Sharlotka, radish salad, and doing my best

November 29, 2022 lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova1 Comment

This Thanksgiving we had the usual American Thanksgiving foods (turkey stuffed with apples, plum sauce because I’m allergic to cranberries, and stuffing, recently introduced by my magnificent and magnificently American boyfriend/partner Cory). We also had radish salad made from radishes I grew in our garden and sharlotka, an apple sponge cake.

Radishes

First I will tell you about the radishes. I grew them myself, planted as a bit of an afterthought in the pumpkin patch because they do well in the shade and therefore do well with pumpkins. Under my grandmother’s advisement I left the hose out in the sun for a bit and watered them with warm water. They did shockingly well; we are now enjoying my second round of picked radishes and there are still plenty left for a third. The exact seed mixes I used are here and here (referral links, so I get a small commission).

I grew regular pink radishes, purple radishes, daikon radishes, watermelon radishes, and black radishes. All the exotic radishes had less intense flavor than I was expecting: the daikon radishes were a bit like watered down regular radishes, the black radishes were a bit like turnips with a radish flavor, and the purple radishes had a bit of an onion-like flavor—nonetheless all radishes, maybe more tolerable than the usual radishes (I like the usual radishes, I just can’t eat too many at once). I dragged the radishes from Boston to a friend’s wedding in LA and then to South Carolina to my family (my bag/”personal item” was mostly radishes, my laptop, and a pair of heels). Here’s more or less what the radishes looked like, minus a few radishes because we’d already started to eat them.

My mom made some of the black and purple radishes into a gorgeous, delicious salad (left) and the daikon radishes into another gorgeous, delicious salad (right):

We all thought the salad was very special and delicious especially because the radishes were fresh and also because we could probably taste that I remembered to water them every day (amazing).

Sharlotka

My mom also made sharlotka (шарлотка), Russian/Eastern European/former Soviet Union apple sponge cake distantly descended from the English charlotte (sharlotka translates to little Charlotte). It’s a really cozy comfort food kind of cake, light and moist with a sweet crunchy crust and with apples inside baked just so they’re soft but barely still crunchy.

Here’s our family’s recipe, for my own reference and maybe for yours too—

apples
4 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1 big cup flour (“big cup” meaning 250 ml—mom says “technically a cup is 200 ml”)

Chop up unpeeled apples and put them on the bottom of your baking dish. In the mixer, add the eggs first and beat until they are white. Then add the sugar, then add the flour. Bake at 375 F for about 35 minutes, though it’s hard to tell for sure how long. You’ll know it’s done by the color of the crust. You can also touch the crust: it shouldn’t give too much.

Here’s the process:

Here’s how it turns out:

Doing my best

The radishes were particularly special to me because they were a very proud and successful accomplishment requiring months of sustained effort.

One of the lessons/epiphanies I learned (or just drilled into myself with some but not a lot of success) this year is about doing my best. My whole childhood my parents encouraged me to do my best, and especially as it applied to school whatever my grades were was fine with them as long as the grades actually reflected my best. Clearly that worked out but this year, when I was practicing for my driver’s license, aka driving, I decided that actually doing my best is not usually such a good approach.

When a person is driving, for example, they probably shouldn’t be doing their best. Ideally, a person should have such a reserve of skill and experience and muscle memory that their best is completely unnecessary, to such an extent that they could even be a bit distracted or upset and still be a decent driver. (They might even be thinking about the concept of doing their best, and they should have enough buffer to not run a red light or a stop sign. Should.)

And then I thought that probably this applies to most of the rest of the things I do. If I’m coding, for example, I can put on a movie and my code will be just as bug-free as it is usually, because I’ve been coding for 18 years and because I learned in undergrad how to add safeguards to make my code as bug-free as possible. Sometimes I work a lot harder—when I’m implementing a new algorithm or when I need to solve a particularly challenging problem or when I’m chasing one of those dumb four-hour bugs. But even then it’s something I’ve done a lot, and I’m comfortable with it.

I’ve noticed this year that ideally, if I have the necessary skills to do my work, and if I have not overextended myself, and if I am working in a healthy, sustainable way, I should not need to do my best. If I find that I am doing my best that is something to investigate. It might be that I am learning a new skill, which happens often and is not a bad thing but requires extra caution to avoid errors. It might be that I have too much on my plate, which means I need to try to find balance, and soon, and probably need to find partners to share my work with, otherwise delegate, or evaluate my priorities. Or it might mean that I am working on a short-term but very important project, in which case I just need to survive until it is over and make sure I am doing at least the minimum to maintain my health. (Our Cell paper, for example, was a time when I absolutely did my best, but it was not sustainable.) That kind of effort, at least for me, is how I’ve usually done everything but it only works in short bursts, and carefully.

When I successfully studied for and got my driver’s license, I did not do my best. First, my dad taught me how to drive stick shift and then I didn’t sign up for a road test and then I went to college and then a decade went by. Then I practiced on my and my partner’s first car, a 2001 Highlander that made sounds I recorded and sent to my dad every week, with my licensed and very brave partner in the passenger seat directing me around very narrow Cambridge streets where side mirrors go to hospice. Then when the Highlander failed its inspection I scheduled lessons, more or less once a week, and I showed up. I took the commuter rail and then the orange line or the red line and I arrived at the designated place at the designated time with the designated amount of cash, somehow never late (though I did forget the cash once and a kind and very smart coworker who unlike me still carries cash lent me the money), and I drove around for 45 minutes with my brave and patient instructor who had and used an instructor brake, and I did that more or less every week. I was terrible at it, then great at it, then terrible again, then more or less okay more or less consistently. I scheduled my road test, did pretty poorly, and somehow passed. This kind of workflow is new to me. I didn’t do my best—I allocated the time, I showed up, and I did the work, a little every week, and then I looked back and I saw that the goal was achieved.

