building a new world, birthing new characters, exploring new ideas. It's a heck of a lot of work.

If you hold my 15,000 words up to the goal of 50k--if you hold it up to the 60k, 70k, even 100k that some people cranked out this month--it looks bad. It looks like a failure. And it is, in a way. I set a goal, and I failed to achieve it. But as I tell my students repeatedly: failure is an opportunity. I've learned the most important lessons from failure. I've grown the most as a person as a result of failures. And I've found my joy because I've failed at things and been forced to re-evaluate.

My gothic novel still lives. I sat down this morning and wrote some ideas down that came to me last night. I just need some time to rest, to refill the well. I've got some pleasure reading lined up for the weeks after the semester ends, and I'm going to actually enjoy it. And I will keep drafting, even if it's just a slow drip of words, because this story wants to see the light of day. And if I can't meet an arbitrary deadline, so be it. It's not all-or-nothing. This book won't join the corpses of other failed NaNoWriMo projects just because I didn't get 50k in November. I'm allowed to choose the pace at which I work. I'm allowed to rest.

So I'm damn proud of that 35,000 words worth of failure. I'm proud because I can look at it and be okay. I used to be bad at failing. I used to take it really personally. I used to tell myself that failure meant there was something fundamentally wrong with me. But failure is just a message that something needs to change. And I'm finally learning to read that writing on the wall instead of scrawl mean words to myself over top of it.

I'm proud because I'm finally learning to listen to myself. To see failure as an opportunity for growth, as a message from my body and my heart to that little pocket of my brain that's always screaming at me to work harder. It's a message that says life is far more complicated than we like to pretend it is, and that success isn't about getting everything right. It's about choosing to live according to what matters, even when that choice looks an awful lot like failure.

Back when I started graduate school, I realized that if I wasn't careful how I spent my time, I could lose hours to trying to solve a few problems for one of my courses while leaving the others neglected. I was faced with a mountain of work and high expectations (one well-meaning faculty member sent us spreadsheets with recommended time on things which added up to a 90 hour work week before meal breaks or commute time). I knew I didn't want to spend 13 hours a day seven days a week working, so I would have to be really intentional about what time I spent and where I spent it.

This led to adopting a time tracking practice. I set goals for the major projects I knew I needed to spend time on and then tried to do my best not to go over those goals. But the most valuable thing I got from my time tracking practice was actually in looking back at the way I'd spent my time over the week. It was really enlightening to see where my time was going, and it helped me to cut out practices that weren't helping me (ahem, obsessing over social media, for example). 

There are lots of ways you can track time. You can go the old fashioned route and make note in a paper journal of where you spend your time, jotting things down as the day progresses. You can use a spreadsheet (there are tons of templates available online) and then track patterns if you're a data nerd like me. I happen to like the app route, because I can just tap a category on my time tracker (I use ATracker, but there are tons of options available) and it will start tracking. Then when I'm done, I just tap the category and it ends! I can also add things in after the fact if I forgot to start the timer.

Tracking my time helps me see when I'm losing hours to administrative tasks or when that pesky revision I thought would be a breeze actually robs me of many writing sessions. But time tracking is just one tool, and what I learned from it inspired me to get even better at time management.

One of the things I realized when I started tracking my time was how fragmented it was. I might spend 30 minutes on one project before getting distracted and losing another 30 minutes to emails and then try to get back into that project again, but just feel super stuck. It turns out there's a word for this: attention residue.

Attention residue is when you task switch, but your brain is slow to catch up. We can't actually change gears as fast as we think we can. Our brains are still processing what we were just working on when we move on to the next thing, and the more often we switch, the more pronounced this lag is. If you want to do better work with less time, the best way to do that is to make sure that time is batched in large chunks. As described in DEEP WORK, by Cal Newport, 90 minute chunks are a good length for this, and the human brain can really only tolerate about four and a half hours of this kind of deep mental work in a day, so don't block out 9am-5pm as one long deep work session. 

The folks at doist have actually put together a really thorough guide to the topics covered in DEEP WORK, so check it out, and if you think you'd like to learn more, the book by Cal Newport is available at bookshop.org.

But what about when you just have too many things on your to-do list? I can relate to this feeling. It's a pretty constant state of my existence to be overwhelmed by the number of tasks on my list. One of the hardest practices for me is saying no. I'm terrible at it. But I'm learning that it's necessary to do this if I want to prioritize the things that matter to me.

A great tool for dividing up that overwhelming to-do list and figuring out when to do each thing (or even whether you should do it) is an urgent-important matrix. If you search this term online, you'll come up with tons of articles about them. The central idea is this: take each item on your list and ask yourself two questions about it.

1. is this urgent?
2. is this important?

How you define urgent and important is up to you, but urgent items are time-sensitive in the short term, and important items are things that will have consequences (ACTUAL consequences, not just you feeling guilty) if you don't do them.

Once you've labeled everything as urgent/not and important/not, you place them in the matrix.

