Productivity Pondering: The Day My Name Was in the Wall Street Journal

One of the things I sometimes forget when I blog here at Patheos is that someone other than my mom and dad may actually wander by and read my musings. An example of that happened last week, when I received an email from the very lovely Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal. Sue had run across my “Brain Dumping” post wherein you and I tried to make some semblance of order out of my crazy productivity systems.

So one morning last week, I was treated to a forty-five minute telephone conversation with Sue. I’m used to being on the other end of these conversations, as the person who’s typically asking the questions. In this case, Sue settled my nerves early on in our chat. She was friendly, affirming, and also frankly super-interested in the minute details of how I attempt to get things done. I’ll definitely try to take a lesson from her play book next time I conduct an interview. I walked away from our conversaton feeling confident that she would not misrepresent what I’d been trying to say: that I have some systems in place, but that I’m frankly still struggling with finding “the” tool to better manage my time.

The end result was this article, posted yesterday in both the online and print editions of the Wall Street Journal. In How Productivity Tools Can Waste Your Time, Sue shares my story among others and points to the struggle many of us have managing our busy lives in today’s digital age.

Because I’m a bit vain, and because I also doubt that there will ever be another time I see the words Lisa Hendey and CatholicMom.com in the WSJ, I was hell bent on finding a hard copy for my “scrapbook” (which is really just a box of stuff to help me remember some of the pretty cool moments in life I never dreamed would happen to me). Yesterday morning, I received a note from one of our CM contributors, remarking on the piece. When I shared with him the fact that I needed to set aside an hour to go hunt down a newspaper, he pointed out to me the irony of the situation: a blogger, talking about eradicating paper from her life and how she has too much on her to do list, taking time to go purchase a newspaper when the article was right there online. I giggled with him, but still made time. Remember, I said above that I’m a bit vain like that!

So now, one day when I have time to actually make that scrapbook, there will be a yellowing piece of newsprint dated January 30,2013 — the day my name was in the Wall Street Journal.

Thanks to Sue Shellenbarger for her time and care in crafting the article. Be sure to watch Sue in the video below for a good overview of the story.

Read How Productivity Tools Can Waste Your Time