The same thing happened with the radishes. I planted them, I watered them every day, I reluctantly (with Cory’s help and insistence) culled them when I had to, and then some months later I had radishes—and then I had radishes again, and there are still more that might grow even bigger, more radishes than I know what to do with.

What happens when a person does their best

As evidence that doing your best is a bad idea, here is our gingerbread house, which we made in earnest as a family:

The Summer of Shit

Unrelatedly I am reminded all of a sudden that there was one summer recently but pre-pandemic when, no joke, a bird pooped in my eye on two separate occasions (two separate birds, presumably, but I can’t be sure). I wear glasses (all the time, or I’d walk into a pole (with my luck a pole from which a bird is just taking off)), so that means the bird would have needed to aim so precisely between my glasses and my eye, at just the right angle, just slightly closer to my eye than to my glasses. Twice.

I remember one of the incidents was under a stoplight, which is probably why I had trouble noticing them while learning to drive. Something about repressed trauma.

An Early Resolution

Since my driver’s license/radishes revelation I have been trying to apply some kind of sustainable, gradual-progress type of workflow to all my work. It is very different from how I usually or naturally work, which is in short, passionate bursts followed by long periods of burn-out. (Of course, because my work is tangential to public health and the pandemic specifically I don’t always get to work sustainably, but I am trying when I can. (Not trying my best, though—as just established that is not the goal.))

Gradual, sustainable progress requires difficult planning and facing reality, the former of which I enjoy and the latter of which I do not: breaking a goal into small steps, being realistic about how much I can get done and prioritizing my goals accordingly, and doing those steps bit by bit every day or every week, with or without passion, efficiently during the day rather than in happy bursts of hyperfocused all-nighters. I haven’t entirely gotten the hang of it, or figured out how exactly it works for me specifically: do I, for example, work on one project on Mondays and Wednesdays and a different project on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do I let myself follow my interests, so long as I make a bit of progress on each of my active projects every week? Or do I work on each project a little every day, perhaps optimized by the type of work I do best in the morning, afternoon, or early evening? Maybe, since school worked so well for me, I should break my day into two-hour “class periods,” giving each project a class period and stopping when the time runs out?

(So far, it’s looked like working on whichever of my active projects I’m most excited about at the moment, switching when I get stuck, and getting unstuck during the semi-rest/not thinking about it of working on the other project, like epiphanies showing up in the shower but instead more like epiphanies showing up while I’m working on something that is at the moment more fun.)

Figuring out a productive, happy, sustainable workflow is one of my goals for the remainder of the year and for the year to come—or in other words, to do the work I care about in a productive, happy, sustainable way and learn how to do that as I go.

Reaching

This is my favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. She’s reaching for something in the water—reaching quickly, judging by her hair. She’s definitely not going to get whatever she is reaching for, because she is a statue, and every time I see her she is still reaching. I like the motion captured in her body and her hair and I like that the water is also a part of the sculpture, and that the reflection of her hand is also part of the sculpture.

The Fates

This is my grandmother’s favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. The three fates: one spinning the thread of life, one directing it, and one cutting it.

Lights

Brookgreen Gardens is a magical place to spend Thanksgiving, because it is when they are in the midst of decorating for Christmas and you get to see their progress from day to day. They put up every conceivable kind of light in every color, including lights in glass bubbles floating in fountains. It’s an enormous, unimaginable effort by many volunteers. My favorites are these string lights hanging from a small forest of oaks and a few other trees at the edges:

Butterflies

I was talking with a volunteer who told me that the paths in the gardens were originally shaped like a butterfly, proboscis and antennae and all, and butterflies are special in the gardens. Then he pointed out to me that the ceiling was covered in butterflies glowing gold in the lights. He had put them all up the previous day. Apparently there were monarchs before but they switched them out. My photos absolutely do not capture the overwhelmingness of the quantity of butterflies, but this is what they look like:

New Fruits

We didn’t get to spend Rosh Hashanah together so we marked one of our family traditions for the new year (which we do sometimes on Rosh Hashanah, sometimes on the calendar new year, and sometimes both) both late and early over Thanksgiving: trying some new fruit.

This year’s new fruit was a kiwano melon. We spent a few days admiring its exterior (we didn’t google it so as not to spoil the surprise). We were very surprised when we cut it open that it was bright green. It was like a sweet-sour cucumber:

I dragged it along with a bunch of mangos, avocados, a papaya, dragon fruit, and four varieties of persimmon in a trash bag together with my radishes as a carry-on when I realized in LA that I had a carry-on for my flight to South Carolina, that I wanted to use that free space for fruit, and California had more exciting fruit than the non-Florida East Coast.

Here is a kiwano melon and a dragon fruit:

Ocean

And here is the ocean on the beach, and a bird flying over the ocean on the beach.

