academic coach

Technological Tribulations

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A definition:

“PATIENCE – n., A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.”

-- Ambrose Bierce

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Since early December, many of my newsletter subscribers have not been getting my Monday Motivators.

In fact, I haven’t even been receiving my own newsletters!

So far, I’ve spent several hours on the phone and sending emails to the three companies responsible for this problem. Unfortunately, at this point my efforts have been completely unsuccessful.

Technological tribulations – how we hate them.

Crashed computers, zapped wireless networks, erratic email. Gah!

Problems with modern day technology follow the long-established law of Murphy: What can go wrong will. Furthermore, what can go wrong does go wrong at the worst possible moment. Know what I mean?

In my own case, years ago, my laptop melted when I was frantically trying to revise my defended dissertation in time to file the document before paying for another semester of graduate school. I also needed to meet my deadline so that I could officially begin my post doctoral fellowship.

Fortunately, when the crash occurred, I had copies of the complete dissertation. Unfortunately, I lost all the revisions I’d made in the two weeks since the defense.

The meltdown also left me without a computer.

When I wasn’t on the telephone with the computer nerds who were trying to recover my hard drive, I was at the library continuing to make revisions. So much for late night sessions of productivity. So much for working in my pajamas with a cup of coffee in my hand. So much for scattering needed spreadsheets of statistics all over the floor of my home.

That computer crash was a major hassle rather than a devastating disaster. In the years I’ve been coaching grad students and faculty, I’ve certainly heard much worse. Dropped laptops. Burgled apartments. Devastating fires.

Do you have any tales of woe to share?

If you do, I’m sure that you back up your work with great regularity. If you haven’t experienced devastating technological tribulations, then you may not be appropriately proactive about protective measures.

This week, please be sure to back up every computer file. Email yourself the latest version of your document. Give a hard copy of recent drafts to a friend who lives in a different building. Check your spam-filtered messages carefully. Invest in an external hard drive. Start today.

Please also cross your fingers that the folks at Earthlink, Professional Cart Solutions, and 1 Shopping Cart will come to their senses, fix my problem, and allow this newsletter to be read by everyone who wants it.

And give me the patience to keep harassing people until they fix these glitches.

Write It Down

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“The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.”       

-----    Lee Iacocca

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Often we carry around in our minds a vague list of things to do and notions of our priorities.

I call this a “Rolodex mind” because we shuffle through our list of “shoulds”, spinning our mental Rolodex wheel and accomplishing little.

When we are trying to work on one project, we get distracted and overwhelmed by thoughts of all the other tasks yet to be done. It is difficult to focus on the immediate task at hand because we’re too busy worrying about other responsibilities and obligations.

A Rolodex mind is an unfocused mind.

A Rolodex mind can also be a defense against the anxiety of making a choice. We flip through mental lists, waffle about which one we’ll begin with, and avoid committing ourselves to action. We feel apprehensive or ambivalent about starting an important project, so we settle for something less challenging to act upon.

Should you work on the literature review or methods section? A difficult choice? Then why not check your email before you decide?

Should you begin your literature review with a description of theories or the history of the problem?  Why not search for a few more articles first to make sure you're not missing any relevant information on the topic?

Sound familiar?

How can we improve our focus, make decisions and take action?
The answer is deceptively simple: Write down our goals.

Far too often, we keep our projects and priorities in our mind rather than on paper.
Do you have a list of the research projects you are currently working on?

Have you made a graphic timeline for the semester that indicates all the deadlines you will be facing?

Is your “to do” list prioritized so that you can begin each day with important rather than anxiety-free tasks?

Do you have a schedule that includes blocked-out appointments with yourself for research and writing?

* Right now, try making a list of the most important projects you will work on this week.
* Rewrite the list so that your projects are ranked in order of their importance to your academic career.
* Now create a new list breaking down each project into concrete action steps. For example, “write the literature review” would be broken down into steps such as “write three paragraphs describing and contrasting Marxian and Hegelian views on property ownership.” “Write the methods section” might be broken down into “write a paragraph describing how subjects were recruited.”

Writing things down may help you stop spinning the Rolodex wheel and lay out a plan for activities in a linear sequence that can be tackled one step at a time.

If you tend to have a mind cluttered with the phrases “should do” and “must do” you may be surprised how writing down goals and action steps will free you to focus on your current task rather than on future anxieties.

