Research(-adjacent) diary #2

follow along as I stress about book launch

Somehow, my third-most-popular post of all time is the one where I chronicled a week in my life:

Research diary #1

As I wrote then, I love reading this sort of thing. I’ve never met a food diary, spending diary, or day-in-the-life I didn’t devour. I’m nosy, yes, but more charitably I’m eternally fascinated by how people choose to use their limited time, money, attention, and other finite resources.

Given all this, I’m not sure why it’s taken me more than 18 months to revisit this genre, but better late than never? As before, think of this as a series of excerpts rather than a comprehensive time diary. Here goes…

Monday

8:35am – K. (my 4-month-old) was up earlier than I’d prefer, so I am several hours into my day by the time I sit down at my desk. I realized upon waking that we were out of cold brew and my husband disassembled the coffee grinder to clean it, so today also involved an early morning coffee shop run. I’m finally caffeinated enough to start my weekly planning ritual. The specifics are always in flux, but in broad strokes it entails a) brain dumping all the tasks I hope to get to this week, b) checking my calendar, goals list, semester plan, inbox, etc. to collect additional tasks I forgot in my initial dump, and c) assigning each task to a day in my planner (or pushing it back to a future week).

my current planner, from a cool company in Des Moines

Parenthood hasn’t (yet) rendered this system obsolete, though it has forced me to scale back my ambitions. Actually, no. I’ve concluded that I should be scaling back my task lists, but I keep failing to do so and ending up disappointed when I inevitably don’t get to everything.

After the brain dump, I realize this may be a very book launch preparation-heavy week. I consult the calendar, realize there are only six weeks until pub date, panic, and create a separate list of launch-specific tasks. (Do I have other such lists elsewhere? Yes I do. Is this necessary? Probably not, but list-making is a core anxiety coping mechanism.)