Gratitude

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for:

sharlotka
an excellent crop of radishes
a garden for my radishes, and for our other crops, and all the crops that grew
my mom, who made the radish salads and the sharlotka
my grandmother, who taught my mom how to make sharlotka
my dad and my brother, who in addition to being wonderful also give the sharlotka and the radishes and the radish salad their whole purpose (my dad loves radishes, and my brother loves food)
my family abroad
my partner Cory
our housemate
Cory’s family
all our friends
and our health and survival
the covid vaccines
modern medicine—oh, especially modern medicine
that I get to do work I’m passionate about, and that I get to choose what I work on, and that I get to chase ideas down rabbit holes, and that, though I would of course prefer it be more money, I get paid money to fuck around and find out, irrespective of whether or not I actually end up finding out anything of value
my dissertation committee
my mentors and coworkers
the people who made my career and my life possible, at various stages
my growing ability to apply sustained, sustainable effort towards a goal and achieve it
and my progress in no longer doing my best, when possible
our Cell paper (omg!)
my driver’s license (yay!)
new fruits and new experiences
no bird poop in my eye yet this year

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ten Strategies I Use to Work Through Burnout or Mild Depression or Scatterbrainedness (and Other Low-Motivation Moments)

February 21, 2022October 9, 2022 lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova7 Comments

I spent a year in seventh grade at Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago before my family moved to Pennsylvania. At the start of the year the seventh graders were counselled to be working all the time, and efficiently—if you’re in the back of a car, you bring your textbooks and you work; if you’re on the bus, you bring your textbooks and you work; if you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, you bring your textbooks and you work. I think that year was the year that set me on track for the rest of my career—seventh grade was the year I learned how to work hard, high school and then undergrad at MIT was where I learned my limits and how to work through and around them, and grad school has been where I learned to self-motivate and direct that work (and I am very much still learning). MIT and grad school (and life) have also both taught me that work should not be my top priority, and that prioritizing work above all else does not end up being productive or happy for me in the end.

I don’t think I’ve ever been able to work through actual depression. But more minor or time-limited depression, or even burnout, if I can’t take time off, I have found I can work through, and I use the same strategies for standard low-motivation days or days when it’s just hard to get started or days when I’m scatterbrained or overwhelmed or can’t get myself to focus—Mondays, or days when I intend to work on a challenging task, or Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Thursdays or Fridays.

Here are ten strategies I use to work through burnout or mild depression or scatterbrainedness and other low-motivation moments—

I. Make it a priority to take good care of yourself.
II. Clarify your goals.
III. Reinforce your reward system.
IV. Rolling for Initiative: remove decisions.
V. Group tasks with similar tasks or with things you enjoy.
VI. Schedule as many tasks as you can.
VII. Join or form an accountability group.
VIII. Pomodoro.
IX. Do as much of a task as you’re willing to do.
X. Schedule breaks, accept your needs, and give yourself time.

I. Make it a priority to take good care of yourself.

Sometimes when I am having trouble focusing it helps me to first go through a checklist of my basic needs as an organism with a corporeal form:

drink a glass of water (1 minute)
clean my space, especially the space where I will be working—this tends to be speedier than I expect and have an outsized effect on how put-together I feel (5-30 minutes)
light exercise, like a jog if the weather is nice or spinning the stationary bike if the weather is not nice (10-20 minutes)
go for a short walk outside, especially with our housemate’s dog Pixel (10-20 minutes)
meditation (3-10 minutes)
eat a nice meal, especially a nice, large breakfast—preferably something with protein, carbs, fat, and some fruit and/or vegetables (20 minutes)
get enough sleep, ideally in one big-but-not-too-big chunk at night like a respectable adult human person (hours and hours)

This is my list of things I need to do to feel physically well. Maybe you have other things you need to do to feel physically well.

All of this takes some time, but I always feel at least a little better after going through it, even if I can only get myself to go through two or three of these items. The time it takes to do everything other than sleep is usually a few hours, which is a lot less time than I am capable of losing to unproductive unhappy scattered feelings. Even if I step away from productivity entirely and spend a day on this list and nothing else, I am usually far more productive with far less struggle when I return the next day.

One month when I was feeling very stuck I found the Fabulous app to be helpful in reminding me to prioritize my health and giving me nice little dopamine rewards for doing some of the above things.

I use Headspace for meditation. I like that there are meditation series, which give me some continuity and a feeling that I am building something, as well one-off meditations on specific topics that I might want to focus on in a given moment. I also like that I can customize the length of time I would like to meditate, because sometimes I feel up for meditating for ten minutes and sometimes I am only up for meditating for three minutes. Lately, I have been meditating on the commuter rail on my way to or from work.

Here are some photos of my fancy breakfasts:

I like pickles and brie as a combination, or brie and chopped prunes, or brussels sprouts chopped small and fried, or oats with bananas and blueberries or bananas and cinnamon, or oatmeal with jam, or toast with butter, or an omelet with some vegetables, or some deli turkey, or maybe some chocolate or some berries.

If you like pancakes and you like oatmeal and you think you might enjoy a combination of pancakes and oatmeal, here is a recipe I like:

Mash a banana, the more overripe the better.
Mix in an egg until you can’t tell the banana and egg apart.
Add between half a cup and a cup and a half of oats, or however much that the mixture looks to be about the consistency in the photo below and more or less kind of has some structure.
Add a bunch of cinnamon, however much cinnamon is the amount of cinnamon you like (I like cinnamon).
Heat some olive oil on a pan on medium heat.
Spoon some of the oat mixture onto the pan. I like to make four pancakes at a time.
Once the bottoms are solid enough that the pancakes can be flipped (you can tell by looking at the edges or poking under them with a spatula), flip them. Once the new bottoms are solid enough again, transfer to a plate.
Repeat until you’re out of oat mixture or patience.

I don’t usually make it through the entire amount in one meal, so I usually end up storing leftover cooked pancakes for the next day’s breakfast or snack.

This is a tricksy food. It does not seem like a large meal, but the dry-ish oats keep expanding once they’re in your stomach and absorbing moisture and you can feel nice and full for a long time and trick yourself into eating a good amount if eating is a challenge at the moment—and a banana and oats and an egg are not the worst thing to eat a lot of.

