kitchen timer

let me give you a little background about my relationship with my kitchen timer.

when i was in school, there were sometimes days, usually around exam time, that i had absurd amounts of work to do. so many pages of reading it made my eyes roll back in my head and my hands start to quiver. my schedule was such that i had long long days of classes tue-thu, then 4 day weekends. but monday and friday were WORK WORK WORK days. so i would wake up, knowing that i had a whole DAY of schoolwork ahead of me, and i would sometimes be in tears before i even put my feet on the ground. i would feel so overwhelmed that all i wanted to do was pull the covers over my head and cry. needless to say, i also have a wee-tiny struggle with depression. which i usually manage well. with drugs. which i love. maybe i'll write about that tomorrow. BUT. back to me being in bed with the covers over my head and countless hours of schoolwork to do.

i started to figure out that if i gave myself little incentives, it made things much more bearable. i would cut deals with myself. like if i work really hard for awhile, then i can take a break and do something fun like eat. this became too ambiguous for me. i needed more structure. and so -- the kitchen timer idea was birthed. i would decide on little increments of time with assigned tasks, and in between them i would get rewards. another thing you should know is that i also wet my pants with excitement any time i get to make a to-do list. so i would make little schedules for myself. here is a really non-specific example:

30 minutes: outline paper
20 minutes: reading
15 minutes: piddle around
20 minutes: reading
10 minutes: laundry

please keep in mind that my lists were IMMENSELY more specific than this. like i would decide in which time segment i was going to read which article, etc etc etc. and one of the stipulations was that once i started the kitchen timer, i had to turn it around and not look at it so that i wouldn't watch the minutes tick by. this worked for me. extremely well. saved my academic life.

now that i am not in school, i am still a big big fan of kitchen timer time. i work from home and have an immense amount of flexibility which sometimes kind of overwhelms me. and i really cannot stand to write case notes for more than about 20 minutes. so now my list might look like this:

20 minutes: case notes
20 minutes: read book of choice
15 minutes: check voicemail; return calls
20 minutes: clean
20 minutes: catch up on email
15 minutes: make grocery list
10 minutes: unload dishwasher

also if i have a task i am particularly dreading (right now it is sorting through everything in the attic) then i do 20-30 minute intervals -- a couple each day. julie says that when she comes home, she can tell what i've been doing during the day by where the kitchen timer is.

today, while browsing for things that i want to fill our new house with (i know, i know, materialism bug is sticking around for a minute), i came upon a kitchen timer that took my breath away. behold.

it is made of heavy duty cast iron, with silver painted numbers. it is available for $32 from anthropologie. if it wasn't the end of the month and if my budget for the month wasn't already so fucked, i would have bought it immediately. i've gotten so inspired about it i kind of want to start collecting kitchen timers.