sabbatical + tools I'm digging

 This week, my role as director of my graduate program ended (potentially temporarily or permanently, depending on how department stuff shakes out). So I'm starting to slide into my new existence as a tenured faculty who is on sabbatical. In the past, a year of unstructured time would have made me anxious or even terrified me...but, well, I've learned some things over the past six years, and the past year of working from home taught me A LOT about productivity and work time and focus.

This week's tasks have been focused on clarifying my goals, outlining my timeline/deliverables, and beginning to organize myself. One thing I just did was clear out all my open tabs of things I want to read, adding them to my Notion workspace. While similar to Trello, Notion offers the ability to create databases and some share features--and it's free for educators (and has a downloadable desktop app that syncs across devices), so I've been using it to help me organize the articles, links, and books I want to read.

A screenshot of my Notion application on the Citations + Notes page

As you can see, you can create a bunch of subpages (with various configurations), and you can actually include a Trello-like section with boards and things to create workflows. So it really has a lot of potential, though I'm mostly using it as my writing log, citation database, and faculty reporting log.

The other tool I've been using heavily this summer has been Trello. Before reading Cal Newport's books, I didn't fully grasp how to use Trello most effectively--but then he described how he used it for administrative work, and it clicked, and it's been helping me keep my information organized and track due dates.

A screenshot of my Trello research board with the columns to do, doing, and Elon Seminar

Essentially, here I have columns for to do/doing/done (a pretty common way to track workflows), but I've added a few columns for specific projects, such as a research seminar I'm participating in (with lots of projects/tasks to organize), a column for presentations/publications, and a column for a grant I'm applying for (also with many components). Each card has information, weblinks, tasks, and deadlines, so I can consult them as needed to see what I need to do--without going on my email or looking in a bunch of different places. And because I have a Rocketbook, I can upload a PDF of handwritten notes to the appropriate card. So far, it's working pretty well for me!

Right now, I'm excited and confident that I can manage my time and have an invigorating and productive sabbatical year. I'll share my goals and what I hope to accomplish both professionally and personally in my next post!

Handy Kitchen Tools

I have a running group that meets on Thursdays to run.  I've brought treats a couple of times, and when I was at the half-marathon last weekend, one of the guys asked for baked goods this week.  I had bananas in the freezer that I accidentally let thaw partially, so they were no good for banana soft-serve (try it! seriously!), so I decided to bake banana-black raspberry muffins.

I would give you all the recipe, but I sorta made it up based on the Basic Muffin Recipe in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.  (I really should measure things, but I am so lazy).  I'm not going to give you all a recipe, but I am going to talk about one of my favorite kitchen tools: the dough whisk.

But first, a picture of Neko, who jumped onto the stool in the kitchen to get attention (on top of my cookbook). We have trained her using peanut butter (yes, she loves peanut butter), so she associates the stool with petted, food, or treats

I first heard about the dough whisk from Chocolate & Zucchini.  Intrigued, I decided to buy one for Lance and his brother for Christmas one year.  They both bake lots of bread.  I figured if a French woman with a tiny kitchen recommended it, then maybe it wasn't too gimmicky.

Lance and his brother both praised it as very useful indeed.  Since I usually leave the bread baking to Lance, I ignored it, content that Lance used it and liked it.  Until I started using it to mix the wet and dry ingredients for muffins and quick breads.

It's marvelous.  It works 1000 times better than a regular whisk or a rubber spatula.  AND it doesn't have dough sticking to it--the batter slides off easily and quickly.  I use it to whisk together dry ingredients:

And then to mix the wet and dry together.

You know how muffin/quick bread/cake recipes always admonish you to not "overmix" or DOOM will befall your baked treat? Well, this dough whisk gently combines the ingredients.  No overmixing!

And you know how if you mix something by hand, inevitably (even while risking the dreaded overmixing!) you miss some flour or something on the bottom?  Well, the dough whisk really gets it all.  No more flour spots lurking in the middle of your perfectly whisked batter.

If you find yourself making lots of muffins, pancakes, bread, etc, I would heartily recommend adding this to your kitchen tools.  Get rid of something pointless like one of those crappy whisks, if you have a small kitchen.  You won't regret it.

I'll leave you with an image of another well-used tool in my kitchen: the 1/2 cup ice cream scoop:

PERFECT for measuring out muffin batter.  And absolutely dead-on for the amount of cupcake batter you should portion out into each cup, as I mentioned yesterday.  Another tool well-worth the cost and drawer space!