II. Clarify your goals.

The point of this exercise is take the disorganized, scary, overwhelming pile of tasks in your brain (or at least that is the natural shape of tasks in my brain) and convert them into an organized, approachable, actionable system that is not overwhelming and is actually usable.

I use Notion, which I first learned about from the current generation of MIT Admissions bloggers, specifically Kathleen E. ’23.

Digitally (easy to edit) or on paper (no distractions), write out everything you need to do or would like to do. This can be a very long list, and that is okay.
Decide which things can possibly be delayed or dropped, including meetings on your calendar. When I feel very overwhelmed, removing things from my plate helps me feel much better rather quickly. Send quick messages to the people who are counting on you for those things or are planning to meet with you and ask for extensions or to reschedule. This can be challenging, but do it and do it quickly and move on. People are usually very amenable to delays or reschedulings if those delays or reschedulings are clearly communicated and do not happen too often.
Decide which things you would like to focus on today. Make this set of things small and not overwhelming, maybe just one or two things. (You can always add more things later, if you get these done.) I recommend starting with things that are weighing on you—for me, that’s things that I have external pressure to complete, things that I worry I will let someone down by not doing. From these, start with the fastest things, because getting them done will feel like a weight off your shoulders and remove a bit of suffering and that will make the next task or set of tasks easier and the next day happier.
Start a new document or chunk of document with just those few things you are focusing on today. Write out in detail and in order every step you need to take in order to complete the tasks, breaking the tasks down into the smallest possible steps—small like “find and download file X,” or “write a paragraph about Y.”
Emphasize (highlight or make to have a dark font) those tasks that you can do now, that don’t depend on other tasks. De-emphasize (cover up or make to have a light font) those tasks that depend on things that haven’t happened yet.

This is your to-do list. Hopefully it is composed of small, doable tasks, and doesn’t contain any big tasks or big-picture goals. Try not to think about things that are not on this list.

I go through this process about weekly, on Sunday night or Monday morning, adjusting it as the week goes on or I gain new tasks or new information about my tasks or priorities. During the week I select small tasks from my large, digital to-do list for my daily, pen-and-paper to-do lists.

III. Reinforce your reward system.

I try to give myself some nice dopamine whenever I complete a task or move in a direction that I find productive or which contributes to my goals. The primary way I do this is in my to-do list notebook. My to-do list notebook is sacred to me. I buy a new one every year, identical but in a new color, and I carry it everywhere.

Every morning, or the night before if I can manage, I make a list of my tasks for the day, work tasks in a column on the left and self-care or other non-work tasks on the right. I include things I want to do that are not tasks but which I want to make sure I make time for, like calling my family or reading a chapter of a novel or building a Lego with my partner Cory. I write this list with my fancy flowy pens.

Every day, I select a gel pen for the day, sometimes a sparkly gel pen with glitter in the ink. I use the day’s gel pen to cross out tasks I complete. I cross out each task three times, with three lines, so I get to experience the joy of crossing out the task multiple times. When I complete a task that was not only on today’s list but also unfinished on a previous day’s list, I cross it out from each list it appears on, which means I get an extra rewards for completing a task that has taken me multiple days (or weeks) to get myself to do.

When I complete a task that brings me closer to a larger goal that is important to me, like a paper or another project I am working on, I give myself a shiny star. I also give myself a shiny star when I complete a task that is an important and challenging self-care task, like exercising or meditating. I stick the star in an empty part of the day’s page in my to-do list notebook, next to my to-do list. I write a short description of what I did to earn the star and I draw an arrow from the description to the star I earned.

I try to give myself my sparkly task cross-outs and star stickers as immediately as possible after I have completed a task, to make sure I associate the reward with the task.

I keep my to-do list notebook open next to my laptop all day as I work. Throughout the day I like to look over at my list and look at how nicely my gel pen cross-outs glitter in the light and how nicely my stars shine in the light. It is extra nice to get to see all my progress as glitter and sparkle; it is very, very satisfying.

In undergrad at MIT I kept my to-do lists in Habitica, formerly known as HabitRPG. You create a little virtual pixelated avatar. You list out your tasks on the site and when you complete your tasks your virtual avatar is rewarded. You can earn pretty outfits for your avatar and you can earn cute pixelated pets or steeds, some of them very exotic and fun, like octopuses (a famously exotic and fun animal) or mammoths and baby mammoths. You can go on special quests, which can last days or longer. It’s very motivating and fun. Habitica was very popular in my very nerdy dorm, Random Hall, and got me through a lot of challenging and overwhelming weeks at MIT. Habitica is also cited by one of my favorite authors, Mary Robinette Kowal, in the acknowledgments section of her latest book, The Relentless Moon.

Here is my Habitica avatar:

For some reason, another thing I have found helpful is Animal Crossing. I didn’t play video games as a child and am now very bad at them, but I do play Animal Crossing (and it is the only video game I play). I like that Animal Crossing rewards me immediately for doing small tasks. Somehow the feeling transfers over to real life—especially when the real-life thing I am doing feels like a slog with a distant or intangible reward, playing Animal Crossing seems to retrain my brain to remember that I should feel rewarded when I make progress. I found Animal Crossing bizarrely helpful for my motivation when I was studying for my qualifying exam, which felt endless. It’s an effect beyond just feeling refreshed from taking a break—Animal Crossing seems to remind me that positive feedback is possible and that I am capable of completing tasks.

Here I am being a grad student obsessed with little libraries and being comfy with books in Animial Crossing just like in real life. I am full of exactly no surprises.

IV. Rolling for Initiative: remove decisions.

We call this strategy Rolling for Initiative. I do it almost every day. I learned it from friends from MIT. It is one of my favorites.

