Pomodoro

So lately I’ve been getting a bunch of questions about my time-management and work-life balance, so I thought today I’d just quickly share what I do and how I do it. Basically, this blog is the tip of the iceberg of the reading and writing I do, with many drafts about many other readings waiting in the wings to be polished up and posted, and significantly more that is never destined for the blog at all. It’s not easy to determine how many hours a day I need to spend reading for my qualifying exams (I do at least two daily, but it’s not unusual to do as much as twelve or fourteen), writing up the notes on those readings, writing my own research, reading for my own research, reading for classes, writing those notes, and researching and reading and writing for those classes too. It takes some juggling.

Part of what’s challenging about this lifestyle in which you are constantly overwhelmed by the work you need to do, very little of which you can easily finish in a normal eight-hour workday, is that we have huge blocks of unstructured time. This quarter, I go into campus two days a week, on Tuesdays for classes I’m taking and teaching, and then Thursday for the lecture for the course I’m assisting to teach. For some reason, some people I talk to seem to think this equals a four day weekend. I have to laugh, because if PhDs took four day weekends, it would take us fifteen years to get our degrees, and nobody wants that. What it really means is that I have five days of unstructured work time, four of which are consecutive. There are no days on which I do not read for a minimum of two hours, and very few days where I do not write a daily quota of two pomodoros (more on that in a sec) or 1000 words minimum. Normally I will read for two hours straight every morning before doing anything else. It’s honestly a pretty easy part of the job to get up at 6, make some coffee, and climb back into bed with a novel till 8 or 9 am, and it’s nice to feel like you’ve accomplished a daily task so early in the day.

It’s the writing that’s a little harder to figure out how to time-manage. Writing does not resemble a job like brick-laying, which is going to more or less require the same level of effort/time to lay. This means you can estimate how many bricks can be laid in a given hour by a given person. If the average is 1000 a day, then the guy who did 800 had a bad day, and the guy who did 1200 is doing great.  There is a measured and measurable expectation of productivity which makes assessment possible. Writing is not like this. Writing is a mercurial task. Sometimes you get the odd unicorn day where it just pours out of you comfortably and easily. Most of the time it’s hard work, and you remember that old Hemingway quote: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed” at least once as you sit there. And then there are the bad days, when you stare at the cursor malevolently blinking at you, and nothing comes. Those are the worst.

In terms of work-life balance, mental wellness, and the cultivation of a professional persona, those bad days are hard on morale. An unproductive day is a bad day, for the writer and the academic, as we measure (and ARE measured) largely by our output. So even if you had the best idea you’ve ever had in your life that day, unless you can put it on the page, it’s a bad day. When you do an eight hour day that yields nothing, and your materials are your brain and your words and your creativity, it can feel like you’re worth nothing. Our work is highly individual, and that lends a different, more personal quality to the nature of the labour we perform than, say, the labour of a person who sells DVDs at the HMV megastore. This is in no way an assessment or judgment of how hard these types of work are, if they can be compared at all. Rather, my impression here is that while all labour is soul sucking, writing is soul sucking in a more personal way, as it is fulfilling in a more personal way too, than, say,  ringing up movies all day at a cash register was for me.

It also means that the strategies in place to deal with the bad days need to be different person-to-person. There are as many strategies out there as there are people who use them. I’ve tried a lot of different ones, but the one I use the most is called the Pomodoro technique, or a version of it I’ve customized to my own work style.

The way it works is that you use a kitchen timer to help create focused windows of productive time. I put my phone and iPad onto airplane mode. I turn the wifi off on my laptop or I activate the SelfControl app if I need to be writing code. I keep a notebook and a pen in front of me, and my word document open in front of me, and I write. That’s it. You can write “I hate this why god why did I think this was a good idea please can’t I go back in time and just be an investment banker who hates her life in a NORMAL way because at least then I could afford avocados whenever I wanted them” over and over again for the entire allotted time. But you have to keep going. The one rule is Get it on the page. Paper or word processor. Doesn’t matter. But you have to keep writing until the timer goes off. No reading, no stopping, no distractions. If I get an idea or remember something, I’ll jot it down in the margins (Renew library books/ Check this reference/ find quote!) but that’s it. It’s HIIT for your writing.

