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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Related Posts

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• Writing is Momentum
• Sooner or Later It All Gets Done
• From Draft to Done
• The Perfect Time to Write

Writing with scissors and tape

Today was a good reminder to me of my own childhood training as a writer. I was taught the sunflower approach to paper organization: a series of notecards arrayed in a lovely pattern surrounding my seat on the floor. Ah, beauty. At the center, I sat with the thesis. Topics ran along each of the outward-bending rays. I could sort the order within each line of cards before picking them up to move to the typewriter. What emerged was (supposedly) a logical progression of ideas – happily generated by the simple act of sorting.

You would think in these days of computer-assisted writing practices that I would have outgrown such practices, but at heart, I’m a geographical thinker. I like to put things into spaces where they belong. This piece belongs on THAT side of the table. (Yes, I’m older now; I sometimes use a table and chair instead of sitting for hours on the floor. Not without some regret.)

I have learned to work faster in at least some ways. I come at that whole “gathering of information” with a different set of tools – notes in files, especially spreadsheets (see my notes on managing bibliography by spreadsheet); rough drafts on computer with comments in the margins; slidedecks and tables for managing visual information, and so on. I sometimes write (in ink) on cards the size of business cards, but not the 3x5 card, my once-upon-a-time most favorite tool. In other words, my information comes in various sizes and textures, and you would think that I’d just plug each bit into a proper outline and move on.

But no, that doesn’t fit with how my brain works. No, I like to use externalities to represent the internalities of my thinking. Which brings me to this morning.

I have a continuity draft of a collaborative article – the complete article, with footnotes, and I am fairly sure that I agree with our conclusions. (Always a positive step.) The argument, however, tended to spin from idea to idea since they all intersect with one another. Clarity? Missing in action! Bits of detail would pop up in one part of the discussion, and we’d have to mention them again over there. Bah. I’ve read plenty of articles like that, but would prefer not to inflict one of my own on the reading public.

To be honest, I put two afternoons into trying to tackle our edits in a mature scholarly way – with comment boxes and line edits. I’ve had dental surgery that was more fun.

So I gave into my impulses, pulled out the coffee pot, and hefted my lovely kitchen scissors. I took our draft and cut it into strips. Each sentence or two became a “thing,” and the “things” moved around the table. I got to about page four and realized that I actually could start seeing a shape to it.

I grabbed some of those business-card blanks and started jotting notes. Again, it was one note per card, so those could join the fray, moving hither and thither. I looked. I pondered. And then I grabbed my computer and wrote up the hook paragraph. It *resembles* the first paragraph that we’d had in the rough draft, but it gets at the content with a different tone and a clearer purpose.

I celebrated this early-morning productivity with a social-media toot, as one does, and then took my walk and tended to the day’s weeding.

In the second sit-down of the day, I moved a bunch of papers around. The completed bits went face down on the table, and then moved down to the bench. I sorted out content areas and used my lovely blue felt-tip pen to write cards about our findings. What were key topics? What caught my eye? What phrases stuck in my memory? This was largely an “away from the draft” process – my goal was to understand what my morning brain thought was most important about what we’d done. 

I think this kind of process is important. They say the devil’s in the details, but I wanted to know the choreography of the paper, not its flutter of words and details. For instance, a large chunk of the paper was represented by the word “Chart.” Right? I know exactly what content that covers, and what it does for the paper. I didn’t need to workshop its words, or even its paragraphs. I just wanted to know where in the paper it needed to emerge for the reader’s attention.

So I played a weird kind of scholarly solitaire, moving this strip onto that card, and shuffling those three cards into a different order, and looking through the remnants for that fact that was cool but didn’t belong but could illuminate this bit over here. I didn’t do the whole paper – like I said, I’d stopped cutting strips around the end of page 4. But I felt like this gave me control over the broad outlines of what we were doing.

At this point, I did two things. First, I made a list in an open document about what points I thought were mission critical, in the order in which I’d decided they probably should go. Now if a windstorm came up and blew through my open screen door and messed up my beautiful collage – which wasn’t yet taped down! – I would still have a record of the morning’s work.

Next, I wrote the framing paragraph. So and so has done this; that other person added that. We build on this by doing these things. Strategically, this paragraph defines the state of the scholarly conversation and the gap we are filling. Plus, it provides a bit of a road-map to what is about to follow. I didn’t polish this paragraph – I still have reminders like INSERT SCHOLAR K and QUOTE / RESPOND as placeholders. (The shouty caps are important. You never want to leave those reminders in a draft at the moment of submission!) But the reminders are just pointers to details, and most of that information already exists in extractable form in the continuity draft. That kind of cut-and-paste can come later. The goal for the day was simply to start creating the pathway for the reader – to onboard them to what they’re about to read.

And then it was time to turn to other things, the regular meetings and emails and urgent questions from students that are to Monday what peaceful murmurs are to hiking. True, I’d rather be hiking, but as Mondays go, I’d call it a success.

