Britt's Blog

Surprise! It’s a baby jacket.

This is the Elizabeth Zimmermann Baby Suprise Jacket from The Knitting Workshop. It’s a weird little exercise in purl-free knitting. Viva la garter stitch!

Believe it or not, it’s worked all back and forth, in one piece, and its squareness and sleeves and cool rectilinear stripy-ness all come from strategic increases and decreases. It looks like a big floppy nothing in particular until you fold it in a fairly nonintuitive way, and sew two (count ‘em, two) seams across the top of the sleeves.

Is it retro? Has it come around to being modern again? Whichever, it’s a really striking pattern, and definitely stands apart from your run-of-the-mill baby clothes.

The yarn is Lion Brand Microspun, which I bought a ton of to make the Lion Brand Baby Corn Bunting (which is actually adorable and was very fun to make) and socks (gad!) when I was a novice knitter and didn’t know what was good for me.

I do not recommend this yarn. It is evil, evil, evil. Very hard to work with. If you’re kind, you won’t squint and see all the flaws. It’s not at all tightly wound, and naturally slippery, so it’s easy to miss a few strands or accidentally split the yarn—especially on this project, as I was working in an especially tight gauge.

I’m pleased with the color combo, though. And the yarn is nice and soft.

A long, long time ago, this double-knit scarf with stars caught my attention. I immediately thought “baby blanket!”

It was probably because of the blue and pink color scheme, but I also think that Elizabeth Zimmermann had a hand (as so often she does). In The Knitter’s Almanac, she says:

Double Knitting…always seems to me, though fascinating, a great waste of time…The knitting public, however, is intrigued by Double Knitting, so, as one of its members, you shall be given Double Knitting. Never one to waste time and effort, I have tried to incorporate four advantages, to make the undertaking worth while. First, Double Knitting is for some reason very light, relative to its bulk, and soft as a cloud if you make it in light, thick wool…with large needles. It makes a splendid pad when you lay the baby down on the hard floor for its kicking exercises. Second, it is the warmest of covers—warm as two blankets, which, of course, it is.

EZ goes on to give a third reason (specific to her project and thus irrelevant to our purposes here) but, curiously, no forth reason. Presumably, the reader is left to “unvent” a reason of her own. My own reason is that double-knitting is lots of fun.

EZ describes a method by which you knit across, slipping every other stitch, turn, and knit across the previously slipped stitches, slipping the previously knit stitches. I’ll agree with her that this method is frustratingly inefficient.

I prefer (as does, apparently, almost everyone else on the internet) the more modern method, which requires that you manage two strands of yarn at once, and knit the “front” stitches with one strand and purl the “back” stitches with the other. This has the same rhythm as a K1-P1 rib or seed stitch, which I find inexplicably soothing. No need to go over the row twice.

EZ also neglects the real charm of double knitting which is that by using two different colors, and working a color changes by switching front to back or vice versa, you automatically get a back that is precisely the inverse of the front.

This blanket is done in Caron Simply Soft Eco, which is nice and soft, cheap, machine washable and available the excellent deep purple and bright yellow colors I was looking for. As an added bonus, the blanket actually contains 3.6 recycled beverage bottles!

I made mine basically the same way the scarf is described, but bigger, with a moon thrown in for visual contrast.

If you’re interested in trying a tamer double-knit baby blanket, there’s the one mentioned above in the Knitter’s Almanac, under February, and there’s also a very charming dk blanket pattern at knitty.com.

If you like SF and you like podcasts, you owe it to yourself to check out the excellent science-fiction podcast, Escape Pod.

Take a listen toExhalation, a Hugo Award nominee by Ted Chiang and a mind-blowing (ha!) story. It’s all kinds of awesome: absolutely fantastic and imaginative but rooted firmly in the laws of physics, surprising yet exquisitely logically consistent.

The episode clocks in around 50 minutes, which is long for Escape Pod, but it is worth the time.

