10 Minute Rule

I have this mental checklist of things that need doing before Monday. The list keeps getting longer or shorter and I am not writing any of it down. That is my first mistake. The second is thinking that a list can ensure the things that need getting done, get done. In reality they only get done by way of prioritizing and dedicating mental energy. A list does a little of that work, but not so much of the heavy lifting. That comes down to accepting that your time needs to be allocated to the things you need to do in order to make time for the things you want to do.

This has always been my problem–wanting to do more than my mind or body is capable of doing at once and trying to do all of it nonetheless. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried multiple ways to make it work, but it does not. After a while you decide to stop putting energy to certain things, putting more energy to others and the result winds up being success in the things that get the most of your attention.

So, if this blog teaches you anything it ought to be to determine your (corp buzzword coming) capacity and create space to maximize that. You want to be successful? Focus on one thing you want to be successful at, and do it the best of your capabilities. Then it is on to the next thing.

My kids have been asking when we draft for the beachborn league. It has to happen sooner than later. Still I am hesitant to draft early, because pre-season is a bitch. We’ve already seen JJ McCarthy go down for the season, the Giants are basically an ER ward at this point, and who knows who will be playing end for the Jets? All of these register as minor concerns, but it begs the question: how long should one wait before committing to the fantasy talent. I believe for my part we will go the weekend of the 31st. It gives me another clean week to decide a strategy for this year, and to review the scoring rules so my player strategy better aligns with the points and how they are obtained. I didn’t do that last year, effectively confusing my leagues and loosing both of them. I lost the BeachBorn so badly that I am assured the first pick… and the resulting toilet seat trophy to wear to the draft. I haven’t set up the trophy for this year, but I am planning on getting a nice one for… myself.. because I am expecting to hoist in at the end of the season, like I always expect I will do before the first pick is in.

The 17 yr old college CB is expecting to get some playing time. He may be right. He’s shifted back and forth between 2nd and 4th string based on play and injuries. Still he’s steals reps with the ones whenever he can. His little brother is also capturing some first team reps, often as a result of injury to other players. He’s a sophomore and expectations are high. He’s shown himself to be a Kyle Hamilton style utility player, moving all over the secondary filling in admirably wherever the need arises. As for his personal desires? He’d like to fill the Travis Hunter role. The opportunities are there on both sides of the ball, but he needs to have sharper play.

Some Thoughts:

1. After being word-shamed yesterday I got back on the horse and cranked out 2k of good stuff. It isn’t 10–not yet. Tomorrow I’ll be able to finish the project and layout the next. Friday is an official day off. Saturday we grind.

Day two went better than day 1, from discovering the project is only 6500 words to putting 2500 good ones on paper, this has been a bit of a leap from yesterday. Yet I am not where I need to be. A colleague of mine is much better at this kind of grind. He recently posted about an oops situation involving a 10k word story he’d forgotten to write. He did it overnight. That’s way beyond my can at present. I used to be that guy, but as I’ve stated multiple times, I just ain’t got that flow right now. I need to get it back and I need to figure out how to get it back. It is more than just getting older (my guy and I are the same age). It is about how I live my life and how I spend my time and definitely about the energy around me which is often not the least be creative outside of the inspirational Lady Talis, but even that inspiration which she provides is not that of watching a working author grind and realizing I need to get my game right.

I want to be better. Part of that is the time on task and how well I use it. I expect to get back to solid business hours in terms of the writing, and the more I hold court, the better and more refined that time will become. I’ve done this all my life. This transitioning back towards that after a very lazy summer is going a lot slower than I planned.

First day back on the grind for real, and man is my mind not ready for the challenge. I’m 2k into an 8.5 k project due in three days. I can honestly say that 500wds of what I have is pretty good. The rest is going to get culled or expanded–hopefully tomorrow, because today I’m bent. I need to get past this revv up stage faster than I normally tend to do, because I lack the time to properly start my engine. Heck, I should’ve never let it go dormant, but I needed the break both mentally and, as discussed, physically. But I am back now, and I am working as hard as I can. I switch between tasks, burning through the inability to do one by diving into another. If I can not write, I work on developing the classes that start next week. This semester is getting closer and closer and I intend to be ready for that work.

Some Thoughts:

1. I suppose this entire thing could have been some thoughts, because I don’t have enough of a singular thought to pen a ten minute blog.
2. The room project is still coming along. I spent too much time (and money) taking steps forward with that today. I admit to using it as a distraction from work. It filled in those blanks between the school work and the writing and the seven rounds of pokemon online and the one game of College Football 25.
3. And the nap… and the hanging out with the Lady Talis…
4. Tomorrow has to be more locked in and organized than this mess of today has turned out to be.
5. More coffee, perhaps?

another day of writing from the phone and letting the hands heal as we move into the last week before classes begin. I slept in to the tune of 8 am, which is unheard of here for me. It’s back to 4:30 tomorrow before I settle into a ‘natural’ 5 am week day routine.

it is hard to shift back onto the idea of a semester’s worth of teaching. Summer teaching feels different because it is more money (by way of being spread across less time) and fewer courses. I have a better focus on the work, which is largely due to the shorter time frame.

yet here I am trying to get going and lock into a work routine that is going to find me some success. Here’s hoping I can create that. It all starts tomorrow.

I’m writing this from my phone because my fingers hurt so badly that I don’t want to press keys. I haven’t worked the computer all day. I’ve hardly touched it since Thursday. That is largely due to the now completed wall project. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that several tiles fell off the wall this morning before we finished. I’m hoping it was a fluke, largely because I want to be done but also because I sleep against that wall and tile rain sounds horrible.