Here’s the short version of this tip of the week:
Write it down. Then make it happen.

New Year's Resolutions

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“We are what we repeatedly do.”

-- Aristotle

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Happy New Year!

Do you make New Year resolutions?
I do.

This year, on January first, my list looked pretty typical. I vowed to exercise more, eat less, keep my office cleaner and keep my email inbox emptier.

What about you?

Will my resolutions fade out within a month or two? Probably.

Do I mind? Not really.

I figure even if I only exercise thirty minutes a day until mid-February, I’ll still be healthier in 2007 than I would have been without the New Year’s resolution.

I figure that if I only clean out my email inbox a few extra hours this month, I’ll still get rid of many 2006 messages I no longer need.

Some people are talented at establishing new habits. They pick one routine, stick with it for a month and then find that it is ingrained – a new habit that is a solid part of their repertoire. Their temperament – based on genetic endowment, biochemical tendencies and environmental history – makes it more natural for them to establish consistent routines.

Other people, like me, get bored with routines after a while or find it extremely difficult to avoid the slow slide towards irregularity and disorganization.

We seem to need a fairly frequent influx of new techniques, fresh resolves and renewed vows to maintain our motivation and progress.

My experience shows that some people are temperamentally able to move in linear, regular paths towards their goals. Others, like me, move forward in fits and starts, in cycles of zest and discouragement.

It has taken me along time to accept that I will never be a paragon of regularity and consistent discipline. Yet this does not mean that I should give up on my efforts of self-improvement. As I have accepted my tendency to fluctuate in my resolve, I have found it easier to manage my cycles of productivity.

I now know that when I fall off my New Year’s resolution band wagons I must look for new means of transportation towards my goals. I will get bored with routines and need variety. When my resolution patterns peter out I will seek new techniques to re-inspire myself.

When my daily trips to the gym lapse, I will join an exercise class. When my in-box fills, I will schedule a kamikaze marathon clean-up session.

Fits and starts and ebbs and flows are my natural rhythm. But I still resolve to be regular and methodical; because there is no doubt that the turtle beats the hare in the long run.

In short, accept your temperament, but even if it doesn’t come naturally, try to implement steady habits.

Establish Habits

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“Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.”

                                                        – Horace Mann

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We all know people with impeccable habits. These enviable folks write each day, exercise each morning and never lose their keys, because they put them in exactly the same place each time they enter their home.

I’m envious, aren’t you?

While we may never be as disciplined as the people who were born to be organized, we can certainly improve our self-discipline and create daily habits of orderliness.

How should we develop new systems and behaviors? With gradual, small efforts and patience.

Here are some guidelines for developing habits:

1) Be Patient – Understand that cultivating a new routine will take time. Research shows that new habits take at least 21 days to form. When trying to implement a new system or behavior, make a chart to keep track of your actions, and wait at least three weeks before you consider your habit established.

2) Start small – Don’t try to change multiple behaviors at once. Pick one positive habit you’d like to develop. Some people launch an enthusiastic make-over plan and decide to begin writing first thing every morning, catch up on a year’s worth of academic journal reading, start a rigorous exercise program and implement a new office filing system. All at once. This is one reason that New Year’s Resolutions tend to unravel a few weeks into January. Instead of trying to change everything simultaneously, pick one area of focus.

3) Be Concrete - Choose something tangible and measurable to change. It is difficult to assess whether you’ve met vague goals. For example, instead of deciding to “stay current in my field of research”, try to “read one new research article a week.” Be as specific as possible. Instead of deciding to “write every day,” try to “write first thing in the morning for 30 minutes.”

These three tips are just the beginning of implementing new habits. Developing desired behaviors is such an important component of becoming a successful academic that I will devote next week’s Monday Motivator to the same topic.

By the way, the habit I’ve established is writing for a half hour first thing each weekday morning. It is surprising how much you can accomplish over time with a daily half hour.

Which habit will you develop?

Find an Editor

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Fine writers should split hairs together,
and sit side by side, like friendly apes,
to pick the fleas from each other's prose.

- Logan Pearsall Smith

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Old habits die hard.

Thus we have difficulty moving from an audience of one for our writing to a potential audience that is international.

