The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live

TL/DR: When life feels overwhelmingly large, progress comes through small, humane, and imperfect efforts — not through heroic productivity.

So I have a whiteboard in my bedroom. It’s where anxious projects live, the ones that are <insert big scary voice> Coming Due Soon. <Close big voice, return to regular timbre.>

And there’s a lot up there. Grading (hello, mid-semester assessments). Article permissions (Why, oh why, did I want to use images? Current me wants a serious word with past me. WHAT were you thinking?). Plant the garden. Take trash to the dump. Write the thing. Research the other thing. And on and on and on.

The reality is, we are all over-busy, and we all have too many balls in the air. Juggling tasks is the preeminent 21^st-century skill. And boring. So boring. What did you do today? It’s about commiseration, not about the list itself.

But there are some reminders that I have found helpful as we’ve gone through this first part of the year. I share them here in case they help.

Put priorities first. That includes social priorities. Thank a colleague. Snuggle your husband. Pet the cat. Living a person-first lifestyle happens through an act of will. I may sometimes put these on my whiteboard, because actually, fitting them in matters a lot.

Consider the big things. I’m getting ready for a major backpacking trip, a conference paper, and a trip to Europe. I’m two months out to the start of that giddy mess, so it was time to drop orders for a few things that will make the trips easier. It was a nice thing to do over coffee, and now I’ll spend my day in anticipation of the fun, not just the mire of the day-to-day.

Productive avoidance. Unwilling to start on the heavy lift? It’s okay to do three lesser tasks as long as the heavy task gets its hour sometime before dinner. Task shifting got that article review done before its deadline, and I’ll still comfortably make the grant deadline, because an hour a day makes progress even if it isn’t one fell swoop. Sometimes I frame this as a strength: I’m really good at task-shifting. I’d even call it a trademark skill!

Bit by bit may really be better. The rosebush trying to colonize the driveway is history, thanks to a series of one-hour sunshine breaks. I got to get outside and enjoy the fresh air (bundled up, of course, what a spring!); every day saw progress. The entirety of the rosebush eventually succumbed to the repeated time-on-task. And my hands will recover sometime soon, I’m sure.

Multitask with the fun stuff. Writing is a concentrated activity, and I’m not a music-while-writing person; I spend too much time listening and not enough writing. But I *can* listen while I’m doing chores, and often do. I found that setting up a playlist before tackling the aforementioned rosebush was a two-for-one: I got to choose class repertoire for my freshmen while still getting through the farm chores. Was it perfect, analytic-prep listening? No, of course not. But it set out the shape of my mental maps for lecture, and the analytical listening came as I put the slidedecks together.

Do or do not, as Yoda says. Wednesdays are largely off the table. Tuesdays (with three lectures and the week’s prep) are over-long energy drains. Wednesdays are for the frivolous. My goal with Wednesdays is: do something. Walk, garden, fold the laundry. Eat cooked food. Go to bed early. Wednesdays have become my do-nothing days. Weekends, then, can be for writing and depth and focus and read-read-read for the Next Big Project. But I’ve had a mental break by then, so it feels okay to double down on the material *I* want to be working on.

Write it down. The things that scare me more than what’s on my whiteboard? The things I haven’t gotten down out of my head. Those are the ones that wake me up at 3:17 worried that they might not get done. Write them down. Put them in your notebook, list them on the whiteboard, make a 3x5 card. Don’t let them sit around taking up mental energy. “Oh, I’ll remember to do that” means that you have to spend all day remembering. Who has time? Write it down.

And the great thing is that the things we write down, we get to cross off the list.

And that’s a good feeling in life.

May your day be fruitful, your whiteboard be a help, and your list diminish over time.

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Sooner or Later It All Gets Done: How History Emerges from Small Details

One of the recurring themes in my scholarly life is “lots of little details.” That’s true of many things in life, of course, but this morning I’m struck with its scholarly application. I’m prone to taking account of a lot of bits-of-evidence, the small details that by themselves are trivial but in the big picture add up to something significant. Assuming I’m lucky, of course.

Historians often inherit sources shaped by earlier editors’ priorities, so part of my work has been learning how to ask new questions of familiar materials. Many of our sources with “lots of details” come from the nineteenth century -- Ludwig Rapp and his mastery of parish clerical details in Topographisch-historische Beschreibung is one of my current faves! Wow, what a collector of detail! So truly, local archives and chronicle accounts were edited by folks excited for what the data can show – about war, about politics, about economics. Their questions, however, did not always extend to other kinds of questions, like those about relationships, and households, and famine, and fear.

Thus, even in a place like Bregenz, where the surviving sources were so negatively impacted by war, and invasion, and the predations of time, I love that there are still questions I can ask, and answers in the little details that come from careful consideration of the sources with new questions in mind. I’ve turned up “new” sources on Thalbach, for instance, not by finding actual new documents, but by reading the extant documents for details that didn’t matter to the indexers of past times – payments to and charity for the devout women of the town. Sometimes the clue is as small as a repeated instruction to light a candle at a grave — something no nineteenth-century editor thought worth indexing, but wonderfully delicious for my argument.

And now, I’m plowing my way through prayerbooks, looking for ways in which spirituality is manifest not as treatise but as practice. We have given preference to the authorial voice, particularly those by named authors and/or those approved by the church, for instance. But what is interesting to me is how those sermon-shaped ideas became fixed in these women’s lives – not so much what they *heard* but what they *did* with that spiritual guidance provided to them.

So yes, I’m reading 15^th century prayerbooks for fun and enlightenment. I think these sources can tell us something important – not so much about what these women actually believed, but about what they did as a matter of practice. Actions speak louder than words; prayers, repeated, and copied, and collected, and shared, tell us a lot about how belief became present as part of daily life.

That’s an awful lot of words, of course. Words words words. Oodles and scads of words. 397 folios of words in one case. 120 pages of words in another.

But little by little by little, and sooner or later it all gets done.

Or, as we also say, “every day a little progress.”

That, in the end, is often how historical knowledge grows: not from dramatic discoveries, but from patient attention to what earlier readers overlooked. And spreadsheets. But that’s another post.

WORKS CITED

Image from Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek, Hs 17: a late 16th-century Thalbach prayerbook, fol. 216, "O junckfrow maria ain künigin der himel," marked with a tab in its left-hand margin.

Ludwig Rapp, Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, 5 vols (Brixen: Weger, 1894-1924). I especially love volumes 2 & 3, the Bregenz volumes.