Tons of people have a version of this, but this one is mine. A friend of mine is an occupational therapist who focuses on neuropsychology, and her dissertation focus was on the biomechanics of productivity. She told me about an article she had read that showed that productivity in the human brain usually taps out after 50 minutes, so I tried that out and now I like to do 50 minute Pomodoro intervals. I take ten minute breaks in between, and do a maximum of three before stopping for at least an hour. Doing 4 just burns me out and then, as my friend Bryan says, “you can’t chop with a blunt axe.” So today’s workday looks like this:

I read for 3 Pomodoros (50 on, 10 off, 50 on, 10 off, 50 on), had breakfast, and practiced the flute for an hour. Then I did my writing Pomodoros: 2 Pomodoros (50 on, 10 off, 50 on. Then I wrote this blog post (another 1000 words but I don’t count these to my academic writing quota). Now that I’ve hit my minimum quotas for the day I’m going to the gym, and then I’ll assess what kind of work I feel like continuing with in the evening. I think I feel like practicing Italian, and doing a few hours of work on a research project I work for. I don’t use the Pomodoro intervals in the evenings because their only purpose is to keep me on track for my daily quotas. Then I’ll read in bed until I fall asleep (Heart of Darkness tonight) and wake up and do it all over again. And that’s my life! I think it’s pretty great.

 

Macarons and Defenestration: The Adventures of Christopher Circumflex

This is the story of Mr. Christopher Circumflex, a swashbuckling piece of text who boldly went on many fascinating adventures. For breakfast every morning, he would eat commas and apostrophes (he loved Italic food) and was often praised for his appetite, though he tried not to let the adulation go to his head. 

His hobbies included

• water-skiing
• macramé
• and tight-rope walking

although sometimes, after he had eaten too big a breakfast, the tightrope line would break

.

.

.

and he would fall through the air and land hard on his asterisk. He took these falls with good grace, however, and, would brush his hands off on his breeches, laughing as if it were all in good fun.

He’d read about much worse falls altogether. Indeed, his friend Sir Tilde had told him just the other day, over tea, of a particularly dreadful fall out of a window  and into a WAR, if such a thing can be believed (everyone knows windows are for looking in as one browses, not being pushed out of, and besides, Sir Tilde was prone to hyperbole.) But he insisted it was true, and even pulled up a photograph of the window in question, mumbling half-apologetically about it all happening eons ago, and who can know what really happened:

 

In the afternoons Christopher would go and play the links with his friends, Sir Tilde, Fräulein Umlaut, and Monsieur Cédille, who had a terrible lisp, and would fly into a French rage at the thmallest pertheived thlight, and would only be placated by the liberal dispensation of pistachio macarons, which his friends kept about their person for just such a purpose.

As such, while cookies are the most commonly used form of baked good to smooth passages from link to link, in the case of these friends, their traversals ended more often than not with them brushing sticky green crumbs out of the lining of their tweed jacket pockets, and muttering under their breath about the French.

Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

Surfacing is Margaret Atwood’s second novel, published in 1972. These are my reading notes.

The narrator is a complex woman in search of her missing father, and as the novel unfolds, we are given snippets of her history. She lived on an island in rural Quebec. Her mother died of brain cancer. Her father has disappeared. Her brother drowned off the end of their dock before she was born. She got married and had a child, and then got divorced and abandoned her husband and child. Her parents never forgave her divorce, or her abandoning the baby. But the unnamed speaker is an unreliable narrator. Later on it’s revealed that she was never married to the man, but that he was her married art professor, and that she did get pregnant from their affair, and he took her to an abortion clinic to terminate the pregnancy. We cannot be sure she ever told her parents she got married or had a baby, or that their forgiveness or lack thereof ever had a chance to manifest itself. The only material evidence of any of this, really, is that she wears a gold wedding band, and the first time she mentions it she claims it makes things easier at motels, and with landladies. In a similar way, her “drowned” brother only nearly drowned, but was rescued and survived the incident with no consequence. He’s not actively present in the novel except in her memory, since he seems to live in a remote part of Asia and cannot be reached; she isn’t even sure if he got the news about their father’s disappearance. The only other detail we hear about him, and he is also unnamed in the novel, as are her father and mother, is that he used to capture small animals and would torture and experiment on them in a makeshift laboratory on the island. At one point, the narrator discovers them after he had neglected to take care of them for a while, and found half of them starved or frozen to death, and the other half she released back into nature, much to her brother’s fury when he found out.

