I wrote the forward to a time travel anthology a while ago. And for my sins, they sent me a bunch of bookplates to sign.
These things sat in my PO box for a while because the email from the editors telling me about them got swallowed up by Apple’s latest iOS update—which has turned the Mail app into a bit of a bin fire. Eventually, though, the team tracked me down and said, “Hey, you’ve really got to sign those bookplates.”
So I picked them up… and the stack was enormous. I stared at it for two days, thinking, this is going to take me two days to sign. And I’m kind of on a deadline here.
But today, I came up with a solution. Every time someone rang and interrupted my writing, I grabbed a stack of bookplates and started signing!
And what I realized is, I didn’t have to give up any real writing time at all. It’s the kind of mechanical, unthinking task you can do while your brain is somewhere else. I think it'll still take me about two hours total to get through them all—but thanks to a lot of phone interruptions today, I'm nearly there.
It's amazing the non brainy work you can churn out stuck on a call or in an online meeting.
As an example, with the election on, the Dems are getting tons of slacktivist form emails from people calling for justice in Palestine, real reform on housing, proper compensation and supports for carers, and action on plastics, waste and recycling. We've written standard responses to all of these, highlighting where our policies address all the points they've made, and I sit in meetings copying and pasting responses into the relevant emails and firing off personalised replies.
I'm particularly proud of the plastics and waste one; there's a bit of a "bitch, please. How about YOU step up?" vibe to it, because we have a whole suite of policy platforms dealing with these issues.
My Dems colleagues are astonished at how much admin work I get done in between my day job and campaigning, and it's this - managing brainless admin tasks while I'm on calls and in meetings, so I can focus on the thinky tasks when I'm free to. But I'm happy to let them think I'm so kind of productivity genius 🤷♀️
squints at signature "J.Bimminghom? wth!"