The take-away? Returning to your writing roots can be a remarkably soothing way to break through a paper-writing hurdle. As they say, writing is hard. The trick I used this morning was to avoid “writing” by reframing it as a slicing-and-sorting task. I *like* slicing and sorting. It was a pleasant way to get 777 words up and on their way. Of course, my co-author will need to sign on. But I think she’ll like it. After all, clarity counts!

And, at the end of the day (or at least the end of the morning), it turns out that scissors and tape weren’t just tools for rearranging text, but for restoring perspective. My humble kitchen tools turn out to be a tangible reminder that clarity in writing often begins with clarity in thought.

My Late Lamented “Everything Notebook”

Blue Spring 2025 notebook, plus a page from a previous notebook

I’m a paper person. I think best while writing; I am an inveterate list-maker; I write up things as a bit of anticipatory joy; I take notes in pen on things to come back to for class. My life is wrapped up in bound notebooks, not just in the abundant books-for-life that I am actively reading at any given moment. (Fantasy! Gardening! Nuns! The Gaze! Space! Soundscapes! If it has words, I probably want to read it. But that’s not what this post is about.)

Because writing is so integral to life, I carry an Everything Notebook almost everywhere I go. It’s gone to meetings (so many meetings); it’s been there while I’ve read email (put a note on the list of future agenda topics); it’s been there when I needed to outline or brainstorm; it’s been there at those difficult draft stages when the ideas need to move hither and thither. It’s done poetry, and drafts of valentines notes, and organized the garden. It has made note of trail damage to report to the ranger; it has the outline of the backpacking trip I want to take. It has non-Amazon book buying websites, and great quotes for the next time I teach that writing class.

And it’s gone. Sometime last weekend, the winter Everything Notebook escaped for freedom. It’s not in the scout bag, it’s not at the bottom of the car, it’s not at Lost and Found, it’s nowhere to be found.

The good news is, there were only about five pages of future-book related notes, and those are mostly mentally recoverable. I had just submitted project 1; I had also submitted project 2; and project 3 is up in the cloud, with part 1 out for review and part 2 in a brand new group brainstorm. There’s never been a better time to lose the Everything Notebook, because nearly all of its big sections are in the “done and done” stage, checked off with gigantic check-marks cutting across the page.

I can reconstruct most of it; there’s probably about three hours of focused work that I need to do to feel fully “back in control.” My list of Amazon substitutes will be out there in social media; the to-do list for the garden I can reconstruct in the car as we drive up north at the end of the week, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got notes on nearly all that I’ve read saved on the computer somewhere. I’ll be missing a couple of great quotes (“here’s that place I wanted to share this thing I once read” doesn’t go over as well as the quote I’d actually copied out, alas), and my record of what we did over the long holidays will be more memory than archive. But it’s okay.

WHAT?
So now, here I am, starting a Spring-based Everything Notebook. I’ve put the blue tape on the front with its label. I’ve foliated the thing (that is, put numbers on each leaf, or folio, rather than on every page – so each opening has a number). I have left my space for a table of contents.

But I thought you, dear reader, might like to know about the concept of the Everything Notebook.

I know a lot of people invest heavily in theirs, with nice almost-like-cardstock pages. I get mine from as bound books (wide ruled!) from the dollar store. It’s going on canoe trips in my backpack, so cheap cardboard covers and a capacity to take notes are my priority. But no spiral binding; spiral binding gets squashed and catches on things. A plain old bound composition book, one that doesn’t create a hurdle to writing in it. (I once carefully inscribed the title page of a notebook. That notebook was too nice for real use and it languished. Now, I just put a title and my contact information. My current notebook has a pre-torn spot on the cover and came pre-installed with a coffee stain when the cat bumped my arm one morning – it’s messy and disposable enough to USE, not to CHERISH.)

My brand new slightly soiled and torn Everything Notebook – plus a page out of one from last year

And treatment of the Everything Notebook differs from one person to the next. Some people are crafty and elegant. Their handwritten notebooks are works of art, with beautifully drawn flowcharts and multi-colored pen annotations that could be reproduced in their next article. Not me. My Everything Notebook is a squawky thing, with mind-maps with words sideways and angled to draw attention to this or that relationship, and lined-off lists of tasks accomplished, and giant caps to remind me to do “the thing” the next time I see that page. 

 A scholarship brainstorm with lines aslant

Some people use fountain pens and inscribe their notebooks as beautifully crafted legacies for their  progeny who may someday consult these pages of wisdom. My handwriting ranges from the tidy to the out-of-control scrawl as the car bounces up and down on carpool days. Nor do I use the fountain pens or multicolored pen shades to carefully shape what a person notices. Instead, in mine, there’s a mix of all-too-bleedable felt-tip ink with good solid ballpoint and even pencil that smears because for me, different kinds of writing implements support different kinds of thinking. This is a work space, not, for me, a pretty one. I don’t put on my glasses when I jot a note in the middle of the night, I just try not to overwrite things already noted down -- though it’s been known to happen.

