8/13: back to bases
For the past few days my schedule has been largely set by other people rather than myself--a definite transition from summer-ness. Today, though, I got to chart my own course, and I returned to a habit I developed a couple of years ago to make sure that I don't get lost or imbalanced in my days. I make sure that I try to touch 4 different "bases" in some way in a day: 1. communicating with someone other than Chris (what I call the "outside world" base), 2. doing something related to my job or my research ("professional" base), 3. exercising (corpus sanum!), and 4. taking on some task related to the house or my own well-being (dubbed "house or self"--it may be strangely significant that I automatically combined these into one category when I devised the bases years ago...where does the house stop and the self begin?). Today I fulfilled the 4 bases by writing to my friend Katy, updating my program's webpages and writing emails to a student and a professor, going to the walking track, and buying a stylus and a keyboard for my iPad (which I've been meaning to do for quite some time but have kept putting off). Of course, those things didn't fill the day, but focusing on them and getting them done gave me momentum which helped me stay on track as I moved on to other things.
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2 comments:
As a baseball fan, I love the idea of bases. I am now going to steal this idea!
Hi, Sandy--I first devised the bases plan when Chris was working at Governor's School over the summers. He was gone for so much of the day, leaving me big chunks of alone-time, and I tended either to float distractedly from thing to thing or to bury myself completely in one thing and become super-focused just on it. The bases were a way of creating some kind of middle ground (a bid for a well-rounded life?). Different people might choose different bases, but as a general strategy it's held me in good stead. Steal away!
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