Children's Book Week: David LaRochelle Visits!

I highly recommend getting David LaRochelle to visit your school or library. He's great!

He talked a little about being an author, and read "The Best Pet of All." Then he told us about how a theater company had done a puppet show of "Best Pet of All" and sent him the puppets! 

He even got the kids moving by playing follow the leader with the puppets. It was a hit!

After that he drew us a hilarious story that he wrote, based on the numbers 1-10. Everyone was cracking up. Finally, he read "It's a Tiger" and talked about the process of making that story. It was such a treat to have him visit us. Not every author can do a great job with preschool age kids, but David's got it!

I even got a sneak peek of his new book coming out this fall with illustrator Mike Wohnoutka. It looks AMAZING and I'm sooooooo excited to read it in storytime.

Guess Who is Coming to Storytime This Week

 You get three clues to try and guess who is coming to storytime for Children's Book Week. Who could it be?

1. An amazing pumpkin carver
2. Minnesota author
3. Latest book has a cowboy hat on the cover

4. I read one of this author's stories during "Pet" themed storytime.
5. This author has a book that goes backwards
 

Make you best guess and stay tuned for more information!

Organizing Myself at Work

The change between being Youth Services Librarian/Assistant Director and working 45+ hours per week to working part time and splitting my hours between Children's Librarian and Reference Librarian has been pretty epic for me.

Photo Credit: NapaneeGal via Compfight cc

One of the biggest challenges was the way I work, and the way that I separate out my "personal" professional work from the work that is in my job description. Before, I didn't really have to think about it. Work was work was work, and it all took place in my office whether it was blogging, conference prep, book reviews, or employee evaluations. I was salaried, and I was there all the time. I used Outlook, Google Drive, and a giant desk calendar to organize everything, and it was good.  I didn't need to be mobile because I had one space to do all my work. Central command, if you will.

Then I moved and changed jobs, and was suddenly working at multiple desks with no spacious office, nowhere to put a giant desk calendar, no Outlook, and computers that won't even support Google Drive.

I was a bit at-sea. Here's what I've found to work:

• I have never found an online calendar that really works for me (I think it has to do with being a visual person and needing a sense of physical space to tie in with the passage of time, but I digress), so I bought myself a very nice planner to take care of scheduling.

• I took the time to organize my workspace in a way that works (though I am rarely actually in that space, even just organizing my stuff well made a big difference). 

• Work jump drive. ALWAYS WITH ME. Also making sure to make good use of the shared folders on our server, which I can access from any computer. 

•  To replace the CRUCIAL to-do list scheduling function that I relied on Outlook for, I researched and tried a bunch of productivity apps, and eventually settled on Vitalist.  I am intrigued by Evernote, but since it requires you to download it onto your machines, it wasn't an option for me. I needed something web-based since I work from so many locations. 

• I found that I'm AWFUL at working from home. When I'm working from home it's too easy to go down the rabbit-hole of endless 'net surfing since there's no interruption. Since all of my reviewing, blogging, and conference prep is on my own time now, I had to find a way to work from home more effectively. I started using an Internet-blocker app called Self Control (sigh). Basically you choose which sites you want blocked, set a timer for how long you want them to be blocked, and you're good to go. Despite the embarrassing name, I really like it, and it has been a huge help for me (self control! I has it!) Here's an app that works with Windows machines (I have not used it personally): Cold Turkey

It's a work in progress, but these are things that have helped me. What tools do you use to keep yourself organized?