My laptop is filthy. I drag it around every waking minute (it seems), I eat while I use it, and I probably don’t wash my hands enough. As a result, my computer has all kinds of grime all over it and crumbs in the keyboard. (And probably swine flu virus too.)

My “A” key got a crumb stuck under it and wasn’t working right. (My students will be happy to know that this mishap occurred after I finished entering grades for the semester—otherwise I would have been unable to give a grade higher than a B+.)

Anyway, I popped off the key to remove the obstruction (my, there’s a lot of cat hair under there, too) and as always I forgot how to correctly reassemble the little white plastic interlocking ring-lever doohickies underneath to get the key back on.

It is deeply annoying that there isn’t a good tutorial out there on how to do it, but at least this one had a (underexposed, blurry) picture that is clear enough to see how it was all supposed to go. Reattaching a key on a MacBook Pro.

I post it here in preparation for the next crumbectomy.

I have found it helpful to sit down every morning (or the evening before) and pick three things off my to-do list to constitute “Mission Success” for the day.

This is a little bit of jargon stolen from NASA. For example, Mission Success for most of the Mars missions constituted landing on Mars and taking a 360° picture called the Mission Success Panorama. That’s it. Mission Success. Now, after snagging the Mission Success Pan, it’s not like the mission folded up its solar panels and called it a sol. But defining a Mission Success that is attainable is what gets your ass off the launchpad and on the way to Mars, where you can do the cool stuff. Feeling like you have to accomplish tons and tons and tons of stuff to be “successful” for the day is intimidating and stifling, and could result in your spacecraft hanging around at Cape Canaveral in its pyjamas paging through cookbooks and reading Metafilter all day. Or something.

This is an excellent way to finally nail of one of those tasks that you’ve been procrastinating on. Eat a frog¹ first thing in the morning, and by conquering it, you get an ego boost that will turbo-charge your whole day. I often pick tasks according to three themes, like 1) an elephant² that I need to take a nibble out of, 2) an old mosquito³ that I’ve been putting off, and 3) a new to-do that I’m excited about. Or the 1) the oldest task on my list, 2) the next time-sensitive thing that’s due and 3) the easiest task on my list. Or one task from each of my top 3 projects. Or whatever.

You can also adjust to your energy level. If you’re having a bad day, picking three really easy things can get you moving–maybe you feel like doing more when they’re done, or maybe not. But at least you did something.

The three-to-do method isn’t foolproof. Failing to hit Mission Success for the day, especially when you’ve set the bar really low, is demoralizing. Also, if you misjudge and set yourself a really gung-ho mission, you can start to resent the list and not want to cleave to it.

But in conjunction with other strategies, it can keep you on track.

¹Helpful and instructive frog-related aphorisms:

• Eat a frog first thing in the morning, and the worst thing that will happen to you all day will already have happened.
• If you have to eat a frog, don’t look at it too long first.
• If you have to eat two frogs, eat the uglier one first.

²Q: How do you eat an elephant? A: One bite at a time.
³I can’t find the original source (and maybe I just perverted the meaning, because Merlin Mann’s mosquitoes sound quite distinct from mine), but a mosquito is a thing on your to-do list that will take you no time at all, but you’re avoiding it for some reason, and it just bugs the heck out of you until you smack it.

I’m going to do a few posts on productivity. If you’re not interested in the lifehack-pr0n, feel free to skip. Mainly this is just me thinking out loud.

It takes a little book-keeping, but keeping track of how much time I spend on particular projects can help me be sure I’m not obsessing over one project at the expense of others. It is also a motivational tool, and can provide reassurance that I’m “clocking in” an appropriate number of hours.

Time-tracking provides some of the structure that GTD lacks, at least in the sense that I usually have some sort of informal goals, e.g. I want to get a lot done on Project X this week, and overall do around 15 hours of concentrated work. I still have the responsibility to make good choices on the ground, but they are at least better-informed choices.

