Taking my own advice

Meditations from the ditch

Photo by Terry Granger on Unsplash

It’s been a minute since I last posted here. Actually it’s been 133 days, but who’s counting? June 25 was when I announced that I was leaving my previous job, and almost everything I was familiar with, behind to move to Texas to start a new career trajectory. On July 20, I left Michigan with my car packed to the gills with everything that wouldn’t fit into the PODS container and made a three-day road trip to College Station. On August 3, I started the new position. And last week, on October 30, I hit the 90-day mark, a consequential milestone for leadership transitions.

In other words, in the last 133 days, my entire life restarted — not just a new job, but a new career, along with seismic changes in my personal life. I read recently that most people encounter 35 significant life events from age 18 until death. That’s roughly one every 18 months. I am currently navigating my way through at least four of them simultaneously.

Frankly, it’s been overwhelming. I’ve attempted to reboot my posting here at least half a dozen times and failed, and I’ve felt the ugly irony of not following my own advice about taking small steps within coherent systems to gain control over my life and work. In the process, I’ve come to realize at a deep level that Intentional Academia isn’t just one of my blogs, it’s a message in a bottle to everyone out there in a similar situation as well as a way of reminding myself of what’s important and true and how to have a life of purpose and meaning in higher ed, even when everything around feels like it’s constantly shifting.

Today I am reconnecting with this blog, by looking back at my next-to-last post about getting oneself out of a ditch which was back in May. This now seems like a lifetime ago. I’m taking my own advice right now that I dispensed back then, and seeing how well it fits.

Recap of ditch-extraction

In that post, I outlined what a bottoms-up situation in academia might look like and some things to do to help yourself get out of it. A “ditch” is a situation where you’re stuck, maybe through no fault of your own, where your plans get thrown back in your face and life becomes chaotic. At the time, I mentioned that there were “two or three” major disruptions that were following me around that kept me from being settled every day. Well, here we are today.

What I said then, to navigate through these, was: simplify, get clear on your higher horizons, take care of your body, and do something small. How are those working out for me?

Simplifying

My first piece of advice was to employ the 80/20 principle and shed as much of the 80% that doesn’t really matter as possible. In my experience this summer and fall, I’ve found that while that principle is true and important — in fact it feels like the key to everything in academic life — the act of simplifying, is itself not simple.

Some things are easy to drop. For example, it’s still the case that only about 20% of the items that end up in my email inbox are things that I can or should be handling. The rest I can say No to or, as the director of a center, I can delegate. In fact, it’s one of my core job duties to understand and enforce the scope of my center’s work and say No to things that don’t fit within it.

But elsewhere, it’s not so easy. When I came here this summer, I didn’t just take a new job. I restarted my entire life. And in that situation, for the first time in a long while, I am exploring rather than exploiting, and saying Yes to as many things as possible so I can discover what this reset life can look and feel like.

This can be freeing and exciting, but is also hard. For example, one of my top priorities was to reconnect with a music scene once I arrived here. It took a while, but eventually I made contacts with bands. Two of these bands have turned into regular commitments. One of those two, is a serious regional band that plays at a high level and in venues all over Texas and beyond. While it’s been very exciting to get connected with that group, it does entail a large amount of practice during the evenings, and weekends traveling to places like Galveston and Austin (each 3 hours away) to do gigs. Saying Yes to this opportunity has been great, but it means I’ve had to say No to other things — like cleaning my house in the evenings, or traveling to see family and friends on some weekends, or gigging and rehearsing more often with the other band.

So it’s a conundrum. I’m in a position where I should be saying Yes to a lot of things, but if you say Yes to too many things, you put yourself into a particular kind of ditch. And so knowing what to say Yes to and to say No to is an important and difficult task. And I don’t always get it right — and we don’t get to know what the right answer is beforehand.

Getting clear on higher horizons

In the past, I’ve said that the way to make simplifying systematic is to first get clear on your higher horizons: what your core values are, what your 3-5 year goals are, and what your 1-3 year goals are. Then say Yes to the things that align with those values and goals and say No to the things that don’t. While I still believe this is true, I’ve realized this too is harder than it looks.

My particular ditch in this regard is that when I moved here, it was a complete reset of everything. My higher horizons have changed, significantly and perhaps completely — and I am not totally sure what they are now.

Back around the time of my actual move in July, I took a day for a personal retreat to write out what I think my new higher horizons are, an update to my core values as I moved into the life that I’m living now. It didn’t work. I wrote out what I thought my core values had evolved into, but it didn’t feel right at all — because I hadn’t moved into the life that those values defined yet.

I do have values, but I have not yet codified what these are, nor do I think I have enough data to do so. I’m still in process. I do plan on taking some time during the holidays to journal and reflect on this as I’ve been here long enough and lived this reset life enough to have a sense of what I believe I value now — rather than recycle my values from prior to my move and simply reconstruct the life I had before here in Texas, which would be untrue to myself.

This is a particular kind of ditch to be in: Living a life that demands constant calibration that is so new to you that every day is disorienting and demanding — but you’re working out what exactly your core values are as you are doing it. Maybe that’s just life itself.