When we were undergraduates, only our professor saw our written work. When we are graduate students, we typically have an audience of five - our committee members. Then, when we are professors, we are publishing to reach as many scholars as possible.

Ideally, the growth in our reading audience invites new habits. We need to seek out feedback early and often.

When we were undergraduates, it would have been "cheating" to have several friends read, critique and edit our work. When we are graduate students, having peers help us with our writing is allowable - laudable in my opinion - but we must still make sure that our work is independent. Too much help is "cheating."

However, when we are professors, any and all help is a boon. We are no longer trying to prove that we have the right to call ourselves scholars; that was the role of our doctoral program. Now we are out to contribute to an academic body of knowledge and the more comprehensive and clear our writing, the better.

We need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that getting editorial help is somehow "cheating," and we need to become comfortable with the idea of showing drafts at various stages to our peers and mentors.

When I work with doctoral students, I recommend that they show and discuss early outlines of their work with their advisor. Many advisors, understandably, prefer not to read incomplete or rough drafts and it is appropriate to wait to give them a dissertation chapter that is fairly polished. If your advisor prefers to see work in progress, by all means provide it. If not, seek feedback from friends in your program.

Editorial help becomes even more important when you are a junior faculty member and no longer have the experienced eye of an advisor to rely upon. Try to find colleagues willing to look at early drafts of your articles. Hire someone to edit your work before it goes out for review at journals or publishing houses.

One of the benefits of developing a network of editors and informal reviewers is that you will become less of a perfectionist about your drafts. Rather than worry whether a piece of work is good enough to send to a journal, you'll work towards a reasonable draft which friends or your hired editor can tweak and critique.

Finding a good editor is a challenging task, so next week I'll devote a post to ways of finding someone to help you with your writing.

Those of you who already have an editor: How did you find someone to work with?

Focus Pocus

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“The ability to focus attention on important things is a
defining characteristic of intelligence.”

                       -  Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance

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Do you start every day by working on your most important project?

This is an essential habit of the most productive people I know.

Many of us start with a warm-up period that sometimes morphs into time-wasting.  We check our email, peruse the news, read a few favorite blogs and, before we know it, the hour we planned to use writing has meandered into procrastination.

Consistent focus on our priorities is the way to make significant progress on our work (and in other areas of our life as well). 

This is why the vast majority of novelists and other professional writers begin each day by writing for a set period of time.  What would happen if you began each weekday morning with an hour of focused attention on your research and writing?  The cumulative result would be many publications, or a finished dissertation, I’ll wager.

Maintaining focus – on both a macro and micro level – is one of my greatest personal challenges.  I’m the type of person who opens my email program with the intention of sending an important message, gets distracted with new notes in my in-box, answers a few requests, , and then logs off having forgotten to write the message I had logged on to send.  Does this ever happen to you?

My most productive days are those when I first review and update my “to do” list, plan which steps I’ll take and when, avoid unimportant detours, and keep my priorities in focus.  It always surprises me how much I can accomplish when I apply my energy to my chosen task.

Do you need to focus your attention more consciously?

Let’s try, this week, to keep our wandering eyes on the academic ball.  How far will we hit if we do?

(By the way, I wrote this message Saturday morning before I did anything but sip my coffee.)

What are you going to focus on this week?

Rejection Resiliency

“The majority of men [and women] meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those that fail.”
                            --    Napoleon Hill

In my experience as a coach and consultant, resilience in the face of rejection is the single biggest factor in differentiating successful from unsuccessful academics.

• If you’ve failed your comps, reschedule them.
• If your dissertation proposal failed the first-round critique, meet with each member of your committee and formulate a new plan.
• If you’ve struck out on the job market this year, publish that article so that you’ll look good next year.
• If your article has been rejected, send it to a lower-tier journal rather than the rubbish bin.
• If your grant has been rejected, remind yourself of the low percentage of submissions that get funded, make the reviewers changes, and resubmit during the next cycle.

Unless you get back on the horse you’ll never get to the end of the trail.

Tuesday Tidbit: Practice Stopping

PRACTICE STOPPING

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"All the best work is done the way the ants do things - by tiny but untiring and regular additions."

                                                             -- Lafcadio Hearn

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All the procrastinators I know (myself included!) nag ourselves relentlessly about our difficulty starting.