In terms of the novel’s atmosphere, the story opens with the narrator going home to rural Quebec to look for her missing father. It’s a fascinating portrait of a Quebec that has, for the most part, vanished today. Atwood has an eye for details that are dated, that feel distinctly mid-century, and that are beginning to decay or go out of style – the fringed clothes, the winged cars, the advertisements they pass on the road. Atwood also emphasizes an element of Quebec culture, Catholicism, that lost its grip in the 60s during the Révolution Tranquille in which people moved away from the church:

“A clutch of children playing in the wet mud that substitutes for lawns; most of them dressed in clothes too big for them, which makes them seem stunted. “They must fuck a lot here,” Anna says, “I guess it’s the Church.” Then she says “Aren’t I awful.” David says “The true north strong and free” (16).

This serves to put forward the divide between the French of Quebec, who at the time of writing were in the throes of a nationalist movement, and the rest of North America. Anna (who the narrator claims is American but then later contradicts herself) remarks on what she perceives to be a soci0-cultural difference, and the comment makes her seem disrespectful, coldly superficial, and unsympathetic. In that moment, Anna is awful, but it’s not for the reason she thinks she is. To her, and perhaps by extension also the two (maybe) American men in the car with her and the unnamed narrator, Joe and David, Quebec is an uncanny sort of place, in the Freudian sense of the Unheimliche. Rather than being entirely foreign, like a country in Europe would be, and rather than being familiar, like the way Americans have the potential to feel at home in an Anglo-Canadian space, the cultural landscape of rural Quebec is uncomfortably familiar and yet utterly foreign, and it’s an unsettling ethos our four travelers find themselves in.

The unnamed narrator, who unwaveringly identifies as Canadian, and grew up an Anglo-Canadian in French Canada, is like her “American” counterparts, and cannot help but feel the same disturbing, uncanny tension between the familiar and the foreign. Her first stop on her quest to find her father is to visit a French Canadian couple who knew her parents:

“I wonder what they think I look like, they may find my jeans and sweatshirt and fringed over-the-shoulder bag strange, perhaps immoral, though such things may be more common in the village since tourists and the TV; besides, I can be forgiven because my family was, by reputation, peculiar as well as anglais. I lift my cup, they are watching me anxiously: it’s imperative that I mention the tea. “Très bon,” I manage to get out in the direction of Madame. “Délicieux.” Doubt seizes me, thé may be feminine.”

This is such a great passage because it brings home the alienation that anglophones can feel in situations like this. It’s not that you can’t speak the language; you can, and you do, but to make even the smallest mistake, or to have an accent that betrays you, is to announce your alienation, instantly and uncomfortably, to your auditors and to yourself. And it’s a particularly cruel alienation for someone who was born there and has lived there all her life, because it means that she not permitted to feel at home in her homeland. So what is this person, this belittled, beleaguered member of a linguistic/cultural minority, to make of” Quebec nationalism, when she is culturally un-homed by her otherness, her peculiarity, her anglais?

This is underlined in the second interaction the narrator has with French speakers in the novel. After taking tea with the couple, who are inclined to be friendly towards her, especially out of sympathy for the death of her mother and subsequent disappearance of her father, she stops to buy groceries, and tries to conduct the transaction in French.

“Avez-vous du viande hâché?” I ask her, blushing because of my accent. She grins and then the two men grin also, not at me but at each other. I see I’ve made a mistake, I should have pretended to be an American.

“Amburger, oh yes we have lots. How much?” she asks, adding the H carelessly to show she can if she feels like it. This is border country.

“A pound, no two pounds,” I say, blushing even more because I’ve been so easily discovered, they’re making fun of me and I have no way of letting them know I share in the joke. (30)

This scene is exceptional for its depiction of vicious, mundane cruelty enacted  with depressing regularity the world over. It is also something that Atwood’s writing has in common with Alice Munro’s: the ability to convey, in an almost offhand manner, the small ways in which the ugliness of human nature instantiates itself into daily life, quietly and insidiously. The tone of the writing is calm, accepting, easy even, and that is part of what makes both of these women’s writings so disquieting sometimes. Their representations of human interaction are not fraught with judgment, moralization, or even the suggestion that there’s a better way to be. The writing just flows forward with (maybe more so for Munro than for Atwood) a spare grace that creates chilling tensions at times. It’s brilliant.