Taking care of your body

I wasn’t really aware before my move just how important taking care of your physical body is, until encountering complete and daily exhaustion, navigating all the major life changes that I’ve had to handle.

The biggest part of bodily care for me has been sleep. After I arrived in Texas, I began having major issues with sleep, driven by physical and mental health concerns like anxiety and self-doubt. I was frequently getting to bed at 11:00pm but waking up at 2:00am with my mind churning in a worry loop and unable to get back to sleep. Eventually the sleep debt started catching up with me. I was dozing off at work, and while driving on several occasions.

Sleep, at least, is something well within my control. I started setting strict limits on my bedtime, and instead of getting up early to exercise I started prioritizing sleep instead¹. I spent the remainder of my relocation allowance on a bed frame and an expensive mattress. I wasn’t sure I could afford either of these, but it’s been well worth it to improve my sleep duration and quality. I’m much better able to do my job, handle life, and just be a quality human being.

Right now I am trying to find a sustainable schedule that balances adequate sleep and adequate exercise, as well as taking care of my diet, so that I’m not eating highly processed convenience foods (out of a belief that I don’t have time or energy to cook). Time remains scarce and this is not easy to accomplish. And that gets me to the next point.

Doing something small

I remain convinced that setting boundaries around yourself and living within them is one of the most important things you can do for yourself even when you’re not in a ditch.

For example, I’ve learned to combat anxiety and worry loops by setting a perimeter around myself: Whenever I wake up worrying about something, I grab a notebook, take 2-3 minutes to write about what specifically I am worrying about, then set an appointment to deal with that item at an appropriate time and place – like 4pm the next day. Then, tell myself that I’ve done all I can do about this thing for now, and then try to get back to sleep. Usually it works. What I’m doing is I’m telling myself that I’m giving the worry just enough space to clarify it. And then it is shunted off to a time and place of my choosing.

Where boundary setting hasn’t worked so well for me is blocking out time on my calendar. I used to be master of my calendar. But now in my position, my calendar is largely determined by other people. My calendar is typically full from 8-5 every day with meetings, presentations, and other job tasks. I do have “focus time” blocked on my calendar every morning, but often this gets overridden by meetings that can’t happen any other time. I have not done a good job of strictly enforcing that focus time. I need to start, because using my focus time to triage email instead of doing deep work does not help me live the life that I want.

Asking for help

At the end of my previous article I made a statement that was parenthetical at the time: it’s okay to ask for help, and okay to accept help when it’s offered. I’ve come to believe that this is perhaps the most important piece of advice to follow of all.

If you follow the ideas of this blog, and take responsibility for your own career, you can start to believe that you are capable of handling all parts of your life and work on your own, independently, by having a trusted system and engaging with it regularly. But I am here today to tell you: Nothing could be further from the truth.

Because in higher education, even if you are not resetting your life, loneliness and isolation are endemic. We live and work embedded with other people, but we are also often desperately alone and in need of connection, and we don’t ask for or accept help because we’re proud, or afraid, or feeling shame. And we spiral further down and away from the fullness of both life and work, as a result.

Help can look like a lot of things, and it’s plentiful if you know what to look for. It can look like a therapist. It can look like the person in the office or house next door. It can look like a family member in another state, who you haven’t connected with in a while. It can look like a band that you play in. It can look like the people you write for, online in a blog.

Identifying and accepting the help that is around us is critical for life, even survival. Failing to do so puts us into a dangerous place. If you hear one thing from this post, please let it be this: If you’re struggling and in a ditch, get help. You need it whether you realize it or not.

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I promise I’ll be more regular posting here from now on. I have a schedule set up and I plan to follow it. For now, for those who are in a similar position as mine, remember: All of this stuff about trusted systems and GTD and everything else, is a conversation with God. You can set up your systems, and should, but these are just maps. The real landscape of life is what happens when you live it.

Misc.

• I’ve been using Workflowy as my primary tool for task management for a while — more on that later in another post — primarily because Workflowy now offers the Pro version of its service for free, for life, to university students and educators. Workflowy may not work for everyone but with that kind of a deal, it’s worth checking out.

• If you have a tier of a Google Workspace that lets you use Gemini in your Google Sheets, you can create a Kanban board out of a Google Sheet among many other things. This feels like an untapped resource for GTD and task management.

Music

The “serious regional band” I’m currently working with is the Kane Alvarado Band. Kane is a 19-year old Texas blues guitar prodigy who has been playing and recording since he was 5. He is easily the most talented and electrifying guitarist I’ve ever played with, and I’ve played with a lot of guitarists. I connected with his manager almost by accident, after posting to the Bryan/College Station Musicians Facebook group, and got invited to rehearse with him, which turned into a regular gig as his bass player. Playing with musicians of this caliber, at this level, has been a goal of mine for a long time, and it would have never happened had I not made this move to Texas. Here’s a song he wrote and recorded a few years ago to give you a taste.

1. Ideally I would both prioritize sleep and exercise regularly. But these can be in conflict — they definitely are for me — and if I have to pick one, I’ve decided sleep wins. Sleep deprivation harms your body in ways that are more profound and hard to detect than a lack of strenuous exercise does.