Bread and Lilies

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles starts again tomorrow night! And so the scifi fangirl in me is watching the first season again!

I have been a scifi fangirl since the first Star Trek series, back then it was okay to think William Shatner was hot. Back then, it was a groundbreaking show, women in miniskirts as a normal everyday thing! An interracial kiss!!!! Tribbles! I seriously wanted a tribble back then and come to think of it, I still want one!

The later series got a bit tamer, as I occasionally catch a Star Trek TNG ep these days, I realize how thinky it was, how much everything wrapped up in neat little bows with a good little utopian ending. The Borg brought in good conflict and then the war with the Founders in Star Trek DS9 attempted to display the realities of war but it never quite worked for me. By then, I’d seen space wars in the first Star Wars trilogy and movies like Alien, Independence Day and Terminator.

Star Trek Enterprise took a step back in time, before the first Star Trek series and that held promise, all the newness of space, all the aliens new again and not friendly, no Federation to make everyone all chummy, but again, a bit too much with the thinky-ness and too much foreshadowing of the other series. I am interested in the new Star Trek movie tho, set in the academy with the original series’ characters just starting out. It could be good, could be bad tho, I can’t remember if it’s an odd number or even number…

I’ve been searching for more effective ways to manage my days.  Where I presently work is about twice the size of any place I’ve worked before (in terms of people in the office that I’m in) and my job encompasses two areas that involve a lot of impromptu people contact, HR and Billing.  This means a lot of interruptions that can’t necessarily be put off and those interruptions are important in their own right both for what I learn from each conversation and what help I can give the other person.  My position also has been in a fire-fighting mode since I started and that hasn’t let up much in the five months since.

My main goal at this point is to move out of that fire-fighting mode and into not just getting all the tasks done but seeing more of the bigger picture and more long-term planning.  I work with some terrific people so I’ve been letting their good management techniques rub off on me as well as taking all the input I can get from them about the company and the projects we’re working on together but I’ve still been looking for a better way to handle my to-do list.

Recently a friend who’s job hunting posted a link to a post about resumes on Rands in Repose and in checking out the rest of the site, I found two great posts about handling tasks and to-do lists that sparked some light bulbs above my head. The first one, The Taste of the Day, minimizes the task list to three areas. I particularly like his thoughts about how priorities are fluid and therefore it’s pointless to simply set priorities on each task. And I’m all for not spending time managing the structure of my to-do list! I have a tendency to take work to sleep with me – to either dream about it or wake up and start thinking about it and I liked his idea of scrubbing the to-do list each evening, it may help me put work aside at the end of the work day, give me a feeling that I’m ready for the next day with no need to stress over it all night.

The second post is The Trickle List and most of it is something I’ve already been doing intuitively without the structure he gives it. The focus is more about the future, about moving forward and planning and it’s too easy to get caught up in simply crossing things off the task list without ever looking up to see the rest of the world.

Ah, the beauty of the empty blog!  All that lovely white space to fill up with magical words!

Life changes, it’s the only constant.  A change in jobs has brought me to a different place, where I have managed lots of things and a few people, now I find myself having to think in broader terms, to find new ways to go beyond just managing the work as well as have a life outside of it.

The title of this blog comes from a poem I cannot find now, I found it on a printer some twenty years ago, when you hit the test button on this little dot matrix, it would spit out this poem, the author not understanding why the poet would spend his last dollar on lilies when they grew freely in the ditches and bread fed so many senses as well as the body.  I had it once in a text file on my computer but in the years of changing from one to another, it’s been lost along the way.