I didn’t really explain the hands. We peeled tiles off the wall by hand, which damaged the skin below my nails to the point where it hutt et s to press down. A labor of love.

Happy to have completed the wall and be making the turn into finishing some writing this week. I’m on top of things for the most part and that feels good. I’ve got another 11k word project to do this month and classes starting so I need to stay focused and on task. They starts with these hands healing. Nobody wants to do 11k on a phone…

Well, it got worse. It got so bad that I find myself wondering how it possibly could have gotten this bad. We are in the midst of a logic defying trainwreck in the Talis-household. I take total responsibility. Let me break down the problem:

When laying tile I believe I switched directions at one point. Where I had been going from bottom to top of the wall, I shifted to top to bottom. During that time micro cracks had begun to form, pushing the once straight (and new, because as I mentioned yesterday, I had to do it over) tile line down on a slight angle. Somewhere near the middle the entire thing began to look odd. The choice was made to keep going across the top, because that part looked good. However, once I started going down, the line became more and more crooked. Huge cracks began sprouting up as one tile would not lay evenly next to the other. Finally it reached the stage where the tiles were completely disconnected. This is where we are now. Lady Talis is doing her best to address the situation as I sit and blog and try to let my subconscious process exactly how I screwed this up. She’s called me back in to see her results, which is just as well because ten minutes is up and I’ve figured out exactly nothing.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I am not good at laying tiles. Especially the stick on variety. I’m also not good with taking input, which is what largely led to the tile issue. I go fast and when I think I’m cooking, the food is burning. This is what has been happening over the course of our home project. We decided to lay wall tiles as a beautiful backdrop to our bedroom and almost immediately, I screwed it up. I continued to do so, finally accepting that things would need to be redone. Yet as the redo is deeply underway, I see more cracks forming in the construction. I’m not good at this. Indeed, it appears that I am getting worse.

DIY is probably not for me if you want a project done right. I’m good at the labor end. I’m good at helping my kid move to a new home, lifting and putting stuff together–which I also spent the day doing. When it comes to fine eye work, I’m not that guy. At least now I know it. Unfortunately, I will be seeing it on the wall basically forever.

I just paid the $200 dues for my fantasy league and I’m feeling a return on investment.

The league is a fun one and filled with a bunch of dudes from the big easy and a few New Yorkers like myself. That is the scary part, because everyone will know the players I want. Luckily it is a keeper league, which leaves me with the best RB in the bunch by way of CMC. Barkley is going to be #2, but if the guy who has him drops him (bigger Giants fan than me) then I will do my best to scoop him up in the first round. That is the plan–focus on big names early and fill out the roster with Malik Nabers-styled rookies and players who I think will be volume guys. I am excited about the prospects of the season and frankly surprised at how fast it will be upon us.

Meanwhile, both my boys who play are fighting their way up the ranks. The HS sophomore is getting more reps due to a guy in front of him being hurt. Now what he does with those reps will be telling. He isn’t there yet, mentally. He isn’t doing the small things that add up to a practice of perfection. His big bro is doing those small things as a college freshman, but he is battling uphill. He was able to corral his first 11 on 11 pick which should help him move up, but he has to make a splash to be noticed. There are a lot of dbs in the room, and #31 is a quiet freshman with a solid technique that means the QB doesn’t really test him that much. That means he is not being seen. He may pop on film as a coverage guy, but it isn’t translating to moving up to first team. We’ll see how this last showing pans out when practice resumes friday.

Some Thoughts:

1. Project season at the Talis household. I’ve spent waaaaaaaay too much money on an outdoor projector project that continually seems doomed to fail. The goal was to reduce the tech footprint of the projector setup to make it both mobile and dope. It hasn’t gone well. The bedroom project is lining up better after a minor (but pricey) mishap. I’m going to need to practice patience moving forward.

Turns out my first post of this turn was a waiver wire. Fitting stuff, that. I was talking about the Jets looking for a QB and the Giants having hope. Tomorrow being the Waiver Wire, you’ll hear more about these things. For now it is more about the headspace I was in all those days (and year+) ago. The goal was to get through a thousand days in this iterative cycle–something I’ve not done before. Halfway through I think I am doing it pretty well. I also believe I’ve evolved quite a bit as a person and a human since 7.1. I still care about a lot of the same things–I’m still a football fan–but I also have cognitive distance from the things I love and a better understanding of what that interaction means from a dopamine and dissonance perspective, and how to have better control over the common sense of all things. I can now, for example, divorce myself from this institutionalized love of the Giants and see them as a thing separate from myself. That team is not my identity. It is not how others see me and it doesn’t need to be representative of self.

That is an important thing to understand during political seasons. We often struggle to divorce ourselves from labels and categories. Voting Trump or Harris becomes a definition of self for those around us, in spite of the fact that the moment of voting is extremely private and personal. Still I can absolutely recognize the dissonance of being in a ‘Forever Trump’ environment and going into that small booth and deciding to cast your vote elsewhere or not vote at all. Just as I understand growing up a Giants fan and then, one day, rooting for their rival as though that choice actually said something about me externally. This could be the thread I start to tug on this semester in my classes. I won’t talk politics, but I do want to talk about self and self-definition and have them write about who they are as individuals and in relation to texts. Heck, that even fights against ChatGPT!

Self-reflection, self-awareness, self-growth is important. These are the things that make us better humans and better scions of society. In a world that feels so chaotic and so driven by rivers of urging and escalation it is often hard to take a moment to sit still and reflect on who you are and who you want to be in this world, and especially on what it takes and what it means to do just that.

I’m trying here.