My former boss is someone who describes herself as "working to deadline." "In other words," she continues, "I procrastinate." Seeing as she's also a phenomenally motivated and productive workaholic, and that she's OCD, she actually combines these traits to figure out ways to use her procrastination productively.
For example, she almost always some task that she isn't doing that she calls the "engine": it pushes everything else along because she'll go to such great lengths of avoid doing it. (For example, she did triathlons while in graduate school. "I had a lot of time on my hands in graduate school," she'll explain. "You see, there was this really big thing I wasn't writing.")
I've been doing that all this week, and trying to make peace with it. I've gotten a great deal ticked off my list -- email messages sent, things put into motion for the start of the semester, errands run, and the like. (A current colleague calls this "swatting flies." Also apt.) I still have much of that sort to do, but part of the reason I've been moving at this pace has been because I'm tired -- from all the travel, in part -- and re-entry is moving slowly this time. (Both G and I have complained to one another about the downside of this summer of wonderful trips: the time at home has been pressured for work, and so hasn't felt terribly, well, summery.) August 20 is when things will heat up on campus, and I'm both looking forward to and utterly dreading that moment.
The big thing that I'm avoiding is, as usual, working on The Book. I made modest progress this morning in thinking about it, but then hit a small snag and have huddled down and hidden ever since. (But I filed my entire to-be-filed stack!) My current learning curve is a slow one with that particular project. I suppose that's to be expected, since I'm in the midst of incredibly steep learning curves in my day-to-day administrative work and in the other realms in which I write. I need this one to speed up, though, or at least the rate at which I feel competent to produce to speed up. I'm getting worried (again) about my ability to keep going with it, about my commitment to it. This is a cyclical worry, which is something that I'm also trying to make peace with.
I'm interested in the idea of learning curves more generally, in part because when we talk about them we (well, I, since I'm extrapolating from my own experience here) imagine them looking something like this: 
smooth, consistent progress. Now, anyone who teaches knows that learning curves and processes are much more uneven and interesting than that, but that doesn't stop us from being frustrated with our own progressions (and lack thereof).
I've been thinking about learning processes of late because of the conjunction of Tricksy learning to walk and Squiss learning to read. Squiss has always been something of a slow-and-steady progresser, while Tricksy seems to move in more leaps and starts, with a kind of momentary lag between desire and success. I was talking to Squiss's teacher about some of this this morning, because she brought a book (that she'd made by stapling together pages) home the other day. She's made books before, but this was the first to include a substantial amount of text: cat, mat, vase (spelled "vese"), and so on. But what was most interesting to us was that every single one of the words was spelled backwards. So, T-A-C for "cat."
I wanted to ask her teacher if this was typical. (And, sure, there was a vague dyslexia question in the backs of our minds, more in terms of wondering whether or not we should be keeping an eye on this than anything else.) It is -- and, apparently, it's something that kids do before they can really read. In a couple of months, she explained, Squiss will really be reading and this will disappear.
I found this fascinating, and we had a great conversation about it. Squiss can sound out words and sentences, but it takes a lot of effort. And sometimes she'll see words and recognize them for themselves without that step in what is clearly "reading," but it's not the norm yet. It somehow makes perfect sense that while you're focused on the letters that make up the words -- rather than the words as entities in themselves -- it would really matter in what order the letters go, as long as they're all there. Montessori Maven further explained that many kids will start out with the letters all over the page, in no order or grouping that makes sense to adult eyes.
There's something about this logic that feels as though it could help me sort through my own writing issues right now: letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books. (Hmm. That makes it all seem linear and necessarily progressive, doesn't it?) I've written before about the local issues/big picture problem and I -- and perhaps we all -- have in working on a large project. I think that part of the problem for me right now is that I don't quite know what order of magnitude I need to focus on. I've spent the summer reading for the big picture -- the theoretical framework -- and while I'm not nearly done, I've made good progress. But I'm feeling today a bit as though I'm trying to write a sentence without knowing what the letters are; and I'm not sure how to go about recognizing the letters.
I'm tempted to keep filing and avoid this until Monday, but that also feels a bit like a kiss of death. The better alternative is probably to commit to a full hour of sorting this out before letting myself slide into the fussy work of tying up the week.
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