On productivity

22. August 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

This has been a busy, busy week, filled with productivity and failure (yes, both). I have to say that the people I work with often rise to the challenge of difficult situations and we really do band together in that goofy, sappy way you think of when the chips are down. So I’m grateful that there are good people in the world and that they happen to work in my building.

I’ve taken on a new strategy, which flies in the face of GTD, but I think I like it. I only check email twice a day and each time, I only spend 1 hour at most responding. In my line of work, I could spend all day just reading and responding to email. So, what I do is scan email, looking for important things, and respond to those first, and then deal with the more mundane issues. Honestly, I’ve had a lot of people figure out their problems all by themselves. I figure people will either email again or call if they get truly desperate. And this way, I actually get work done, I feel less frustrated (because I’m not constantly seeing messages that make me think, you have a Ph.D. and you can’t figure this out?), and the day goes by pretty quickly. David Allen may not approve, but I think I like this plan so far. I do twitch a little when I realize there are over 300 messages in my inbox, but likely by the time I get to some of the earlier ones, I can delete without reading them.

Surprisingly, even though this was a post-vacation week, I didn’t have the usual post-vacation slump, where I wish I were still on vacation and kind of flounder around hoping that work will disappear. I guess it was because there was just so much to get done, I didn’t have time for that. The other strategy I developed over the last few weeks (also somewhat anti-GTD) is to just focus on getting 2-3 things done in a day. So often I’m staring at a huge list of things and it seems overwhelming and I get frustrated when only a couple of things get done. But that’s because most everything I do takes several hours and if things don’t go smoothly, well, you know how that goes. So now I write down a couple of things to focus on and it feels better to have accomplished everything on the list. I use post-its, so I don’t even have room for more than a couple.

So maybe I’m falling out of love with GTD a little. I think I felt that sometimes, it made me focus so much on getting more done that I wasn’t getting the right things done. While my inbox was at zero, I wasn’t getting the more important things done–important both to me and in many cases, a large number of people. I still like having a kind of repository for stuff that needs to get done, but I think looking at it once a week is a better plan than staring at it every day. At least for me.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Process vs. Product

01. June 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

In the composition field, process has been the buzzword for well over 20 years. The idea behind the buzzword is that for good writing to happen, teachers can’t focus on the commas and spelling. Some attention needs to be paid to how that writing gets onto the paper in the first place. Only then will students be able to produce good products. The idea of focusing on the process of something is somewhat inherent to all of education and is, in fact, what the anti-test educators among us are focused on. This next week, I’m putting the concept of “process first” to work in a completely different setting.

Every summer, I coordinate the Summer Multimedia Development Institute, a program designed to both teach students multimedia skills and to produce products. Many of the products the students have produced over the years have been very good. They’ve received rave reviews from alums and have even been cited in MLA presentations. What this has meant, unfortunately, is that the expectations for excellent products has increased and the idea that this is a learning opportunity has nearly fallen by the wayside. And sometimes, honestly, the products aren’t so good, which makes both the students and the people for whom the products are being produced feel bad. I look at it as a learning experience, but because there has been this focus on product, the other people involved are just disappointed.

This summer, I’ve completely reconfigured the program to focus on “educational” products and on the process of learning to create those products. This means that we’re not creating products for the alumni office or the admissions department (both of whom I’ve argued should hire professional multimedia developers). It also means I’ve built in lots of ways for the students and the faculty working with them to become conscious of the process. We have a blog and the students will all be creating their own blogs and will be asked to write and reflect there on what they’re learning. I’m encouraging them to reflect on their technical skills, on working with faculty, and on the challenges of working with technology in an educational settings among other things.

Focusing on process is actually harder. Creating the necessary framework, communicating to everyone involved that it’s not about the product, and doing a lot of reflecting and listening is harder than just giving feedback on a finished product. We’ll be doing some of that, too, but we’ll be doing it within this process-based framework. While it may be harder, I think it will actually be less stressful. Where before students might have felt obligated to produce professional quality work, they can now focus on doing their best and working with their faculty as partners rather than in a kind of client-customer relationship. Honestly, they might produce better work anyway. At the very least, I want them to have thought a lot about what they did and to have learned from it in a way that they can apply that knowledge in the future. Actually, I want everyone involved to learn something–including me–and that’s why I like doing things this way even if it is harder.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure