Taking Stock

This paragraph from a post today at Lifehacker caught my eye, for obvious reasons:

The final week of 2009 starts tomorrow, and amidst all the travel and gift-giving and family drama, be sure to make time for the ultimate life hack: an honest, year-end self-assessment....Things at the office are slow, phones are quiet, calendars are clear, everyone's on vacation, you're getting zero email, and you can get away with ducking out at 4pm without anybody noticing.

Since the crickets are certainly chirping in the library today, I thought I'd take their advice and post my own stock taking today.

Looking back on 2009
This has been a pretty rough year for me, all things considered.  On the bright side, I've had some nice professional accomplishments: I survived my probationary review for continuing appointment, I became a YouTube sensation on the Library Minute, I was invited to present at the State Library Institute, I successfully recorded a podcast and organized an exhibit for Open Access Week, presented a well-received preconference at this year's AzLA Annual Conference, and just today submitted a comment on behalf of my library on the OSTP's Public Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research.  I also feel like I've managed to maintain a pretty-good attitude at work despite a full year of constant uncertainty, and in a lot of ways, I've grown and settled in my position.

Despite those positives, I've felt more adrift this past year than I have in recent memory.  I didn't accomplish any of my New Year's Resolutions - I seem to have lost interest or drive midway through the year.  In fact, many of the activities that I usually enjoy have fallen by the wayside this year, like regular exercise, playing music, or taking pictures.  I may have found some degree of comfort in my position, but it's hard to stay motivated when I don't know whether I will have the same responsibilities next month.  In many ways, I feel like I've just been hunkered down, hiding out for most of the year.  I didn't even really realize it.



I also fell down on a few major professional goals - I didn't write any articles, and many of the things I've put forward have been denied, for example, applying for the Scholarly Communications 101 Roadshow, and a presentation proposal for the next Computers in Libraries Conference.  These have been disappointments, to be sure.

Looking forward to 2010
The thing is, the uncertainty about my job isn't going away any time soon - more "task forces" and "thoughtful consideration of recommendations" are taking place, no real actions yet.  If I'm to find any peace or inspiration at all, it will have to come from within.

I'm only going to make one resolution for 2010, and that is to find my passion, or in the words of Zen Habits, to find my Amazing Work.  This  doesn't just apply to my career, but to all aspects of my life - I want to identify what really gets me excited and then focus more of my energies on those things.  I feel that I've always just drifted along and, often, have taken the path of least resistance.  I think it's about time I made a bit of an effort to bring more focus and energy to my life.

I read a lot of great stuff about productivity when I was working on my preconference, and one of the ideas that really resonated with me is the idea of using monthly themes to help make improvements or accomplish tasks/projects - again from Zen Habits:

Pick a theme for each month. A lot of people like to set goals. Well, I don’t. I find that goals give me too much anxiety because I’m always measuring myself up against what I could have done better. So instead, I like to set a theme for each month and focus my energy on that. This month, my theme is improving my ability to focus. Less email checking, distractions, and more highly focused, deep concentration work.

So this year, I'm going to pick a theme for each month that will bring me closer to my overall resolution.  Hopefully, this will help me accomplish my goal.  I'll post each theme at the beginning of each month and talk a little about my progress as the year advances. I'll post the first theme at the beginning of January.

From the Lifehacker post (linked above) that started all this pontificating:

Imagine December 31st, 2010. What will your list of accomplishments look like? Write those down. Then, make a list of steps you need to take to make 'em happen.

This is what I'll be doing over this last week of 2009.


Okay, and one more resolution: I want to learn how to make really awesome breakfast eggs.  :-)

December in Phoenix

As I was riding home today, I saw a boy sitting behind a card table in front of his house, with a sign that said, "Fresh squeezed orange juice - 5 cents/glass." I was happy to see someone partaking of his wares.

Productivity Toolbox

This past Monday, I gave a 3-hour preconference for the Arizona Library Association Annual Conference highlighting my exploration in to various methods of kicking my own butt and becoming more productive. I think it turned out well - all the attendees seemed attentive and engaged, and I hope they found some tips that they will take home and implement. Anyway, here are my slides - I'm working on designing slides that are still interesting when I'm not blathering on with them.

Productivity Toolbox

View more presentations from Grumpator.

Email Test

I'm testing out the email function on Blogger by which I can specify a few folks to receive an email whenever I post.  I often forget that not everyone is as addicted to an RSS aggregator as I am.

If you'd like to receive an email notification, leave a comment or send me an email.  I will state, however, that I will only add you to an email list if I know you.  Otherwise, you're stuck with RSS.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Chris had the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off, so I took a day off as well.  We've had a blissful 5 days off in a row, which is truly something to be thankful for!  It's only been marred by Chris having a lingering cold since Tuesday.  The joys of teaching and being exposed to every illness known to children!

