Looking for my shining sink...

I am swamped. Tired. Exhausted. The plan habit is not going well. I don’t need to write a plan for the day because I’ve been using the same plan for a week now. And the funny thing is? None of the items are done yet! Why, you ask? Because every day I come to work, some kind of disaster is waiting for me to deal with. Sometimes I cannot even tell what my time was spent on. But by 5pm I am exhausted. Just wiped out.

Now. Normal people go home at 5pm. Me? Not normal. I got my dissertation to deal with. And that is another bucket of problems and decisions to deal with. I have a lot of stuff coming up this fall: two important trips, which both require substantial preparation; a paper which lays foundation to my future research; a grant; a research proposal; and the most important thing of all – my oral exam. Oh, the rush of stress hormones every time I think of that!

The good thing is that most of the above schoolwork items are overlapping and interdependent. However, what I really REALLY need to do is to… write a plan! Schedule all the things to take care of and by when. A nice quote I read the other day:

Long-term planning is not about making long-term decisions, it is about understanding the future consequences of today's decisions. (Gary Ryan Blair)

As for the FLYing at work, well it is not quite happening for me yet. I keep thinking of how I can apply FlyLady’s advice to my work and everything fails. My schedule at work is determined by a lot of outside factors, which I cannot control. On the other hand, I could find 15 uninterrupted minutes. So what would be my “shining sink” at work? Something to remind me that I’m on my way to make it less stressful and more enjoyable?

I’m thinking I should de-clutter the corner of my desk where my computer is. I have pictures, documents, quotes, calendars hanging on the cubicle wall, directly in my sight all the time. Maybe they contribute to my mind being busy and distracted… Ok. It is settled then. I am off to “shine” my work corner.