I find Rolling for Initiative to be day-saving on days when I feel overwhelmed and can’t figure out how to prioritize, or when I feel unproductive and can’t get myself to feel willing to do anything. Sometimes, the thing that is holding me back from starting a task is that either the decision to start a task or the decision of which particular task to start becomes a huge hurdle. Often (almost always), the actual choice made matters a lot less than that some choice is made—and that there is some forward movement.

First, I make a list of the tasks I need to do, usually by clarifying my goals using the previous two methods. I make this list in my sacred to-do list notebook (above), but you can make your list anywhere. This list always also includes non-work and non-urgent tasks and self-care, like cleaning or laundry or meditation.
I also add activities that I am genuinely interested in doing, like reading a book or going outside for a walk.
Looking through my list, I identify the six tasks or activities that I find the most tolerable at the moment, that I actually feel able to engage in from whatever happens to be my current state. I number these tasks one through six. If I am not able to identify six tasks that feel tolerable, I give the most tolerable-feeling tasks two numbers.
I roll a dice. Whatever number it lands on is the task or activity I engage in.

I use my partner Cory’s fancy DnD and board game dice. I use a new die every day. It is a fun ritual to select the die that feels best today (and matches my to-do list gel pen for the day). Sometimes I have more than six tasks I want to choose from all at once (or selecting six tasks is itself too challenging a decision), and then I like to use a die with more faces.

Here is our very modest dice collection:

V. Group tasks with similar tasks or with things you enjoy.

Like in Rolling for Initiative, the goal here is to do whatever it takes to remove the challenge of starting a task.

If possible, pair something you don’t want to do with something you do want to do. If Cory and I want to run but also really don’t want to, we run to a nice destination. When we lived in Cambridge, Cory and I ran to Union Square Donuts once a week on the weekends. We ran and we got donuts at the end. I also pair laundry or cleaning or exercise with television. Lately I have been watching documentaries: on eugenics and Prohibition and Mark Twain and Hemingway and tuberculosis. If I’m watching a documentary it is easier to exercise or clean or do another task that does not actually require my eyes and ears.

You can also decrease the challenge of starting a task by removing the “start” part of it by tacking it onto the end of a similar task. If you need to write a bunch of emails, write a bunch of emails, instead of writing each email on its own. Task-switching is really hard for me—I find it a lot easier to do a task that is similar to the preceding task I did. (Of course, if “write a bunch of emails” as a task is overwhelming, then maybe just write one.)

VI. Schedule as many tasks as you can.

You can also make it easier to start a task by turning it into a routine. Where possible, try to do things at about the same time or in the same sequence every day. If you run or go for a walk right before lunch, then it becomes easier to do it. It helps remove the decision, which makes it much easier to get started.

One way to do this is to schedule something with other people.

VII. Join or form an accountability group.

On weekdays I meet up with a group of other trainees over zoom for a little more than an hour at 9:30am. We are all overscheduled, so there are between two and four of us on any given day, and there are four of us in total. We start by asking each other how the previous day went and setting goals for the following 45 minutes. Then we leave the zoom meeting and work independently on the goals we set. We meet back up at 10:30 and report on how the 45 minutes went. Finally, we set goals for the rest of the day. In addition to setting productive goals, we also try to each set a wellness goal.

We started meeting as part of a short-term accountability group organized by Harvard’s Academic Resource Center in September 2020. When that short term ended we kept meeting. Our first meeting was Monday, September 14, 2020. We’ve met almost every workday for 17 months.

On my least productive days, I don’t get anything done after our meeting ends, but at least I move forward during that hour. Accountability group usually breaks through the difficulty of starting work in the morning and always breaks through the difficulty of starting work for the week. While I still have days when I don’t get much done, the stretch of “dark” time is much shorter. I no longer have entire weeks when I don’t make progress toward my goals.

Accountability group has also made me better at setting realistic goals and estimating how long a task will take. I get daily practice setting both 45-minute goals and goals for a day.

Not to mention that the group has become my very good friends and an important part of my support network, and that I look forward to us seeing each other and starting our day together.

VIII. Pomodoro.

Pomodoro is also helpful for getting me to start working on a task (or start working at all). In the Pomodoro technique, you work for a set length of time (I set my sprints to 20 minutes). Then you take a break for a short amount of time (I set my breaks to 5 minutes). Then you work, then you take a break, and so on. After a certain number of sprints, you get to take a longer break (I set my long breaks to 15 minutes). During your sprints, you turn on “do not disturb,” don’t open email or social media, and put your phone away. It is much easier for me to resist distractions when I know I can be comfortably distracted by them without guilt in 20 minutes.

Pomodoro means that instead of approaching a whole task, I approach the concept of working on it for 20 minutes. Sometimes it is easier for me to convince myself to work on a large or ambiguous task for 20 minutes than it is to convince myself to work on it until some benchmark, especially if the task is ambiguous enough that there aren’t any benchmarks. Those 20 minutes are usually enough time for me to become engaged in a task (and then I just keep working), understand an ambiguous task enough that I can break it down into well-defined smaller tasks or ask for help, and identify and possibly resolve the barriers that were making the task difficult to approach.

I use the Be Focused desktop app. I like that I can make a to-do list and select which item I am focusing on for a sprint, and I like that the app tracks how many sprints I have dedicated to each task. I also like the sounds it makes. My friends from accountability group recommend the Bear Focus Timer app.

IX. Do as much of a task as you’re willing to do.

Sometimes a task is too large for me to feel willing to do, even if it is not a large task. Sometimes I’m able to make progress by being okay with doing one small part of the task, whatever that small part is. For example, I might not feel up for doing laundry, but I can get myself to put all the laundry in my laundry bag and leave the laundry bag by the door. Or cleaning the kitchen might feel impossible, but cleaning a small part of the kitchen feels doable. Or I might feel up for working on something for just 15 minutes, and then I let myself work on it for just 15 minutes and pick it back up later. At least it is progress and that is what matters.

