Once upon a time, I was “the cell phone girl” where I worked.  Among other responsibilities, for about 40 employees, I was the person you went to when your cell phone stopped working,

or when you got a new one and couldn’t figure out how it worked,

or when you accidentally laundered it,

or when you dropped it into quick-drying cement,

or when you ran over it with your utility truck.

(Just a note: any of those last three pretty much result in the first one.  And no, you can’t just “let it dry out.”  And yes, I had to explain that fact numerous times.)

Generally speaking, I think near-universal cellular coverage is going to end up being a good thing.  Providing they don’t end up killing us all first in horrible traffic accidents.

Thanks to cheap cellular service, many people I know (myself included) no longer have a “home phone.”  This makes my friend, who works for the local phone company, excessively nervous.

That’s the thing about big changes.  Someone’s always going to end up getting the short end of the stick in any revolution.  As with nearly anything of value in life, there’s always a cost.  You may not pay it, but someone will.

I can still remember party lines and rotary dial phones.  In fact, when I was very little, it seems like I remember that the entire small Kentucky town that my family came from was on party lines.  Not a single person in town had a private phone line.  If you were quiet (not to mention nosy and lacking a good understanding of personal boundaries), you could listen in on your neighbor’s calls.

In some ways, mobile phones have made us more connected.  There is now the unspoken expectation that you should always be able to reach someone, or at the very least, leave a text message or a voicemail and get a speedy response. It’s a reflection of our impatient, “always on” culture of connectivity.

But connectivity is not necessarily connectedness.  Being able to reach someone nearly any time you want does not give you words, or empathy, or a relationship.  Technology can be a lifeline between two people, or a barrier, or a set of masks.  Connectedness is invariably an issue of heart, mind and soul–no matter what cables, antennas or towers might be involved.  And the root of the word cellular itself implies small, self-contained individual parts–or a room in a prison.  Connectivity can give you freedom and mobility–or it can be a leash.

As I get ready to head off on my weekend “girls retreat,” I’ll be in one of those rare spots that cell phone towers still haven’t reached.  In one sense I’ll be “disconnected,” unplugged from the matrix of social media and wireless access.  But I’ll also be nurturing some important relationships, and that is a kind of analog connection that is worth the effort to maintain.

imgs courtesy barunpatro on sxc and cerealfan, mikelehen, and bohphoto on flickr

I was a cranky Kat last week.  Come to think of it, I was kind of cranky the week before that, too.  I think I realized tonight what was making me Mrs. Cranky McNastypants.

I stopped having fun.

Ironically, somewhere in the last year or so, just as I found myself in the admittedly enviable position of being able to do what I really enjoy for a living, I stopped enjoying it.  I was so darned determined to prove to people that I’m good at what I do, I turned what should have been a calling into a “job.”

When you’re in your calling, what you feel should mostly be joy.  Something about the work connects with something deep inside you.  You’re doing what you were made to do, and that should feel good.  And I know this because I have felt that over the last year or so.  But for the last few months, it was becoming less frequent, just as the progression of events in my vocational life should have made it more often.

I’m not saying you don’t have aggravations and frustrations when you’re working in your calling.  There will always be jerks, and weenies, and infuriating technical snafus.  But I wasn’t enjoying the work itself.  It had become labor.

I did a little etymological research.  The root for the word “work” is related to “activity” and “accomplishment.”  “Vocation” comes from the root word for “voice”–meaning something is calling to you; which is why “vocation” and “calling” are such close synonyms.  “Labor,” however, comes from a root word that means “totter, slip, or sleep.”

When you’re awake to your calling, your work does give you a sense of accomplishment.  You feel that you’re getting somewhere, that you’re completing your opus, or at least contributing to it.  But when you’re slipping out of touch with your soul, your deep inner self, you totter into labor, and you lose consciousness of why you’re putting forth that effort.

Okay, enough with the big words and the heavy stuff. That’s not the main point of this post.

Have I ever told you the story of how I got involved in social media, online communities, and blogging in the first place?  No?  Maybe elsewhere?  It’s an interesting story, that.  I’ll probably share it here soon.

At any rate, there was a time when talking with other folks online, getting to know them and letting them get to know me, was fun.  Sharing stories and hearing what people had to say about them was fun.  Figuring out how to write a title so that people absopositivenlutely had to click on it and read the post, was fun.    Learning and teaching and mentoring and being mentored online was fun.

And then, sometime after I started getting paid to do those things, I think the guilt hit.  I love my parents and grandparents, but quite frankly, growing up I got the very strong impression that work was supposed to be a miserable, hard, difficult thing.  If it wasn’t, you probably weren’t doing it right.  Or, more to the point, if it wasn’t, you were probably not putting in a hard day’s work.  This meant you were, as my granny would say, a hippie.  Or just plain lazy. Let’s just say my elders did not really grok Csizsentmihaly’s concept of flow.

I also have a large number of loved ones who would very much like to be doing something they really enjoyed for a living.   As much as they’ve tried to be happy for me as my vocational life kept getting better, I can’t help but feel an undercurrent of envy.  Whether it’s a true reflection of their feelings or not, I kept imagining them thinking “What on earth did she do to deserve this?”  So anyway.  Guilt.  Lotta guilt.

I started trying to make my work seem more like, well, work.  I got deadly flipping serious.  About everything.  I lost the playfulness, sense of exploration and lighthearted curiosity that made this work my métier in the first place.

Part of this is a function of my personality type.  When I’m in a healthy place, my humor and idealism shine through.  When I’m in a less-healthy spot, I get increasingly “heavy” (metaphorically, spiritually and physically–I gain weight when I’m down).

