Week 47
View from the houseboats
You may not believe this, and you probably aren’t hearing this enough, but you are doing great. No, seriously. We continue to be living in a pandemic. Many of us separated from family or loved ones, often trying to help from afar or navigating risks to help in-person. Many of us are navigating deep grief, in varying degrees of willingness to talk about it. We are all trying to make the world a little less terrible, in our own ways. Thank you for all you are doing.
For whatever reason, our household struggled a bit with emotions this week. Even with only one kid who has full-time in-person preschool, we hit another pandemic parenting speedbump this weekend. It’s (still) hard to never have a night off, a babysitter, a real vacation outside our own house. Theo’s been waking up many times a night with nightmares and/or for company while he walks (all of 20 feet) to go to the bathroom. The Zoo re-opened and we took him one day this weekend, but it’s frustrating to see people not wearing masks properly or still having trouble with the concept of distancing. Though we’ve been meal-planning to reduce decision fatigue, I called an audible Sunday night and we ordered Sol Food for pickup. Thank goodness we at least have preschool for weekday breaks in negotiation. Somehow I scheduled myself early-morning meetings every day this week, and routine change makes it harder for me to fit in exercise. At least it’s been sunny!
I want to acknowledge that while our feelings are probably normal parts of parenting, we are still incredibly lucky and privileged; so many people have it harder. The NYT Parenting page has a new section called the Primal Scream, with this article summarizing the impact of the pandemic on mothers. I’m also curious the impact on men who took on childcare duties -v they are likely suffering too (with, I suspect, fewer social supports).
(Re)Learnings and observations
Functioning amid an overwhelming to-do list. I’ve been working on preparing for onboarding a new team member or two, and I’m listing out all my current projects and collaborators as part of creating the “intro to my lab” page. It’s an…intimidating list of qual, quant, and implementation science (e.g. program development/evaluation) projects at various stages of development. In this environment there is never an end to things that could be worked on. To cognitively manage it, I choose 1-2 tasks within important priorities (like a part of a manuscripts) to focus on each week and try to make progress on it each day. This is how my “small goals” section of these missives got started. Honestly, I’ve been doing a terrible job of this recently. I’ve been letting administrative stuff take over my bandwidth because it’s often more urgent and, frankly, less scary.
On resetting: I have been stuck on a piece of writing for nearly two months now. It’s been such a mental block that, upon reflection, I’ve prioritizing administrative stuff because I couldn’t figure out how to get unstuck. And I’ve fallen into bad habits, not prioritizing my own research at times when my brain is fresh or letting my reserved “writing time” be claimed by meetings. This means it’s time for a reset to practice prioritizing my own work. Thursday morning, I ended up skipping a meeting and having a long and satisfying amount of time for my own work, as well as new ideas for getting unstuck.
On setting boundaries. One of my goals for this year is to schedule (and stick to) having one week a month (roughly) that has no/minimal meetings. This is to both enable time for PTO (because sometimes scheduling it when needed is too hard) and to enable time for thinking and writing – which are actually some of the most important parts of my job. Getting sick and needing to catch up messed up my first attempt this year, but I’m reminding myself that taking time away from meetings – from the daily grind – is modeling productive behavior for others and contributing to changing cultural norms. I recognize blocking off many weeks a year is hard-to-impossible for people with weekly clinical practices, but I still would gently encourage everyone to ask themselves what norms they could challenge – it’s clear an organization benefits from overwork, but everyone is hurt by burnout. On a related note, if we stop doing work for free, occasionally someone realizes the work is sufficiently important to pay for the labor.
Description of the pomodoro/unit method of productivity: This interview description of an anthropologist’s writing process sounds enviable these days. It does make me think that I could think about days where I have breaks between meetings as a pomodoro session. I love the concept of the pomodoro but pragmatically, it serves me best as a trick to get started at all. Permission to stop is fine, but the prioritizing and the starting is the hard part for me.
Gratitude & appreciation
After I deleted an entire project folder (including mixed-methods data supporting up to 3 manuscripts) I was able to recover it when I realized my mistake 8 hours later thanks to the magic of UCSF Box.
A colleague is involved with and introduced several of us to the UCSF REPAIR project, which is three-year initiative designed to address Anti-Black Racism in science and medicine.
A weekend planning meeting with a colleague/friend that included a walk with Theo and chatting while he threw rocks in the ocean
On Tuesday, Sam and I happened to realize we were planning to get exercise at the same time and ended up on an impromptu, unplanned bike ride together
I have plans to hike with another colleague/friend this weekend…without Theo
I’m looking forward to finishing listening to the In the Bubble podcast (with our own Bob Wachter taking over for Andy Slavitt) talking with Julia Marcus about risks in a semi-vaccinated world
I’m looking forward to listening to my friend Carey Candrian talk about her work to improve serious illness care for older LGBTQ people on GeriPal – it’s so fun to see your friends thrive.
Things we’ve been making
I really want to make chocolate olive oil cake
A day and a night alone in a hotel by myself (I guess this is sorta what conferences used to give me…except with way too little sleep and too many things to do).
As always, I invite you to share how you are doing, and your small goals or progress towards them. Hoping you and your loved ones are well.
Sincerely,
Krista