X. Schedule breaks, accept your needs, and give yourself time.

Finally, I find it helpful for my productivity to not be productive all the time. I think it is important to schedule breaks. I think it is very important that these breaks are scheduled—that they happen regardless of whether or not you have completed your tasks and that they are not something you have to earn. During these breaks, you should do things you actually enjoy, not things you think you should enjoy. (I once again recommend Animal Crossing.)

In addition to vacations, I give myself a break for a full day every week by observing Shabbat: every week, I try not to work between sunset on Friday until after sunset on Saturday. I don’t observe particularly strictly, but I try to only do the things I genuinely want to do and I try not to do or even think about anything related to my job. I also write planned breaks and other things I am looking forward to into the monthly calendar view of my to-do list notebook.

Similarly, often when I am having trouble motivating myself to be productive (especially if it’s not the start of the week), I just need a break, preferably guilt-free. It is hard to face that I am not going to be productive for some chunk of time when I had hoped to work, but feeling guilty and struggling usually is not as pleasant or productive an experience as calling it earlier and trying again in a few hours or the next morning.

Things you can purchase:

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!

My sacred to-do list notebook is a Moleskine daily planner, this year in green. (I buy whatever color is cheapest in December, which gives me a nice variety of colors from year to year.)

I write my to-do lists with black 0.5 mm uni-ball pens. I also use these pens for line art, and otherwise I do not use them. They are my sacred to-do list and art pens.

I cross out completed to-do list items with gel pens, usually but not always glittery. I keep them in their nice carrying case they came in. I took out the ones I didn’t love (and left them in a little library) so that my daily choice of gel pen would not have any possible wrong answers. I do not use these gel pens for anything other than for crossing out to-do list items. They are my sacred to-do list gel pens.

I also have an absolutely absurd collection of shiny star stickers in different colors and sizes. Lately I have been using almost exclusively the smallest star stickers. I keep the two or three or four sticker sheets I am currently using in my to-do list notebook and I keep the rest in the pocket of my gel pens’ carrying case.

Finally, dice.

@techroastshow
my life is good now #techbro #techie #softwareengineer #siliconvalley #seattle #sanfrancisco #bayarea #engineeringlife #comedy #character #fyp
♬ original sound – socially inept

@themorsecoda
this is a good plan, I think. this will go well for me
♬ original sound – Morgan Morse

Secret Santas and the Icy Cheer

December 29, 2020June 22, 2022 lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova2 Comments

The man living alone in the $4 million mansion across the street has over the past month gradually accumulated not one, not two, but six Christmas trees, at least, with lights and decorations on all the trees and outdoor lights on all his trees and fences outside, which he doesn’t have on a timer, like I thought he would, but turns on by hand every day at sunset, and garlands and strings of lights on the stairs and walls, lit up like a Christmas Gatsby mansion projecting green and red and blue and yellow onto the road when it rains at night, a million tiny colorful moons reflecting off our little river of a street. Every day he sits alone in his home office on the other side of the house facing the main road until dark, when the sun sets and the dark sets in and he sits in the dark lit up by his computer screen and then walks through the house and around the house turning on all the lights and makes dinner in the big open kitchen behind the big bay window with one of the larger trees, which has a nearly identical tree of just slightly smaller size situated precisely above it like an axis of cheer crossing the ceiling through the next floor up. That tree is the one he had last year, too, and the year before it, and usually he leaves it up for months into the new year. (Usually it’s just the one—the profusion of lights inside and outside is a new development, just for this year, or at least hasn’t been around when I’ve been in town, and I’m always not by now.)

This is my first winter break away from my family and my first winter break with my Cambridge family. Our roommate goes to work and my partner Cory goes to work a few days a week and I work remotely from home and occasionally go to the grocery store. We watch movies and TV shows and we cook elaborate meals and we undersleep and oversleep and stress out about work. We go for walks at least once a day on most days. Sometimes we drive around.

Here is our Christmas tree, which we got from Ricky’s Flower Market in Union Square. It is small, because our apartment is small and also because we are hoping that if it lives through the winter and the weight of the decorations we’ve burdened it with we might plant it someplace where it can live a good life.

Another cheerful Christmas thing we did was to send out Christmas cards. They looked like this:

—All very strange. It bothers me that the couples-jacuzzi one has the marshmallows literally skewered. Most menacing is the marshmallow face melted into the hot chocolate surrounded by little marshmallow body parts floating next to it, and more marshmallow body parts on the ground by the cup. (I am also bothered by the happy messages inside reflecting for the reader how lovely it is to spend Christmas with family, in a year when most people safely can’t.)

These aren’t the Christmas cards we ordered. Shortly before Christmas we got a Christmas card from Cory’s uncle, which was very classy and nice and made us very happy and also regretful that we had nothing prepared to send to give those same good feelings in return. We ordered some Christmas cards with cute animals on them. (I like to optimize and look at every option before making a choice, but Cory saw them and knew he liked them and we bought them right away without evaluating other options, which is a new feeling for me.) We got these instead. Cory decided that we should salvage the whole situation by including hot chocolate and stickers (two stamps for two ounces almost exactly!). They turned out nice.