Page labeled “Brahms” with some hotel scribbles, a note about Climbing safety, and prep notes for a training. Pretty? No. Functional? Yes.

SOURCE AND ORIGIN
I came to the Everything Notebook from two places. First, I used to take topical notes: one topic in one bound composition book. I’ve got three such notebooks from my early days as a monastic scholar, for instance – notes on readings, lists of convents, those kinds of things. And then I had another book on Beethoven, and one on Mozart, and piles of paper for my to-do list. Packing for the office was regularly a virtuosic act of “where did I put the things?” and not the calm collected departure that leads smoothly into the productive part of the day. Besides, I was forever leaving a notebook at the office, and needing it at home or vice versa, and writing on slips of paper to be added in later, and … well, it was a mess.

So by moving to a single bound composition notebook – large enough to fit a lot on a page, small enough to fit handily in even my smallest daypack – and ensuring that it goes everywhere with me, I’ve done away with a lot of the paper clutter. (Cue my family laughing heartily; but now my paper clutter is at the level of the article draft or PDF printout rather than at the level of little slips of paper. Trust me, it’s an improvement!). That “aha” moment was about a decade ago, after one last frustrating search for the list I’d made just the day before. I rage-wrote the list in the back of the nuns notebook. And then the lightbulb went off: what if I just put everything in one place? And the Everything Notebook was born.

The second inspiration was my 20 page to-do list. Okay, not everyone does that kind of self-organizing. But I found early on that each of my projects (and I have had a lot of projects) has about 10 things I’m trying to track. Schedule the next meeting, draft five bullet points, find the verb list and write up that Learning Outcome chart for the bureaucrats out there. Now, each project can be tracked at once in one place with my Everything Notebook in hand. My upcoming trip to China and Nepal is there alongside my class prep is adjacent to the bibliographic planning for the next article. And the list of seeds I need from the store will be there when I go to handle the recycling later today. I manage (mostly) to get it all done, because I can track it.

HOW?
To support my wild-and-crazy work/life balance, I’ve divided my book into sections. Sometimes I start at the back-end of a section and work toward the book’s front, and other topics work in the regular front to back. It seems chaotic, but it does help me navigate.

And my sections are:

• fols. 2-3: Table of Contents (grows organically as I work)
• SECTION 1: RESEARCH
• fols. 4-5: Info about conference and book deadlines, high level overview of the season’s plan
• fols. 5-20: Research on the book
• fols. 20-40: Research on other projects, either grouped or interspersed, depending on mood
• SECTION 2: CLASS PREP / TRAVEL
• fols. 50 backwards to 40: class prep stuff
• fols. 50 forward to 60: travel planning
• SECTION 3: ADMINISTRIVIA
• fols. 75 toward the front: meetings, so many meetings. And more meetings. And then some notes on meetings
• SECTION 4: PERSONAL
• fols. 75 toward the back: language learning. Right now, I’m getting ready for China. Chinese is haaaaaaard.
• Fols. 97 toward the front: to-do lists.

And, at random in the range of the 80s or so, things to do with life. Poetry. Bird lists. Recipes. Stuff.

WHY?
Why tell you all of this? On the one hand, it’s one quirky person’s way of managing All The Things. On the other hand, this is the kind of practice that can really make a difference in terms of personal productivity, because it puts “life” and “work” into the same physical space, and invites a contemplation of brussel sprouts (with honey and sriracha) alongside contemplation of the intricacies of prayer transmission in the 16th century. Because both are important. And the Everything Notebook helps me keep track of it all.

Another advantage, which I didn’t think of when I started this practice a decade ago or so, is that I do actually remember my work chronologically. Oh, that was the project I was working on when we were doing improvements down at lakeside. Pull out the 2019 notebook, and there are the bibliographic notes from that work on this-or-that. It helps me remember more than if it were limited to the thing itself. It also helps me find things on my computer, since I can put boundaries on the date search.

And third, I really do believe all the scholarship that tells us we remember what we write by hand better than what we type. Type is fast; ideas flow through the fingers onto the page. But the dramatic sad face next to the bad archival news recorded on the sheet of paper is the thing my brain actually chooses to remember. I’m a geographical filer; that’s true in note-taking space as well as in my life. I know where to look, and that’s enough to help me track down the thing I’m looking for. (Where was that great mushroom soup recipe? Oh, yeah, that was the year we did the quick departmental retreat – it was at the back of that notebook. Yum.) So for me, this kind of organization works with the ways in which my brain chooses to connect things. My coffee stains and rain-ruffled pages are my version of Proust’s madeleines – the spark that brings to life the whole complexity of thinking indulged in by my previous self.

As long as I can keep track of where I’ve put my book. Sniff. I’ll miss that winter volume, but I still carry around an image of the coffee stain on page 16 with the notes from that inter-library loan book on scribes, and the carefully checked-off “tell my sister X, Y, and Z” list from the winter holidays at the back of the book. The writing imprinted not just the page, but also my memory.

And that process of writing information into memory is exactly what the Everything Notebook is for!