Here is one of my favorite lines from the book that the narrator utters, and that exemplifies the genius Atwood has for cuttingly prescient statements (at time of writing, Trump is to be inaugurated at the end of the week): “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results” (34). The instance of evil that stood out to me in the novel was the part with the blue heron. The narrator and her friends are portaging a canoe across some land to get to an inner lake when they come across a blue heron that has been killed and strung up from a tree with blue nylon cord. She is profoundly shaken by this because there is no reason to kill a heron – they are not pests, they are not dangerous, and they are not good for meat. She knows immediately that this was done by Americans, stating that they kill for pleasure, and out of boredom, and that it’s the only thing a certain kind of man does for leisure, now that he’s back from the war and there’s nothing to do. Yet when they encounter the men on the lake, she is surprised to find out they are Canadian, from Sarnia and Toronto. The narrator doesn’t buy it though:

“But they’d killed the heron anyway. It doesn’t matter what country they’re from, my head said, they’re still Americans, they’re what’s in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference […] If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do” (152).

This sheds new light on her prior assertion that her three traveling companions, Anna, David, and Joe, are American, when in fact they are all Canadian. It creates a narrative tension, broadening the divide between herself and these three. Only she and her family are unnamed in the novel, and it may have something to do with the fact that she cannot situate herself and her family geographically, culturally, societally, or in any other way. We know that the three traveling companions do not speak French, and that at least one of them is from Ontario for certain. I think it’s likely that they are all Anglo Canadians from English Canada. We know that Paul is a pure laine French Canadian from Quebec too. It seems that the most stable characters are the ones that are the most clearly or easily situated in the socio-political/geo-cultural map. The American man, Bill Malmstrom, (the only actual American in the novel, besides Evans, the guide) who comes up to make an offer on her father’s house, is easy to pin down – David even suspects him of being CIA, although I think this says more about David being a fanciful ass than it does about Malmstrom. The narrator’s family occupies a confusing liminality that makes them impossible to situate on that map, as recluses, as Anglo-Canadian minorities in French Canada, as a peculiar family, and as people who individually are impossible to locate. The mother is deceased, of course, and the brother is gone but not missing, and the father is impossible to find. Over the course of the novel, he occupies a Shroedinger-esque state of simultaneous alive/deadness. She thinks he must be dead, and then that he must be alive, and is on the island with them, watching them, waiting for them to leave, and evading attempts to discover him. It is an intensely creepy part of the narrative, almost Gothic in its quality of pervasive unease.

The end of the novel shares this near-Gothic quality as well. The narrator, falls into madness, but her psychosis has an undeniable internal logic. This is part of what is so disturbing about Surfacing; the insanity  feels quite sane more often than not. She decides she needs to get pregnant to replace the child she lost (she characterizes the child as “lost” like it was a miscarriage or something beyond her control… which in some ways maybe it was). She has sex with Joe, the boyfriend whose marriage proposal she has recently turned down, and who earlier that day had had sex with Anna (Anna’s life revolves around cheating more on David than David does on her. Their marriage is a stalemate of mutual hatred and cruelty which they sustain because to do otherwise would end the relationship, and they are a pair of co-dependent narcissists). Joe mistakes the narrator’s sexual advance as forgiveness for his transgression with Anna, but the narrator is beyond caring at that point. She believes she knows she is pregnant, and the next morning she destroys the film canisters of the movie the men were making, and runs away, hiding in the woods until they leave. Then she gets rid of her clothes, wearing only a blanket while she waits for her animal pelt to grow in because at this point she believes she is going to turn into an animal, and trashes the house, and builds herself a den outside like a woodland creature. She eats things from the garden, but is soon on the point of starvation. She walks the island, having moments of ice-clear lucidity (a fairly common symptom of fasting/starvation) and hallucinates that she can see her dead mother standing in the yard, feeding the jays from her hand. The novel closes with Joe coming back to find her, and he stands on the dock calling her name. She stays hidden, deciding whether or not to go back with him. It seems like she does choose to go with him, but it is not depicted with any kind of certainty. She calls her love for him “useless as a third eye or a possibility” (224) and she can see the kind of future they would have together, acknowledging the probability of failure. She also sees that he “isn’t an American… he is only half formed, and for that reason I can trust him” (224) and then she … what exactly? It’s not clear. She seems to decide to go to him, but still she does not move: “To trust is to let go. I tense forward, toward the demands and questions, though my feet do not move yet.” (224) and this is how the final scene ends, with Joe waiting, and with the narrator poised to come forward to him, yet not moving.