by thetendingyear | Jul 23, 2018 | Chronic Pain, Time Management, Workaholism
If you follow The Tending Year on Instagram, you’ve like seen recent posts about spikes in my chronic pain. Since I’m focusing on intention this month, I set an intention to investigate why my pain was spiking at night in an attempt to prevent, lessen, or accommodate...
by thetendingyear | Jun 11, 2018 | Chronic Pain, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Personal Development, Slow Living, Workaholism
If you do a search for the hashtag “selfcare” on Instagram, you’ll find an amalgamation of “you are enough” written in calligraphy, heavily filtered pictures of skinny bikini-clad women on beaches, and…products. Marketing campaigns promote self-care as a product for...
by thetendingyear | Jun 5, 2018 | Addiction & Recovery, Dissertation, Graduate School, Productivity, Workaholism
Most graduate students learn how to condense their dissertation projects into a one sentence “elevator pitch” when someone asks us, “So, what do you study?” We are also just as likely to field the question “Why do you work so much?” with a rehearsed answer. My own...
by thetendingyear | May 21, 2018 | Chronic Pain, Graduate School, Mental Health, Workaholism
This image is by the artist Layla Durrani. You can see her artwork on Instagram and on her website. I love black and white thinking. I love rules, instructions, how-to guides, and most of all I love doing a “good job.” Sometimes, due to pain or illness or overlapping...
by thetendingyear | Apr 16, 2018 | Graduate School, Mindfulness, Productivity, Slow Living, Workaholism, Writing
When I was a teenager, I would write a poem in one sitting, always declaring it “done” after a few hours. I enjoyed then and still enjoy having something concrete to show for my work. Since then, I gathered many more tools that help me to envision writing poetry as a...
by thetendingyear | Mar 27, 2018 | Productivity, Project Management, Time Management, Workaholism
I’m focusing my March posts on Conscious Input and Output, and Week 13 is all about Perspective. I’ll be honest: I almost changed my topic halfway through last week to Stress, because I was under a lot of it! I’m going to offer a double whammy analysis of stress via...
