I am, and always have been, a creature of habit. Luckily, most of my habits are good (other than my chocolate addiction), because I'm very slow to change them, and I don't enjoy trying in the least. Some habits I've had forever (colour coding my day planner, putting on my left shoe first, always eating hot dogs with the same toppings), but others get added as my life changes. This year, I've cultivated my Killam habit, which I'm quite particular about. For all of you non-Dal people, Killam is our ridiculously ugly, fortress-like library, and as my home office consists of a desk in the living room that I share with the hubby, I spend a lot of time working at Killam. Here's how my slightly OCD ritual goes:
- Walk into library
- Get cup of tea (English breakfast, one milk) at Second Cup- totally necessary
- Press up button for elevator
- Take elevator to the fourth floor
- Choose desk directly opposite the women's washroom & water fountain facing out into the atrium
- Set up my desk with my computer, mouse, files, books, twelve colours of highlighter, requisite cup of tea, Nalgene bottle, headphones, etc. -and yes, I carry all of this around in my backpack with me everyday. I'm a Haligonian sherpa.
- Get to work
- The sun was shining right in my eyes, and my computer had that glare thing going on
- It's far away from the water fountain
- It's right in front of the doors to the stairwell, where people enjoy tromping up and down, coming in and out, and talking really loudly on their cellphones
- EVERYONE knows where I always work, and if someone was looking for me, they wouldn't be able to find me
- I'm obsessive-compulsive and couldn't feel properly productive because I was on the wrong side of the library
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1 comments:
I think grad school makes people compulsive (or in most cases, more compulsive than they originally were, since you pretty much have to be compulsive already in order to get in). My theory is that it fills our heads with so much information, that we don't have room left over for everyday details. This is why we set up systems that take care of the details for us. Like how my keys have hung on exactly the same hook every day for two years. Or how my expenses get entered into a spreadsheet, according to colour-coded category, filed into accordingly colour-coded files and transfered into a similarly colour-coded graph for ease of future reference. (If you don't already do this, I highly recommend it. Makes taxes much faster.)
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