Ira's Interdimensional Push On Going to Inbox 0 #8

To all who have untold thousands of unread emails, In the words of the esteemed Doug Nygaard, with whom I worked with ever so briefly from my days at Epic - “when I come back from vacation I delete all my new emails - the important ones will come back.” At the time it seemed like a respectable thing to do, especially if you’re a step or two up off the bottom of the ladder. Now, it feels more efficient and effective than ever and so without further ado - here’s the top three ways that I’ve been going to inbox 0 these last two weeks: 1. Submitting my lesson plans before they were due and done: Most managers, nay employees, these days are responsible for some tracker or another to make sure certain standards and deadlines are being met. These days, however, I (or more more regularly Chat GPT really) just do what my boss needs me to do to check off her spreadsheet so that I can quickly get back to what interests me. If there’s feedback, or the emails return so to speak, I’ll make the changes (or Chat GPT really) as efficiently as possible to keep my boss’s spreadsheet checked so that I can get back to my existence. 2. Teaching with the lessons that I have: From my time in the American charter industrial complex, I’ve built up a tremendous guilt around teaching without a “perfect” lesson plan - as if all of my students’ gaps in understanding is because I didn’t design the lesson well enough. Now that there’s absolutely no time for that nonsense (not that there ever was really though), I roll in - I roll in with the lesson that I have. I’ll do the best I can to prepare and take the forethought seriously to give every lesson the anticipation that it deserves to truly break down the trickiest concepts, but at a certain point I need to just roll in and let my light for math shine. There’s little else to do - the guilt just dims the light and doesn't lead to any more decent preparation the next time around. There’s always next year and the year after and the year after to build on what didn’t land “perfectly" this year so there’s no rush and no race folks; if there truly is a problem I’ll hear about it after some class or another and make adjustments going forward. 3. Buying what’s right in front of me: The Dutch people around me (namely Talja but also her friends/associates from time to time) look in on horror as I spend money - as if I've never heard of a home-cooked meal or that it occurred to me that wedding chairs can be rented instead of bought. To me though, avoiding spending is complete anathema to going to inbox 0 - if at every bend I’ll spend an hour cooking and cleaning when I could work while I wait for the food to come, I’ll just jam up the jam-hole which is already unspeakably backlogged. Money doesn’t grow on trees, but neither too does time and at any given moment there needs to be a willingness to calculate which I am shorter on and make adjustments accordingly. Sometimes the 20 euro lunch buys more than just food when I can sleep for another hour, get more work done, and ultimately trade my time cooking/cleaning for something that interests me more. These days I get up at or (a couple-few hours) before dawn to views that can be seen [here](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MvrkW33UIpkde_P4HN9VfMu_h4m5MTXJ?usp=sharing) and at or about this time next week I’ll say I do (except I won't use those exact words because as it turns out that's not part of the Jewish custom). In the before times, I think I really wanted to understand every part of my role, or relationship, or trip, or whatever and would take every deadline, or conversation, or meeting/moment super seriously, but now that’s just totally not possible and I don't think that kind of attention actually serves me. It’s nice to build some nuance between diving into what interests me the most at any given time and letting AI do the rest. From (within range of) inbox 0, Ira P.S. I plan to keep writing these updates until January or February or so unless I can get to 100 subscribers - if you want more of these please do your part to spread the word!!