In grad school, I started using the Printable CEO Concrete Goals Tracker by the excellent David Seah. After a while, I decided that giving point values to different accomplishments was not as important as just marking time. (Probably another academia vs. business thing.)

I made up my own form (sadly, lost when my old iBook bricked) with a long row of squares for each project, with each square subdivided into four smaller squares. A small square is 15 minutes, a complete square is an hour. I’d use one form per week, filling in boxes on each day in a different color. (Note the excellent excuse opportunity to exercise your office-supplies fetish. Multicolor pens are very motivating.)

The fifteen-minute block is a very low barrier to entry, especially if you play the whole “I’ll just work 15 minutes, and then I can quit if I want,” game with yourself. (Thank you, FlyLady.) The desire to rack up some serious boxes can then keep you going in the face of distraction.

Having the information in graphic form makes it easy to assess at a glance how you’re doing, what projects you’re going strong on, and what projects you might be neglecting.

Now, don’t expect to rack up too many hours. You’re only recording hours that you spend concentrating on work… not running around making copies, not chatting with co-workers, not deleting spam. In The Now Habit, Neil Fiore recommends working no more than 20 concentrated hours a week, and no more than 5 hours a day. (I did 30 hours of concentrated work a week for a couple weeks while finishing my thesis, then moved to Wisconsin and promptly fell over with a sinus infection that took me completely out of the game for about three weeks. Learn from my mistakes.)

Time tracking requires, well, keeping track of time. You can set a timer for fifteen minutes, a half hour, or an hour. I like the Stop It! Dashboard widget because the chime is pretty. Another fun way to keep track of time is David Seah’s online Emergent Task Timer which chimes every fifteen minutes to prompt you to click a bubble to indicate what you’re working on. (You can even customize the chime with your own mp3.) If you’d prefer, there’s a printable Emergent Task Timer as well. (Told you that David Seah is awesome).

If this all sounds a little obsessive, well, yeah, it is. But as the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. For me, evaluating how well I’m doing by how I feel about my work can be disastrous. Feeling like I’m not doing well (accurately or not) can easily turn into a spiral of shame as I “try harder,” get stressed, procrastinate, and get nothing done. Tracking time means I don’t have to pressure myself to accomplish a big goal, or do a task perfectly, or even work a huge amount of time—I just have to get my butt in the chair and fill in some boxes, which is pretty easy, by comparison. And having my butt in my chair and filling in boxes leads to my work getting done and me feeling satisfied with what I have accomplished.

I’m going to do a few posts on productivity. If you’re not interested in the lifehack-pron, feel free to skip. Mainly this is just me thinking out loud. If you are interested, check out the previous post post on how I handle time management during the school year.

One of my strengths is that I’m actually very good at accomplishing smallish, well-defined tasks with finite deadlines. I am almost always prepared for class well in advance, my papers get graded in a more or less timely manner, and in general the basic rhythms of the school year agree with me.

In the summer time, I don’t teach, so all of those reassuringly recurring tasks go *poof* and I am left staring down a number of large, long-term projects like “Prepare for next fall’s classes” or “Write a paper” or “Reduce this dataset.”

One of my weaknesses is that I’m lousy at planning, executing, staying motivated for and persistently working on large projects. (And of course, by “lousy” I mean “probably better than 80% of the population, but less good than I am at other things.”¹)

Organizing these kinds of projects happens to be what Getting Things Done is particularly awesome at. In the GTD system, you have a list of projects with well-defined goals (which I wish I were good at writing), and you review this list weekly to be sure that you’re doing the right thing for each project, and, most importantly, to identify stalled projects and figure out why you’re stuck. Stalled projects are almost always stuck on a poorly-conceived or abstractly-worded “next action” on a context list somewhere that devours another tiny piece of your soul every time you look on it. Rewrite the offending next action, and you’re golden.

