Surrender to Pocket Robot, Part 1

A student came to office hours this week with a few questions about class material. At the end of our meeting, though, she had another question. She’s had an extraordinarily busy semester balancing school, work, extracurriculars, and some kind of personal life. How, she wanted to know, do I find balance? How do I find balance?

Honestly, I’ve never known how to answer this interesting question, or the more irritating sister question of “how do you do it all?” (Answer to that one: well, you do what you have to do to pay the bills, and also I don’t have any children to care for, which goes a long way.) What is balance, really? Especially when a big part of your job involves doing what you do for fun anyhow?

This did not really answer the question, but I did find myself explaining my system of organization, which I haven’t written down in a long time. So in brief, here’s what I told her. It’s got digital and paper components.

To preface all of this: the key for me is finding ways to take decision-making out of my day, leaving all that executive functioning free for creative work (or at least for work). So if I can instruct myself to do something ahead of time, then I won’t have to remember to do it that morning. This is Productivity 101, but for years I was like, it’s fine! I’m smart! I’ll remember to take my vitamins in the morning. But writing everything down and letting my little pocket robot tell me what to do, while dystopian, is far more effective.

This is also why I have found this cookbook to be an INCREDIBLE godsend this fall. I have cooked all but the last week, and they’ve all been delicious and extremely healthy (with minimal dairy, too). Each week has a grocery list and weekend prep instructions, and then every weekday you follow the instructions to combine the ingredients a little differently to make a new lunch bowl or, let’s face it, dinner bowl (which is what we sometimes do). It takes me about 90 minutes on the weekend to do the prep work, but once it’s prepped I just have to spend 10 mins every evening making the next day’s meal. I don’t have to make a single blessed decision. That frees up a bunch of overloaded brain space.

And I do, in general, keep all my work to the weekdays. Weekends are for chores, meal prep, reading and research, and relaxation or hanging with friends. (And sometimes moderating opening weekend Q&As; the movie business does not bow to my scheduling will.) Except for the absolute most nutty times of the semester, I can pretty much pull this off; it also means when I’m writing a book, I can confine the actual writing to about a weekend or so a month (I write fast) but at least I know that time is there. None of this “get up at 5am” nonsense will work for me, especially since I write every day for my job rather than by choice anyhow.

Now to the apps.

First, I have a fine-grained Google Calendar setup that I look at multiple times a day because otherwise I literally don’t know what’s going on. I don’t use it to block out time to work, or that sort of thing, because it gets too cluttered. But when I fire up my calendar I see two major categories: my own appointments and events in one calendar, and another one (in another color) for events that Tom and I share, like concerts, dinners with others, and grocery delivery windows.

I also have two full-time jobs, which means I have Google Calendar accounts at both of those jobs that administrators and editors and other people put things onto sometimes — story meetings, committee meetings, and so on. I frequently go through and “duplicate” the events that pertain to me onto my own personal calendar (Gcal makes this easy) so that I don’t miss them and so that I don’t have to show all of those calendars in my own app. The goal is to only see things that I, personally, need to attend, prepare for, or travel to.

I run all this through Fantastical. So this is roughly what my calendar looks like:

The events with stripes on the side are duplicated between calendars. The purple calendar is my personal calendar; the yellow ones are the shared calendar. The orange ones up top are in a separate calendar where I keep track of film release dates for movies we want to cover at Vox.

Second, I use ToDoist, which I settled upon after literally a decade of trying every list-making app out there. There are many, many reasons I love this one in particular. It’s very extensible and granular, its setup for repeating events (absolutely vital) makes sense, you can create custom filters and labels — and, most importantly, it integrates with Google Calendar if you pay for the premium version, which means that items from your calendar populate onto ToDoist and any tasks with times attached to them populate onto your calendar.

I put everything in here, and I use the priority labels (there are three) to help order them roughly in order of my day. So everything I need to do when I first wake up (that day’s workout, take blood pressure reading, pack lunch, do a quick DuoLingo lesson) gets top priority. Then my workday starts, with everything marked as second priority — articles to write, people to call, things to prep or grade for class. Then, as I cruise into late afternoon, the third priority items kick in. There are usually some non-priority items, but they’re often just, like, “drop off package” or “defrost chicken” — things that take no time to do at all.

There are a lot more bells and whistles in ToDoist that I take full advantage of. For instance, I file things by which job (or at King’s, by which class), and apply a label that tells me basically what the task is that I will need to do: Write, Edit, Grade, Prep, Read, Watch, and there are a couple others. But more importantly, I set up filters so I can quickly see what needs doing in different contexts. Here are those filters:

I think that’s pretty self-explanatory, but it means that, for instance, I can pop open the “Vox for two weeks” filter when I am in a meeting with my editor and know what I have coming up. If I have time to read, instead of flailing around wondering what to read, I check the “Read this week” label and see if there’s anything I need to get to.

Here is what the ToDoist page that I open every day looks like, roughly:

That’s actually tomorrow because I don’t have much left to do today!

This is all super simple, but it took me so, so long to figure out a system that worked for me. And this wouldn’t work at all if I didn’t couple it with a weekly paper-based ritual, since anything digital flies out of my head the second I look away from the screen.

But this has gotten rather long. So I’m going to hold off on the paper-based part until next weekend. If you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to send them along and I’ll answer them next week!

Been writing

• I wrote about Robert Greene’s immensely important and brilliant new film Procession, which is now streaming on Netflix. It’s important you don’t skip this one.

• I was also delighted to write about Mike Mills’s new film C’mon C’mon, in theaters this weekend, which tries to stop time a little.

Been reading and watching

• I started my friend Isaac’s upcoming book The Method and it’s so, so good. As I told another friend recently, it’s a little unfair how good it is, especially since I am reading partly to see how he pulled of what I’m hoping to do with We Tell Ourselves Stories. Having brilliant writer friends is a blessing and a curse.

• This week I saw a bunch of good movies, but the one worth mentioning is Tick Tick Boom!, which is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directing debut, a smartly adapted version of Jonathan Larson’s musical (pre-Rent), starring Andrew Garfield and basically every Broadway actor alive. It’s on Netflix now, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it!

Odds and ends

• I tweeted about this stuffing biscuit recipe that I’m psyched to try for our big Thanksgiving feast, which we’re co-hosting at a friend’s apartment this week. I’ve got other stuff to make as well — a lot of other stuff actually — but these just sounded too fun not to try.