​But if something is neither urgent nor important, then why are you spending your time on it? (Obviously this disregards pleasurable activities, but this is meant to be used in the context of the workplace. I would argue that there are no consequences aside from my feeling bad if I don't read the next N.K. Jemisin book, and there are no deadlines attached, but I sure as hell am gonna do it).

The last tool I'll mention is less of a tool and more of a regular practice. One of the hardest things about having two careers is the way the workload can pile up and fill me with a sense of dread and overwhelm. Practicing mindfulness is the best way to break out of that cycle and be more intentional about how I'm spending my time.

Mindfulness doesn't have to be a 30 minute meditation every morning or a regular yoga class. It's more about being present and thoughtful and reflective. Take a few minutes every day -- maybe set an alarm on your phone -- and just pause and ask yourself how you're feeling. Explore a little bit what's going on and why. Are you feeling stressed and overwhelmed? Are you feeling peaceful and relaxed? Starting to notice these things can help prevent that automatic mode we can often get into when life gets busy. Ask yourself why you are doing things, and really explore how they make you feel.

One of the ways I'm mindful about my work is by journaling. I keep a bullet journal as well as a personal journal, and I check in a few times every day to see how things are going, to notice my mood and whether I've been spending my time well. I ask myself whether I'm pushing through on some project that's stalled, and would it be better for me to move on to something else until inspiration returns? I ask whether I even have the brain power to be creative or if maybe I should check off some of those little mindless tasks that pile up but still need to be done and which I can't delegate.

However you choose to do it, being thoughtful and intentional about how you spend your time is going to help you manage your writing career and your day job with a little more peace and a little less reactivity. And that, in the end, will make the whole process easier.

I hope that sharing this set of tools and resources I use has been helpful. It took me years to build up these practices, so be kind to yourself as you try them out. It takes time to establish healthy habits, and it's always better to focus on one change at a time instead of deluging yourself with a whole new set of rules. So pick one and test it out, and see how it goes for you.

For those who have not read up on why the whole internet seems to be talking about sea shanties, a quick recap:

It all started with a post on TikTok by Nathan Evans, who posted himself singing the sea shanty "The Wellerman."

Lovely even on its own, but this little ditty was destined for more. Evans had been covering sea shanties for a while, but for some reason, this one took off. Other TikTok users began to add to it, filling in the harmonies across vocal ranges. 

If you have time to do a deep dive and watch this particular TikTok user layer on harmonies from bass all the way up to tenor 1, I highly recommend it.

But this isn't even close to the end. Others added their harmonies to the piece, including additional voices on the melody. ​And finally, a fiddle was added, giving some instrumental accompaniment to this lovely vocal arrangement.

I say finally, but really this process is anything but linear. There are endless combinations out there now, as different people add on to the song in various stages. If you search "sea shanty TikTok" you'll find dozens of different combinations, end even remixes and mash-ups. It's a beautiful, organic, meandering process.
​
Music has been a large part of my life from very early. My mom has a guitar that she would sometimes bring out in my childhood and strum some folk tunes. Her influence instilled in me a deep love for Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell and old Irish folk songs. My dad's status as an ultimate Beatles fan has given their voices a permanent, nostalgic association with some of my earliest memories, like a soundtrack for my childhood thirty years out of place in spacetime. One of my biggest regrets to this day is abandoning my piano lessons in my early teens when I grew bored with the compositions I was learning.

Neglected piano aspirations aside, I'm still a musician. I've sung in choirs for most of my life. In fifth grade, I joined a children's choir, and aside from a few short breaks during intense periods in my post-secondary education, I have been part of a choir ever since. I met most of my closest friends through making music together. Music builds ties between people. It's hard to create something together and not become closer. It requires coordination, communication, listening to each other, connecting to the same beauty and enhancing it in a way that is not selfish.

And music is full of pathos. There's a reason we score movies and television shows. There's a power to music even when we only experience it. Its power is in what it makes us feel.

I've been embedded in music my entire life, and it has been embedded in me. And in the last year of social distancing, I've mourned that hole in my life. 

And then sea shanty TikTok arose. Some might call it the unlikeliest of trends in today's climate of fear and anxiety and loss, while others might call it a fitting acknowledgment of our current state. Sea shanties contain many elements of the current human condition: a deep sense of yearning, the ever-present awareness of danger, and the urge to stubbornly push on, beating our oars against stormy seas, knowing that once we are in the midst of it, the only way out is to go through.

For me, this movement was a much-needed revival. To see a group of complete strangers come together (virtually) in a time when we are all  tired and frightened and anxious and sad in an act of such spontaneous, generative creativity - well, it almost makes me wish I was on TikTok. Almost.

One of the reasons I am motivated to write is that I want to find beauty and hope in darkness. The human experience is so complex. It contains such highs and lows, and it is capable of great destruction - and great creation. This viral trend - here one day and gone the next - is a microcosm of the good that we have in us. It's a fleeting reminder in the darkest of times of the healing power of music, and the beauty in humanity that gives us something worth saving.