However, another facet of GTD is this notion that you don’t schedule tasks. Instead you have your lists of next actions for each project, and you tackle them according to your context, your energy level, and your priorities as determined by periodic review of the big picture. There’s an almost fetishistic emphasis placed on being flexible about what you work on.

However, as a wise colleague just pointed out to me, GTD was invented for a business context, not for academia. In business, emergencies happen, and conditions and priorities are constantly shifting. Agility is absolutely necessary. But in academia, there is no such thing as an emergency. In the best case, you know for months in advance what you need to do and when it needs to be done by, and even in the worst case, there is no deadline that cannot be negotiated. Every once in a while there is a crisis (genuine, or just in someone’s mind) and you have to drop everything and deal with it, but it’s rare.

So GTD is based on fulfilling a need for flexibility that I don’t have. Worse, one thing I’ve learned about myself is that I’m bad at making good, responsible choices on the fly. (As Steve Pavlina says in this post on getting up right away when your alarm goes off, your sleepy self when you are in bed in the morning is not your best coach for becoming an early riser. Neither is my self sitting at my desk at 2:15 in the afternoon my best coach for being productive. Web-surfing champion, perhaps, but not productivity coach.) I’m much better at following routines, building habits, and basically using inflexibility and inertia to my advantage.

I have experimented with a few ways to try to cope with my inability to make excellent priority-based decisions moment-to-moment in a GTD-esque, mind-like-water manner, and in the following post(s), you can find some of the methods I have found helpful, and lots of links to the sources that inspired them. All of these create planning and structure that is absent in GTD. This is not intended to be a how-to for achieving perfect productivity. It’s not even a description of how I’m going to organize my time. As I mentioned, I’m mostly just thinking out loud in these posts, and part of the purpose of writing them is trying to decide what I am going to do to stay focused this summer.

Am I still on the quest for the perfect system? Not so much, any more. What I do want to do this summer is experiment with different methods, not to build the perfect, stress-free life, but in order to work with (not against) my strengths and weaknesses and keep making progress on my important projects.

¹Fact: I have a Ph-freaking-D (really, the “freaking” is on my diploma²), which means I cannot suck totally at long-term projects. Fact: It took me 10 years to get it, which means I suck more at long-term projects than most other people with PhDs. Fact: 1% of Americans 25 and older have a doctorate, so even if I am the suckiest long-term-project person with a PhD, I probably don’t suck at long-term projects all that bad, even considering that not everyone who is good at long-term-projects has a PhD.

²No, not really.³

³You know who else really liked nested footnotes? David Foster Wallace. And I say “liked” rather than “likes” because he offed himself. So it’s probably not a good idea to keep this up.⁴

⁴But, anyway, the point is that completing long-term projects without having a boss telling you what to do and holding you accountable for deadlines is hard and I should stop beating myself up over not finding it easy. All the same, if you know any good resources for learning how to plan an manage a project that might be useful for a person who works alone, not managing other people, especially with an academic bent, let me know.

I’m going to do a few posts on productivity. If you’re not interested in the lifehack-pron, feel free to skip. Mainly this is just me thinking (typing?) out loud.

How should you keep track of the things you need to do? There is no one right answer. It will vary from person to person, of course, but I find that I need different ways of tracking my to-dos during the school year than during the summer. And I’ve even been using different tracking of to-dos for different aspects of my work during the school year.

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Our local KFC has a sign that says:

TV COUPONS NOT EXCEPTED

What does that mean?

I mean, I know exactly what they think it means, but my brain keeps trying to parse its literal meaning, and ends up going in exhilarating little logical loops—the mental equivalent of spinning yourself around until you get dizzy and collapse, giggling.

If I had a “TV coupon” I would probably be even more emotionally involved. Do you think it refers to the infamous Oprah coupons?

In other, possibly related news, I turned in my grades today. Wheeee!!! Now I can get started on my summer of mostly student-free strenuous mental exertion!

After I recover from the dizzy coupon circles.