Even when we just move from upstairs to downstairs, we lose three baskets of grain.
Old Hakka Proverb
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.”
Proverbs (and a surprising amount of seafood)
“Don’t die like an octopus, die like a hammerhead shark.”
One of my favourites from a recently encountered online stash of Maori proverbs, many of which I’d never heard before. Apparently octopusses (octopi? octopods?) give up if squirting ink at you didn’t scare you off, whereas hammerheads have fight in them practically all the way to the plate. (“I’ll bite your legs off!”)
Try another: “The kumara does not say how sweet he is.” This one brings up a difficulty with proverbs: you often want to… shall we say, apply them where they will do the most good, but the recipient does not always catch your drift. And sometimes it’s more embarrassing when they do. Ideally, they should catch your drift when they get home, as with the French esprit d’escalier, when you think of the perfect thing to say as soon as it’s too late to say it.
Trust the French to have a word for that. Just as the concepts other languages feel the need to have words for tell you something about them (see The Meaning of Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod), so the proverbs of other cultures give you a glimpse of their experiences and thought-processes. And sometimes you find out they were the same as yours. You would be surprised, for example, at how many cultures have proverbs linking the use-by-date of fish and guests.
Of course, just as surströmming and hákarl are not universally admired, so it is with proverbs. Take this, for example, from W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil: “A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.”
Perhaps this explains the enduring popularity of what I now discover are called anti-proverbs. I had thought they were a sign of our sarcastic times, until I found this, from Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): “People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it’s impossible to count them accurately.” Hard to imagine the languid Oscar counting chickens himself – or having anything to do with chickens that didn’t involve a knife and fork – but he may well have a point there.
The anti-proverb most often quoted in my family is a much newer one, coined by Terry Pratchett in 1997 (in his novel Jingo). “Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.” And this illustrates the other problem with proverbs: even when they tell you something true, they aren’t necessarily helpful.
But today, at least, I can say I’ve learned something: do not go eight-legged into that good night…