So this week, I’m resolving to unload the guilt, recapture my joy and start having fun again.  Online.  Offline.  At work.  In my marriage.  With my kids.  With my other relationships.

Because truthfully, that’s the only way I can be really good at any of those things.

img courtesy simmbarb on sxc.hu

Consider me officially out of practice. With everything.

I’m currently a somewhat lapsed devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system for personal productivity and organization, FlyLady’s household management system, David K. Reynold’s Constructive Living therapy, Dr. Willard Harley’s Marriage Builders program, and Sacred Space/Pray-As-You-Go’s daily prayer practice.

What do all these things have in common? They each touch on big, massive, shudder-when-you-think-about-it Major Life Goals.

• Getting your schedule under control and making sure you get what’s most important to you accomplished.
• Creating an uncluttered, nurturing, non-chaotic home environment for your family.
• Managing your neurotic emotions and living consciously and gratefully in the present.
• Protecting and enriching your lifelong romantic partnership.
• Developing a rich, reflective inner spiritual life centered in the presence of God.

Whoa.  Big stuff, there, right?  It makes my head hurt just thinking about any one of them, much less all of them.  But the thing is, I want all of them.

Except each of these different systems, different programs or frameworks, focus on the small stuff. They don’t focus on the elephant you’ve got to devour.  They focus on the next bite.  What’s my Next Action?  How much clutter can I clear in a 15 minute burst of activity?  What needs doing, despite what I’m feeling?   What is the most effective thing I can do each day to demonstrate love to my spouse?  What’s happened in the last 24 hours, and where do I feel God’s presence or absence?

These are manageable things. I can think about each of these questions without feeling a headache or a vague sense of panic and overwhelm.  I can attack any (and maybe all) of those questions in the course of a single day, with all the energy and enthusiasm I have available for that day.

Ultimately, it comes down to practices. A “practice” is something we do because we’re not perfect–but we’d like to be better.   Usually, it’s something we have to do daily, or at most weekly, because if we don’t, we get “out of practice.”  We lose what we’ve learned, to an extent.   But the nice thing is, most practices are like riding a bike–we may get rusty, but if we mastered it once, we can generally pick it up again.

With a little more practice.

img courtesy torli

…is to stop trying to remember stuff.

Yup, its time for another one of those “remedial GTD” posts. I signed up for Jott towards the end of last year with the intent to use it and Sandy to help me build my “trusted system.”

The “trusted system,” for those not familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done organizational system, is basically where you put your “stuff,” rather than trying to remember it all.

“Stuff” equates to all the random data that are hogging all your mental RAM: appointments, to-dos, plans, schemes, ideas and such like.

The idea is, you “download” your “stuff” into your trusted system regularly (daily or weekly, depending on your need), and as your brain learns that the trusted system actually can be trusted to keep track of all that stuff, it lets go and frees itself up to think about bigger stuff that requires your higher thinking skills, like creativity.

So anyway, I signed up for Sandy and Jott months ago, but as much as I liked them, I didn’t really adopt them because Sandy requires typing (and usually when I think of new stuff I need to remember, I’m somewhere that typing is awkward. Like sitting in traffic.)

Jott doesn’t require typing, and its voice recognition is Da Bomb, but it does rely heavily on text messages, and when I originally signed up, I was getting charged a fee for every message.

Well, in the intervening months, we’ve added unlimited text messages to our phone plans, because we’ve found that it’s the best way to communicate during the workday. It’s less disruptive than a voice call on the cell, but you know that as soon as your spouse gets a chance, he or she will respond.

Anyway, I revisited my Jott/Sandy combo today, and I must say, it’s pretty sweet and trust-able. I also figured out how to post to Twitter and to both blogs via Jott. Um–yay.

So my blog posts here will hopefully start coming a little more frequently, although as a heads up, they may have a few more “typos” till Jott’s voice recognition gets fully up to speed on interpreting my Bluegrass-Hoosier accent.

If you are not a fan of gadgets and the interweb, GTD can work quite capably as a paper-based system. A great resource site on paper-based GTD is DIYplanner.com. In addition to tons of articles, it features great printable forms. Another good source for templates is David Seah.

I didn’t think this was all that big a deal, but friend Jonna has insisted that I must blog about it.

I’m trying to quit multitasking. Instead, I’m trying something new to Get Things Done: DO-TAATIRS. It stands for “Do One Thing At A Time In Rapid Succession.”

Basically, I’ve found that multitasking is often a horrible way for me to try and get lots of little tasks done quickly. I have two monitors at work. When I have more than two windows open, honestly, I am not getting more work done. I’m cycling from window to window, often stressing out and trying to figure out where my attention needs to be.

So instead, I pick ONE thing, and work at it to completion, or as near completion as I’m capable of at the moment. Then I move on to the next thing, knocking down small tasks as fast as possible (works great for housework). I know this is sort of basic GTD for those who are hardcore about practicing it, but for some reason, having the acronym helps me remember that this is a better workflow model for me. I take a deep breath, and say “Do taters,” and suddenly, I don’t feel compelled to try and accomplish 20 things at once. Usually, within an hour, I have a whole lot less “stuff” pinging my attention, and I feel much better.

I’ve been working on my attention for about four years now, using David Allen’s GTD methods as well as David K. Reynolds’ Constructive Living. They work really well together. It’s had a huge impact in my quality of life, but like any good habit, you have to practice, and it’s easy to fall out of the habit and back into your older patterns of behavior.

So the next time you find yourself running in circles, stop, pick one thing, and DO TAATIRS.