"I should begin RIGHT NOW!" we tell ourselves.

"But I don't want to!" counters our inner whiner.

And so the cycle goes....

We are painfully conscious of our difficiulty getting started. 

However, few of the procrastinators I work with realize that they also have difficulty STOPPING.

Whenever we finally manage to get ourselves to begin writing, or any other anxiety-producing task, we don't dare stop.  We try to take advantage of our momentum and push ourselves to continue as long as possible.  We end our binges only when stuck, depleted, or burnt ot a crisp.

There's a reason we don't stop until we can't go on: We don't trust ourselves to begin again.

In the long run, however, our tendency to binge fuels our procrastination.  Because we associate work periods with fatigue and frustration, we feel greater dread about beginning tasks.  Once we finally get ourselves to sit down and start, we know that we're in for a protracted haul.

It may be counter-intuitive, but to tackle the habit of procrastination, we need to practice stopping.

This is why I recommend regular, short periods of work.  Sure, some days you will be on a roll and find it gratifying to extend a planned work session in order to reach a specific goal.  But most of the time, it is important to stop while the ideas are still flowing, and before you're tired or discouraged, so that you'll remember the work session as rewarding rather than grueling.  If your work sessions are less painful, you'll be more likely to begin again.

You want to be able to say to yourself: "Now that wasn't so bad, was it?"

Then you'll be able to answer: "Guess I can handle it again tomorrow."

So... start stopping today!

Monday Motivator: Focus on Finishing

Monday Motivator: Focus on Finishing

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When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put

it down until you get to the end of the row.

                           -Alice Paul

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Most faculty and graduate students contact me because they are having trouble finishing projects. Incomplete tasks keep faculty from getting tenure and graduate students from getting their degrees.

Academics who seek coaching often have several journal papers in process, can’t get themselves to complete a book proposal, have course ‘incompletes’ remaining from past semesters, or have been unable to finish their dissertation – often for years.

To become a successful academic you must learn how to

persist on a project until you complete it. The ability

to finish projects is a key ingredient to effectiveness

in your career and your life.

Becoming a finisher requires practice.  One of the ways to

develop the habit of completing projects is to break large

tasks into small goals and finish something every day. 

In a given work session, instead of trying to finish a

dissertation chapter, you could first aim to write three

paragraphs of your literature review covering a discrete

theoretical topic. 

Instead of trying to revise a paper for resubmission, you

could first try to address two reviewer criticisms. 

Instead of trying to send out your entire book proposal

to publishing houses, you could first aim to write one

chapter summary.

You’ll find that finishing a task creates a burst of

energy.  When you accomplish your achievable daily goal,

you’ll feel a mild surge of satisfaction and an increase

in motivation.  When you cross an item off your “to do”

list, you’ll experience satisfaction.

Finishing small tasks can also mitigate discouragement

about how long the large, complex projects take.

For example, today I had that common experience of

Tackling a project that seemed to become larger and more

complicated the more I worked on it.  After a few hours,

I felt frustrated and disheartened.  I thought that I’d be

able to finish, but instead I discovered new blocks to

completion.  When I noticed how cranky I was becoming, I

decided to switch gears and work on something I knew that

I could complete: writing a Monday Motivator. 

I find that these weekly emails are both manageable and

satisfying to send out (in part because some of you let

me know that you find my tips helpful.)

So, now that I’ve written this draft, I feel much better

about my day.  And I’m ready to return to the discouraging

morass that prompted me to write about this topic!

Let me know what you finish this week.

Until next Monday,

Mary

P.S. A graduate student sent me the opening quotation because

she had found a previous Monday Motivator particularly relevant.

I always appreciate finding great quotations to add to my

burgeoning file, and in this case I had the added benefit of

learning that Alice Paul was an important suffragist. 

Mary McKinney, Ph.D.

Clinical Psychologist and Academic Coach

Successful Academic Consulting

Visit http://www.SuccessfulAcademic.com

for more tenure track tips.

Visit http://successfulacademic.typepad.com

to read Mary's blog

After the Storm

It is always gratifying to get emails like this:

"Thank you for your weekly tips and your web page. I successfully defended my dissertation a week ago and am done! Everything I could find, including your info, helped me make it through."

Kudos and Congrats!

(Anyone else want to celebrate finishing here?)