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eponymous-rose · 5 years

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Weird question, but you seem really productive despite seeming to have a constantly fluctuating routine, with both your work and your hobbies. Most people think having a solid routine is the only way to increase your productivity but I've pretty much given up on having a routine since my life seems similar to yours--a lot of travel, weird and always changing work hours. Do you have any advice on how you deal with routine and productivity in spite of that?

Oh gosh, this is definitely something I struggle with a LOT, and I’m not sure I’ve found a coping strategy that works for me yet. But the small things that have been helping have been (1) keeping a routine in my planning even if the stuff I do changes dramatically (even if I’m traveling, I have a notebook where, every Sunday, I list all the stuff that has specific dates/times for the following week, I list the stuff where I still have to come up with a date/time, and I list the stuff I’ve gotta do that week for sure), and (2) finding multiple ways to approach the same goals that I can tailor to my level of energy/spare time on any given week (so this week I’m just not in a super exercisey mindset and can’t rely on having the motivation to run every day, but instead I’m making an extra effort not to eat out this week—lower-effort for my current state of mind, but all toward the same goal of feeling a bit healthier overall).

I’m also very cognizant of how little time at work is actually spent working, so I try not to feel guilty if the total number of hours worked is low as long as the work’s getting done. I’m an incredibly routine-oriented person, but it’s been a bit freeing to slowly and steadily teach myself that stuff just has to get finished one way or another, and the easiest way to do that is to just focus on specific goals and let the rest be flexible.

Anyway, yesterday I was thinking of this ask and was like, “You know, I’ll just write up what I do on Monday as an example, and I bet things will go hilariously awry.” And so they did.

So here’s what my weekly planning list looked like last night:

Dated Events:

Call with paper coauthor at 9AM Monday

Call with leadership academy planning committee at 10AM Monday

Call with peer mentoring group at 9AM Tuesday

Sit in on class at 11:30AM Tuesday and Thursday

Seminars Wednesday at 3PM, Thursday at 4PM, and Friday at 3PM

D&D Saturday at 6PM

Undated Events:

Coordinating abstract submission for an upcoming conference (early week)

Setting up Skype calls with a couple friends I haven’t talked to in a while (late week)

Assorted Priorities:

Book hotel for work travel in July

Accept journal article review request and scope out how long that’ll take

Review some materials sent out for my peer mentoring call

Revise my paper and submit the revisions before the Monday deadline

Get my driver’s license renewed (the joys of yearly visa renewal… your license has to be renewed yearly as well)

Put together a schedule for a biweekly Twitter feature highlighting new publications for the account I run for a subcommittee in my field

Respond to an e-mail about a conference in January about some weird deadline that popped up for next week

Come up with conference abstract ideas before the as-yet-unscheduled meeting

Fill out some action items in advance of my 10AM Monday call

And some more specific checklists for four research projects I’m focusing on this week

I purposely try to group conference calls together, because I currently share my office and feel weird doing video calls when she’s stuck in frame five feet away from me while she tries to work. So Monday seems like a good day to work from home, and I can squeeze in Tuesday’s call before heading to the office that morning. I’ll be in the office Tuesday-Friday, which means I’ll be able to attend those seminars and classes with no problem. I have most of my D&D prep done already because we ended early last game, so I can leave that until Saturday. The only thing I might have to shuffle to next week is the driver’s license thing, because it’ll take three hours and I have to account for finding a Lyft there and back. Okay. Aces.

Wake up this morning to find my internet’s out, and I also somehow left the hard drive with all my research on it at work. Hoo boy. But staring over my to-do list, I think I can set today up as a “big picture” day and not have to do any actual coding, so I’m still okay to work from home. I can also phone in to the conference calls instead of using the video call software. All good.

Luckily, the internet comes back right before my first call of the day. Said call is with someone who also happens to be a dean, so she has a tendency to get held up at meetings, so I take that delay to look at the action items for my second call (I mean… if you send me action items at 8PM on a Sunday I am not gonna touch them until Monday morning).

When she did make it online, we chatted about the new paper, and she strongly encouraged me to send it to our other coauthors in case they have suggestions. We’re submitting on Monday, which is way too short-notice to read a 20-page research paper, but they already read the pre-revision version in great detail, so I shot them an e-mail that included a summary of the substantial changes and a note to the effect that if any of them want more time to look at this stuff, I can beg the editor for an extension on their behalf. Minor crisis averted.

