Breaking the Ceiling

Writing morning pages (3 pages of stream of consciousness handwriting) before getting down to work is one of the best ways for me to clear my mind and let what’s important for the day surface. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way and mother of the morning pages practice, advises against reading back your morning pages. And I agree it’s good to let those thoughts go. But when to-dos come up, I still want to collect them from those pages.

So, as soon as a task comes up, even before I’ve written it, I put a dot in the left margin of the line in the exercise book I’m about to write on (inspired by Ryder Carroll’s bullet journal method). I phrase the to-do in a way that I can cross it off right after completing my morning pages. This morning, for example, I wrote “add drawing to scale to renovation project note”, instead of “draw rooms to scale for interior design”. This way, all I had to do was add a bullet to a could-do list I keep in Apple Notes, and I could cross off the dot in the margins as a completed task.

Basically free dopamine ✨

If I forget to phrase my task so cunningly, I still migrate the task to Apple Reminders (if it’s a must-do I want to be reminded of by a visual cue through the iCal widget on my phone), or a relevant could-do list, and simply change the dot into a <, so I can tell it’s been migrated. This practice is also based on Carroll’s rapid logging method.

Tiny tasks, like “check if there’s a status update of Lidl shipment” get completed immediately, following David Allen’s two-minute rule from Getting Things Done.

Together, this practice gets me started on my ramp-up to more difficult tasks.

Today at 14:48 (a.k.a. 2:48 PM), I logged that I was going to see if I could find some information on energy transition and roof maintenance at the site of our neighbourhood’s interest group. (My partner and I just bought a fixer-upper house and are in the middle of renovating it.)

I proceeded to read all available information on their website.

Questions popped up and alarm bells started ringing, since I didn’t recognize my partner’s plans for making our home gas-free anywhere.

No notes were taken during this time.

Next, I moved on to learning about heat pumps. I was processing what I read in my head, and more questions and concerns arose. I came to the vague conclusion that we were at risk of being f*d if we went through with our plan and let the grid operator remove our gas connection.

Again, I took no notes.

I stopped taking in information after maybe an hour, when my head was buzzing and some fuses in my brain definitely burned.

Why hadn’t I taken any notes? Now I’d have to have a partial do-over just so I could articulate my concerns to my partner later that day. (Which I wouldn’t, because my brain was already fried)

The answer is simple: I didn’t set up my tools beforehand.

My ADHD brain hates friction, and once it’s on the fast lane, that’s it. When I’m in the flow of reading and answering questions in my head, no way I’m interrupting that by opening a note-taking tool, be it digital or analog, to jot things down.

Before I start researching something, I need to (1) set a timer at about 45 mins so I stop before I get stuck in a burnout groove, and (2) open a note, preferably side-by-side to my browser if I’m working from my laptop, so taking notes is as frictionless as possible.

Welcome to Breaking the Ceiling! Where I, Marleen, pledge to learn in public about systems research, Personal Knowledge Management, and teaching at the law faculty of a university.

This blog will be a public record of my experiments and discoveries in real-time, starting from where I’m at: finishing a PhD research proposal that’s 4+ years in the making. Every workday (which may not always be Mon-Fri…) I’ll write a sentence or two up to multiple paragraphs about what I learned, thought about, or experimented with that day. What works (for now), what doesn’t, and why. Along the way, I’ll develop creative constraints so this doesn’t turn into a procrastination destination.