“Don’t blame me, Pongo,” said Lord Ickenham, “if Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you. God bless my soul, though, you can’t compare the lorgnettes of to-day with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle.
“My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holster and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes, as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.”
from Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P. G. Wodehouse
Getting Control of Your UFOs
Spreadsheets have a reputation for being cold and factual. Less often are they seen as a form of inspiration and a repository of dreams.
Let me explain. Some time ago, I was going down for what felt like the third time under a morass of unfinished things and dreams deferred. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, as the writer of Proverbs sagely observes, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life. (You know you have too many UFOs when even the creator and sustainer of the universe tells you to get your act together and start finishing things.)
But where was I going to start? There were too many of them, and some had to be done before others, and they all had different conditions attached, and….
Enter the spreadsheet. The first thing to do is to list all the projects you have underway, followed by all the projects still at planning stage (Column A). To my shock, my list came to nearly 20 items.
The next step is to assign them deadlines (Column B). These socks need to be finished by the intended recipient’s birthday; those curtains need to be lined before summer; this project needs to be completed before that one can be started, and so on. Some things don’t have a deadline; that’s fine. Just put down NA.
Then reorder them accordingly. Column B gives you your deadlines (where applicable) but it’s Columns C and D which really tell you what to work on next.
Column C tells you whether each project is portable or not. Can you take it out and about (to the theatre, on the bus, to a friend’s place), or is it a strictly stay-at-home kind of project? Obviously, if you only do one or the other sort of project, skip Column C.
Column D rates the concentration necessary for each project. A rating of 1 means you can do it while focussing on something else – TV, someone reading aloud, a conversation… Plain knitting, sewing hems or seams, and projects you’ve done a zillion times all fall into this category. A rating of 3 means that the project requires your full attention: complicated projects, cataloguing materials, or trying something you’ve never done before.
A column for notes can also be handy – take photos throughout for this one; break this one down into smaller tasks; check you have all the materials before starting. Do not attempt when tired. Here be dragons. Whatever.
The results? While I still have plenty of UFOs, there are fewer of them. Fourteen at last count, of which only six are actually UFOs – the others are still in the planning stages. When I add something new to the spreadsheet – for a gift, for example – it moves toward completion more quickly.
And then it disappears. You may wish to keep a record of your Finished Objects, so you know where all your time went, but don’t clutter up your UFO spreadsheet with them – you want to see at a glance what you still have on your plate, and what you have, so to speak, eaten. (Let us leave this metaphor before it becomes any more ooky.)
After so long spinning my wheels, I finally have traction, and I am enjoying it. Enjoying making progress, enjoying knowing the UFOs are under control, enjoying seeing my dreams come closer, and enjoying the productivity of my hands. Because good time management isn’t about being harried by a to-do list, it’s about enriching your life. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”
My Wrinkle Shock
I always knew I was going to have wrinkles eventually (unless I died first). But I was totally unprepared for how they finally appeared.
I confess: I secretly hoped for lines like my husband has: a radiating sunburst that appears beside each eye as he laughs (which make my heart turn over). I feared, however, that I would end up with frown lines. Maybe not quite as chiselled as those of Hugo-Weaving-as-Elrond in the Lord of the Rings films, but frowny nonetheless.
Which, obviously, I didn’t want. Not that I fear the inexorable signs of age; I just didn’t want them to proclaim me to the world as someone who frowns more often than she laughs, or smiles. As Maria Montessori said, “the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age.” Roald Dahl made a similar point.
But when I recently noticed lines on my face for the first time, I was shocked to find that they were neither the eye-sunbursty type, nor the Elrond frowny type. No. The dreaded character-reveal writ on my face shows me up as someone who habitually raises an eyebrow.
Some teenage girls spend hours in front of the mirror practicing makeup techniques and pouty duck-lips. I spent, if not hours, at least many minutes, in front of the mirror strengthening part of my occipitofrontalis muscle, in order to achieve the desired effect of one eyebrow rising while the other remains unmoved.
But unlike Jeeves, with his occasional flicker of the right eyebrow when deeply moved, I may have overused the effect in the intervening years. Result: lines, which will no doubt deepen into wrinkles.
There are, of course, many paths I could choose to take from this point. I could go heavy on the moisturizing sunblock. I could cultivate a hairstyle so tight as to stretch my face flat as a pancake. I could (if I was completely out of my tree) arrange for botulinum toxin to be injected into my facial muscles, causing paralysis.
Incidentally, did you know that the Wikipedia page on botox has a sub-section titled ‘Bioterrorism‘? I kid you not. And now I’m imagining a horde of perfectly expressionless bioterrorists…
But of course, being a sensible sort of person, I will do none of these things (although I could probably do with a bit more of the moisturizing sunblock than I currently use). No, I will do the intelligent, rational thing, and practice raising the other eyebrow. Because if I’m going to have wrinkles, I want a matching set.