Second meeting is very intense and structured. Everyone has to volunteer to organize and lead two webinars in the next three months, so I go ahead and volunteer for the two April ones so I’ll get it out of the way early. Aaand the first webinar is at 1PM this Friday. Okay. I’ll work from home that morning so I can do last-minute prep, then head into the office in time for the 3PM seminar. No biggie. One organizer puts together a draft schedule, and I send a quick e-mail suggesting a different use of one of the ten-minute time slots. One of the other organizers requests another conference call tomorrow instead of e-mails. I tell them I can only do after 4PM, if I leave work early. Eh. We’ll see how that works out.

After the call, I get through a bunch of small tasks in maybe 20 minutes: hotel booked, Twitter posts prepped, review request accepted (not due until May 20, so plenty of time on that), conference deadline e-mail chain started. I spend the rest of the time before noon getting sucked into an article someone sent me about the myths surrounding undergraduate grade inflation and then reading up on the peer mentoring materials for our call tomorrow. A couple other minor e-mails pop up (scheduling the precise date of a conference mixer in January, that kind of thing) and I manage to deal with them right away.

Lunch! Clearly working from home means I should take the opportunity to indulge in some fine cuisine, some leisurely cooking that highlights—

I heat up a microwave meal (chicken couscous) and watch YouTube videos for an hour.

Back in it! I write up some abstract submission ideas and make a valiant attempt at setting up a time to talk about them, but it looks like that might have to wait until next week. We’re still a ways before the deadline, so that’s okay.

Mmmmmmm someone on Twitter mentions a conference in Germany in September and a workshop in Colorado in July that both look like a good fit for my research. I’m in a situation where I have a big chunk of travel funding that’s going to disappear unless it gets spent in the next year. Oh no. But also oh yes.

Just in case, I put together a couple point-form ideas for stuff to propose that I can bring to the people holding the purse strings.

The rest of the afternoon is spent putting together weekly goals for four of my research projects: each one involves a collaboration with a different person, so I’d like to be able to send each of them an e-mail with at least one new thing to share about that project this week. Just in case that doesn’t happen, though, I rank them from most to least important. Worst-case scenario, I don’t have to send any of them this week, but it’ll make next week tougher if I don’t.

It’s only about 3:30 at this point, but honestly, I’m feeling a bit exhausted and overwhelmed (some of the e-mail chains have gone through five or six replies at this point and keeping it all straight is giving me a headache), so I opt to get some groceries and call it a day.

I may have added some stuff, but I got a lot crossed off today! Here’s how that last checklist looks at the end of the day:

Assorted Priorities:

Revise my paper and submit the revisions before the Monday deadline

Project #1: come up with a new exploratory figure and send to Person A.

Project #2: summarize the early results I started last week and send to Person B, along with an ask to see whether he’d be up for me presenting this stuff in Europe in November.

Project #3: improve on figures I showed last month and send to Person C.

Project #4: prepare a rough outline of the next paper to send to Person D.

Not having my work hard drive means I was able to just focus on the stuff that wasn’t specific to research today. In all the chaos of today, I’ve set myself up well for a research-heavy rest of the week where I (hopefully) won’t have to worry about non-research stuff or big changes to the schedule and can just burrow into research, emerging for occasional seminar/webinar breaks. A good Monday, all around.

#eponymous academia tag #karionwriting

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eponymous-rose · 6 years

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So I'm preparing my first game as a DM and am a bit nervous and overwhelmed about where to start, what to do, what to watch out for, what to plan for, etc. As someone who has recently started running games, do you have any random tips you learned from your own process?

Oh man, DMing is an exciting time! At this point, my in-person campaign’s been running for a few months, but before that I DMed a handful of one-shots online, and the experience was very different.

Stuff that happened that I wasn’t expecting:

I was so much more exhausted at the end of it than I expected. It’s the good kind of exhausted, but talking for several hours while having to think ahead and stay on top of unpredictable circumstances reminded me of teaching for the first time. Probably good to plan some relaxation time afterward?

It can be tough to figure out how much time stuff will take (especially if you’re doing a one-shot where you’re trying to get everyone to a reasonable endpoint---at least with a campaign session you can stop a bit earlier than expected if you need to and pick it up next time), but I think most first-time DMs tend to run longer than anticipated. Something that helped for me was scheduling a five-hour session and only prepping for three hours. Things generally worked out.

