070620 — Blog — Rulerless

Ruining a good thing

The last day of school was always sometime in June — June 16, maybe, or June 21 if there had been a lot of snow days — and that was it. It’s finally warm outside, there are finally leaves on the trees, and you’re finally free. A perfect transition from one grade to the next, with a nearly three-month buffer between the two.

The feeling of absolute freedom has stayed with me. No obligations, no dangling threads. As an educator, I follow the rhythms of the school year, but I no longer get to experience a clean break in which all of my projects end at the same time. Three-month vacations are a thing of the past as well, sorry to say.

Casey von NeumannJune 4, 2020070620, 010121, 052721Comment

Putting creative work first

The Notes app on my phone is full of entry codes to buildings, shopping lists, information about how to find my car in this or that parking garage, quotes I found interesting, lists of songs to play, and the truly inscrutable (“Dreamed I was schoolmarm to a teenage Jagger and Richards”).

It’s also where ideas go to die.

I’ve had this blog for just over a year, but I’ve been coming up with blog post ideas for much longer — they are all over the place. Not only that, I have a note from May 4, 2015 that says simply, “Daily blog posts.” Why did it take me nearly four years to follow through?

Casey von NeumannMay 26, 2020070620, 100520, 112420, 012521, 031621, 060321 Comments

Do the work that moves the needle

A colleague of mine told me how she used to spend hours in lesson planning.

Or so she thought. What she was actually doing was stewing in her own anxiety for hours, then spending a relatively short time completing the lesson plan.

As she became healthier, she realized that the hours of anxiety didn’t “count.” In other words, that time wasn’t actually helping her to accomplish anything.

Casey von NeumannNovember 19, 2019062420, 070620, 081820, 110920, 042721, 031022Comment

Do enough to change your brain

After years of searching, I have discovered that the best breakfast burritos in my city are to be found at a counter inside a suburban gas station.

And just as with many such establishments around the world, business there is conducted entirely in Spanish.

I don’t speak Spanish, really. I know a few words. But the other day, I was delighted to find that I understood the woman’s simple greeting and all of her questions without mentally translating them into English. It was as though a little window opened up in my brain — an unexpected pop-up shop, not unlike the taco counter itself. Something had changed.

Casey von NeumannSeptember 5, 2019change, 070620Comment

Why I fell off the Inbox Zero wagon

In the early days of my business, I was doing all of my own marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.

That meant that I lived in my email. Each weekday, I would start around 8 AM, crank through as many emails and phone calls as I could, and then start teaching music lessons at 3 PM.

Hiring help was necessary as the business grew, but the volume of email didn’t go down. If anything, it expanded. But I was committed to processing it all, based on what I had learned from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, a painstaking process that required making a decision about what to do with each email, phone call, and piece of paper I received. And once everything was processed, my reward would be an empty inbox, an empty voicemail box, or an empty actual box. Everything would be filed, archived, put away, and dealt with.

Casey von NeumannSeptember 2, 2019070620, 071720, 021821, 043021, 080621, 082622 Comments

Great job! Do it again.

“The bottom of the nose belongs down here, and the eyebrows should hit here. You can improve the perspective on the house in the background by incorporating these lines. Also, why is the sky a strip of blue at the top?”

We know that there are developmental stages that children’s artwork goes through as they learn, so we don’t expect kids to draw like adult professionals. Dena Luchsinger makes the case that it’s just as unhelpful to a growing writer to point out all of their mistakes.

Casey von NeumannMay 30, 2019071919, 070320, 070620, 072720, 080520, 081420, 083120, 101320, 090721Comment