The actual process was a very fun assembly line, perfect as a background task during a movie. It reminded me a lot of our lab’s holiday card assembly lines, only while doing them just the two of us I got to do every stage myself, which was fun. Cory writes pithy and clever messages that make people laugh. I write really long and heartfelt and far less funny messages, which takes a lot more time, signing some or most of the cards: “Wishing you and yours health, safety, love, cheer—and maybe even happiness.” Here is one early stage of our assembly line:

Christmas card giving seems to have increased this year, or at least it feels like it has. We got five Christmas cards! I am going to be using two of them as proof of residency for a parking permit. I do not think we usually get five Christmas cards.

The week before Christmas we had a magical snowstorm (like a foot of snow) and our first time shoveling cars and even sidewalks, which was great exercise and a lot of fun. It was the kind of snow that makes the sky pink at night and makes our usual streets feel unfamiliar and quiet and perfect, and everyone says hi when we pass each other even though we don’t usually do that and don’t know each other at all. I bought shovels the night before, and then I got up before sunrise and I got to spend most of the whole day outside, with breaks to get warm and change my socks and gloves. In the morning it was just me and the plows and the snow falling and the light beams from the plows made gorgeous lighthouse light beams through the dense snow falling. A few people were skiing. There was an incident with a FedEx truck that got stuck in the snow and shredded a parked car. I got to see a family of rats playing in the snow, which was actually delightful. It was overall an eventful day.

On Christmas Eve we went for a long walk during the day and again at night to look at everyone’s lights in our neighborhood and the nearby neighborhoods. We called our families and opened presents, then Cory made a lasagna by a new recipe and I fell asleep on the couch, and then he fell asleep and we burned the lasagna and that whole experience reminded me a bit much of undergrad. (We did end up trying what was between the top layer of burn and the bottom layer of burn and it must have been a very good lasagna.) The next day was warm and raining, which melted most of the remaining snow, and we had a lovely warm walk under the rain looking at lights in other neighborhoods and then when it got too cold and windy we went home and opened our presents to each other and made duck by another new recipe, which we did not burn and which turned out wonderfully, and watched Christmas movies and built wintry Lego sets. The day after we drove to a friend’s empty apartment for a change in environment and did a virtual Secret Santa with Cory’s friends from high school and looked at Christmas lights in another neighborhood. My Secret Santa got me a candle called Exhilarating, which in this case means peppermint and rosemary, a sugar scrub called Exhilarating, which in this case means peppermint, rosemary, coconut oil, almond oil, and shea butter and is apparently not edible despite tasting delicious, and honey and almond and olive oil soap that is not called Exhilarating—all very lovely smells, the former two of which give me the same good feeling as one time when I accidentally got mint toothpaste in my eye.

I really like American Christmas. I don’t think any of us expected it when we moved here, because Christmas in Russia (at least in the Orthodox church) happens on the Julian calendar two weeks later and is a purely religious holiday, and the usual Christmas things—the presents and the party and the tree with the lights on it—are all New Year’s things to us. My mom likes to tell me that our first year in America, in Chicago, I, probably not yet fully speaking English but apparently already properly indoctrinated into the tradition of the American Christmas, was the one to pull the rest of the family into the proper ritual. On Christmas, which was going to be a regular day for us, I said: “But where are the presents? Aren’t we inviting everyone? Mom, don’t you know it’s Christmas?” Mom took me to the store and we picked out presents for the other recent Russian immigrant children living in our neighborhood, and we invited our small immigrant fold and had a lovely last-minute American Christmas party in Russian and everyone had a lovely time.

My most special memories of Christmas music in particular are from Chicago on an outdoor ice rink that doesn’t exist anymore, where I used to skate twice a week from right after school until late in the evening. My mom used to pick me up from school and drive me to the rink with dinner in a tupperware I’d eat on the drive while doing my homework, and then I had karate lessons sometimes and then a few hours of downtime on the rink, then skating lessons, then more skating until Mom was done with work and ready to pick me up, and sometimes she’d skate with me too. I loved skating. The rink was downtown, hidden from the road between tall buildings, and was never crowded even when the other rinks were. A lot of the time the staff played Christmas songs over the big outdoor speakers and sometimes the snow fell while I skated. Whenever I hear certain older Christmas songs that is what I think of, the snow falling and the cold air and the taste of blood from the cold and the pink sky and the tall Chicago downtown just barely darker than the night sky all around me and above me with its beautiful lights.

I miss my family, especially after Skype calls and missed messages that should be days and meals and adventures lived together in person. I just couldn’t justify risking the rest of our winters for this one.

The lesson, if there is one, I guess is to prioritize and be grateful for your health and the health of your loved ones and to make the best of what you have.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The rest of this blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!

The Christmas cards we actually bought were these. The Christmas cards we received were these, and the roll of stickers I bought was this one. It isn’t too late to send cards. You can say they got lost, or that you’re feeling Russian and your cards are meant to arrive by New Year’s.

If you like them, my Christmas lights are these, which I also own in Halloween colors, and my icicles are these. (I also really like these curtain lights, which I bought for my parents in off-white and for a friend in off-white and pink.) The combination of the icicles and colorful lights, reflecting off the wall and off and through the icicles, especially at night, gives a very nice effect of a snowy-rainy street in the winter, and makes it feel like there might be cozy snow and adventure outside even if the snow is melted or it’s raining instead. Bonus points if you arrange the lights around and behind winter Lego sets. Extra bonus points if you build the winter Lego sets while watching some classic American Christmas movies.

My parents got us skis, for which I’m counting down the days until our next big snowstorm (there were a few people skiing on the road in the early morning when it was just the plows and few adventurers and me). I got them a portable-ish pull-up bar that seemed pretty similar to ours, two co zy candles, and a wintry 3d puzzle and a salt-tree activity. Cory got me a book of Taylor Swift songs adapted to the piano, which I think I will just write the notes in because I still can’t sightread and life is too short to not play songs I want to play, and a watercolors and paper set with paper small enough to be a low-pressure art commitment, which is very important to me (unless I’m drawing something very special and fancy I always fold the page I’m drawing on in half first to make it less scary). Our friend in Florida sent us a box of starfruit from her backyard, which is a hilarious contrast to the weather here.