The cold has encouraged us to take it especially easy - I haven't left the house since Thursday, and our social activities have been purely with family (and virtually).  Thanksgiving itself was lovely, we enjoyed a great day with the Perrys, ate ourselves insensible, and played a rocking game of Agricola (Chris and I won). We also paid a brief visit to my folks, and hope to plan something a bit more substantial with them for Christmas.

The Peter Perry clan came by to watch Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets yesterday, which was fun for me, but Chris was not feeling well.  It's fun to see Ruth remember what happened in the book and try to restrain herself from plot spoilers for her mom and Esther.  Esther was quite snuggly, and both girls were entertained by Maggie, who was hamming it up for all the attention she could get.  That cat knows how to play to a crowd.

My main "fun" activity this week has been fiddling with my various computers.  I did a clean installation of the full Windows 7 on my PC, which wasn't too painful, but has taken up quite a bit of time.  Due to some legacy systems and laziness on my part, my music was stored in multiple places on my hard drive, so I had some reorganizing and de-duping to do.  I also seem to have lost my Christmas Card address labels file, which is surprising since I know it was in the folder I backed up.  At least, I thought it was!

Related to addresses, I'd been meaning to investigate Google Sync for managing my contacts and calendars with my iPhone.  iTunes makes me nervous when it's always asking me if I'm SURE I want to sync my phone with my work and my home computers.  Yes, I am sure, I know what I'm doing - I hope.  But I thought Google Sync might reduce all that confusion - only to discover that I can't use Google Sync because the iPhone will only allow 1 Microsoft Exchange account, and I use that for my work email.  I like having my work email on my phone, so no Google Sync.  But I thought I'd try using Google to manage my contacts anyway.  I've never liked Outlook for that purpose, and that's the only reason I'd install MS Office on my computer.  I thought that when I synced to Google, only the contacts in the "My Contacts" group would be used (which is the case for Google Sync).  That was a big mistake - all 200+ contacts associated with my Gmail, including everyone to whom I've ever sent a message, were downloaded to my phone.  I spent a few hours searching for a solution, but there doesn't appear to be one other than to weed down and update all of the contacts in my Gmail account.  I'm resigned to doing this now, but am a little paranoid about missing someone - which is why I noticed my Christmas Card address file was missing.  But in any case, once I get the contacts in some reasonable state of organization, it shouldn't be that hard to maintain.  They probably could use some updating anyway.  As for my calendar, well, I'll just keep syncing it with Outlook at work.

Not to be left out of my tech-twiddling, I bought a wireless mouse for my new laptop (now dubbed Duncan).  However, the silly thing won't boot if the USB fob for the mouse is in - it freezes on the HP screen until I just turn it off.  I chose a Logitech wireless mouse for the sole reason that the USB fob is tiny enough that I can just leave it in the port and ignore it.  But now I have to remove it whenever I want to boot my computer. I'm still searching for a fix to this.  I'm also slightly miffed because the exact mouse I bought on Wednesday at Fry's Electronics was on sale yesterday for 50% off.  That'll teach me to avoid Thanksgiving sales.

The last item on my agenda for the weekend is to put up my Christmas decorations.  I'd better get started on that.  I've been pretty absent from the internet lately, but now with Duncan and all sorts of twiddling and tweaking to be done, I'll probably be lured back in - Dragon Age and Borderlands notwithstanding.

Mission of Librarians

Here's my professional inspiration - probably will keep me going for a while.  Man, I'm sad I missed Charleston this year!



David Lankes is always fantastic!

No drama

We've had a blissful lack of drama for the last couple of weeks, which really is just a return to normalcy.  Charlie can eat hard food, he is just now so spoiled on the soft stuff, he won't touch it.  We've been mixing the tiniest bit of soft food in with the regular kibble and he chows down, crunching away.  Put a regular bowl of food in front of him and watch a classic cat snub.  We've decided to keep doing a mix through this week, but next week it's back to normal.  Hopefully we can hold out longer than he can.

It's been nice to have a day off today as we've spent quite a bit of time hammering out the rest of the insurance details.  It's all worked out as much as it will be at this point - the resolution is not quite what we would have preferred, but it's better than nothing.  Insurance, in general, often feels like a big scam to me.  We pay money every month to help guard against the day you might need real help, but when that day comes, they turn it into an even larger hassle, arguing about this and that, prying into details that don't concern them.  I feel that socking our insurance payments away into a special savings account would be a better safeguard.

I ordered a new laptop.  Will post more about it after I get a chance to play with it!

Okay, back to my officially sanctioned slacking off.