General advice:

Although it’s difficult to remember to do, it can be awesome to let players work out their own awkward silences/general confusion every now and then. When you’re driving the plot, it can feel terrible when everything sort of stumbles to a halt, but generally those pauses and hesitations seem so much worse to you than they do to your players; sometimes it’s nice to give them time to think and ponder and figure stuff out for themselves so you’re not constantly popping up like Clippy and breaking immersion.

Speaking of immersion, if you have a group that’s hesitant to roleplay, having NPCs address characters individually while making eye-contact can really help (it’ll often startle them into replying in-character). Metagaming isn’t always a bad word (honest!), but if players start talking about stuff their characters wouldn’t be talking about, have the NPCs in the world treat it as in-universe and call them out on it.

Worldbuilding-wise, start small. I built a small city for my first session, figured out the names of the people in charge and the loose motivations of a couple of important factions, and then made a list of very lightly fleshed-out NPCs the party could encounter. For each person, I wrote up a name, a brief physical description, one thing they wanted, one thing they feared, and a description of their voice (I don’t really do voices, but just thinking about where the air is coming from when you speak---up near your nose? Down deep in your chest?---was really helpful). I made enough of these that by the end I was just tacking more and more random attributes onto people that would realistically never come up (the captain of the town guard loves dogs and is secretly stealing a bit of money from the town coffers to work out ways to rescue all the strays in town, the armorer once read a book about philosophy and has been having a major existential crisis ever since), but it feels really nice to have those attributes at the ready. Also useful to have a few NPCs that don’t have a specific profession in mind that you can pull out and place wherever you need them if the players go off the rails.

Once I had a setting, I thought of a few story beats I wanted them to hit. If you’re doing a one-shot or a first campaign session, you can afford to have things on rails a little bit more, so it’s okay to have scenarios or invisible walls set up to kind of nudge your players toward specific encounters. I typically have a Google Docs folder for each session with relevant NPCs/monster stats as well as bits of description/dialogue I want to have written out (in stressful situations, your mind might go blank, so it’s good to have bits scripted here and there to fall back on when you’re getting started).

For combat encounters, I love playtesting them myself. Grab your players’ character sheets if you have them, pull out minis (or quarters or spare dice), and play through an encounter, keeping in mind the way you’d expect them to act. It feels a lot like playing with action figures (seven-year-old me with her elaborate action-adventure Polly Pocket adventures would be so proud), but that was how I figured out that one of my monsters with a very low save on the relevant stat could potentially be crushed if my very clever druid remembered she could turn into a spider and web it in place. If playtesting an encounter repeatedly ends in a TPK, it may be time to rework it, or consider dropping strong hints to your players that escape/stealth is an option.

Ambient music can help! There are some great D&D playlists out there on YouTube or Spotify.

Keep notes during the game. I was so stressed out in my first few games that I remembered virtually none of what happened.

If you get questioned on something relatively minor, respond decisively and check the book later. A lot of DMing is tapdancing on thin ice, and the trick is to make it look convincing. Especially if you have experienced players in your party (I had one who owned nearly every 3.5e book ever published and was dubious about the transition to 5e, so you’d better believe he’d challenge me from time to time!), “fake it ‘til you make it” comes in. It says right in the DM guide that the DM has final say on any and all rules, so embrace that authority when you need to.

Just like in public speaking, you have to be “on” a lot as a DM. Whatever energy level you’re putting across, your players will generally mirror it at a slightly diminished level. If you feel kind of bleh and listless, they will positively vanish into boredom. If you’re visibly excited, they’ll be neutral and attentive. If you feel like you’re being entirely off-the-wall and over-the-top wacky, chances are you’re just coming across as mildly energetic and your players will respond by buying in wholeheartedly. As someone who is very soft-spoken and understated as a general rule, I found it helpful to remember that this is acting---sometimes you need to be a little broad and exuberant just to be seen. You don’t need to do cartwheels out of your comfort zone or anything, but dipping a toe out here and there can really pay off: your players will often notice the risk-taking and remember it. Make big choices and commit fully.

Trust your players and treat the game as a gift. They might not play the game the way you’re expecting, which is both the best part of D&D and its curse, but keep in mind that you’re telling the story together, and the best thing you can do sometimes is learn to relinquish control; no matter how much you prepped something, if your players bypass it, let it go and embrace the new adventure. You can always talk to folks out of game if you feel like you’re not all on the same page, but it’s oddly freeing to be open to player-driven changes.

I also posted some advice and resources here way back in October! I hope it doesn’t directly contradict the stuff I said above, haha.

Let me know how things go (or if you have any other questions!). You’re going to do great!

#eponymous d&d tag #long text post #karionwriting

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