My Secret Santa asked for baking things and for a candle and said they like beach things, which in New England means something that got washed up and raked over the rocks in the cold, so I got them this driftwood candle and a danish dough whisk and a lame and a really exciting cookbook of bread recipes. Last winter Cory and I took a no-kneed baking class at Harvard that changed our lives, and the recipes from the class were based on those in that book. A lame is a special tool for carving designs into the bread, and is actually what gave away that I was that person’s Secret Santa—they were opening parts of the present and started opening the razors and I had to warn them that those were razors and to please not open them any further in a manner that was appropriate only for things that aren’t razors. (I also got Cory that same book and a lame, with a similar worry about the razors, and I’m very excited to try carving fancy patterns into our breads.)

This year’s present that I am most proud of was to two children of a close lifelong friend, one of whom I met when they were very young and one of whom I’ve only seen on Facebook. I got them a fancy hardcover Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman, which has absolutely gorgeous black-and-white illustrations, and crayons to color them with. A really good, funny book with beautiful illustrations is a very nice present, I think, especially if it comes with permission to color.

Here are ten nice presents to give to someone you’re not sure how to give presents to, perhaps because they’re your Secret Santa and you don’t know them that well:

Tiny notebooks. Everyone needs tiny notebooks. They can write down their ideas, or their todo lists, or five nice things that happened to them that day, or their unwritten novel. If you’d like, you can suggest things you think they might like to write, and they may or may not follow your suggestions. Texture is important here, and the line type and spacing. Get them something that is pleasant and interesting to hold and has classy thin lines or even a grid.
Nice inky pens. I like these pens, which are my favorites, for todo lists and fancy or important writing and art, and I like these pens, which I used to borrow from lab, for flowy-mind, lower pressure writing. It’s most important that the ink flows nicely. If the person you are shopping for has a favorite color that you know about, you can get them pens in their favorite color and they’ll probably like that.
Little circle sleds. A lot of adults in cities don’t have sleds, or space for sleds. I couldn’t find a satisfactory modern American version of the little butt sled I had as a kid (as well as an actual, much larger sled). A little butt sled is not as fun as a real sled but it’s very easy to store and transport, and is much better than having no sled at all. If you buy them several they can bring a friend or you can keep one.
Nice candles and fancy soaps. A nice way to gift a smell. Texture is also valuable here, albeit secondary. It’s nice to get them something varied and interesting, like a soap with little oats in it or a candle with coffee beans on the sides. Take care not to get anything containing lavender or tea tree oil (which is sad because I love tea tree oil, and still use it even though I know I shouldn’t) if the product is meant to go on the skin.
Soft and fancy socks, or socks with neat pictures or patterns on them. One of the other people in our Secret Santa group got Batman socks with little capes on them.
A star finder, which can tell you what stars are in the sky at any given moment. (Stellarium is even better, but not as portable.)
Hot chocolate, which almost everyone likes and which is apparently available online mostly in absurd quantities. (If they don’t like hot chocolate, they definitely at least like someone who does.)
A book you really like, maybe with a custom bookmark you drew or post-it notes on your favorite pages with some notes on why you liked that part. Don’t write in the book itself, maybe, in case they don’t like it and want to sell it later.
A nice teacup, maybe with a little saucer for it. My grandmother on my mom’s side sometimes gives me nice teacups. They all make me very happy every time I want to feel fancy, and someday maybe I’ll have tea parties. I like to occasionally gift people flowering tea. Tea is a low-stress gift you can give a person lots of times, which is nice.
A nice potted plant that is not too likely to die soon. Plants are nice. Bonus points if you made or decorated the pot, or if you put some special rocks from a special beach or haunted warehouse or other special destination on the surface of the soil, or if the plant is a clipping from a larger plant of yours that you particularly like or particularly don’t like or if the soil contains the ashes of their enemies, delivered as a message of goodwill for the coming new year and a release of your debts. Hopefully they don’t think of the plant as a metaphor for your relationship.

Here are ten things you probably shouldn’t give people:

A copy of your dissertation, probably—especially if you don’t know that person that well, especially if that person is not your thesis advisor or otherwise on your committee (because if they are your thesis advisor or otherwise on your committee then a copy of your dissertation would actually be a very good present).
A book you don’t like, with a note saying you do like it, with the absolute worst and most boring parts highlighted—with real highlighter marks so they can’t resell it to buy something nicer.
Dante’s Inferno, probably.
Their dissertation, with lots of comments in red—especially if they’ve already graduated but still have nightmares about grad school.
Pencils with the lead pre-broken inside, probably.
Someone else’s dissertation.
A plane ticket, given the pandemic.
A surprise visit (or any kind of visit), given the pandemic.
A blank notebook with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover. In fact, I find this potential gift so distasteful and cruel that I made one really quick that you can buy online. Here are two blank notebooks (click the images), one with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover and one with “Your Thesis” written on the cover:

You can also get them as clocks or drink coasters if that would upset you more, or magnets or stickers or postcards or t-shirts or mugs or laptop cases or clothes for your child or blankets and pillows to hug at night or the smallest zipper bag.

You can view all “Your Thesis” products here and all “Your Dissertation” products here. Enjoy.

Live bugs, like 1000 mealworms or 1500 ladybugs (pretty much the only thing worse than a blank notebook with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover).