Even in Kyoto

As mentioned in my previous post, I spent a lot of time over the past week with I, a new graduate student. Interacting with her is reminding me of a number of little things that I have learned over my time as a scientist. A lot of those little things are obvious, in retrospect, but I always have to wonder if I would have spent less time flailing around if I'd known about or thought about many of them earlier in my career. A few examples:

1. Enter in your data as you collect it. (this is what I'm working on today, which is what made me think about this entry)

2. Along those same lines: Clean up as you go along.

3. While writing manuscripts, keep a text file with a "to do next" list. Actually, this should be started even before you start writing a manuscript. For me, it has been the simplest way to put down a project and then be able to pick it back up with minimal fuss.

4. When meeting with other people, put as much as you can into writing, but keep it simple. To have a focused meeting, have a goal for the meeting and put that at the top. Do you want feedback on a specific piece of writing? Do you want help with the experimental design? Do you want help figuring out the holes in your logic? Are you trying to figure out who to put on your committee or who to include in the project? The sooner you can get concrete specifics in writing, the easier it will be for others to help you make progress.

5. Have a plan for analyzing your data *before* you collect the data. You might change your mind later on, but this will save you many potential massive headaches. This means having a thorough outline of your experiment and its dependent variables. Is it frequency data? Continuous data? How many treatments are you comparing? How many figures in a paper will this translate into?

6. Consider keeping annotated bibliographies for projects. I don't know about you, but my brain and memory are small, and the amount of literature I need to be familiar with is large, and covers a wide range of themes. Annotated bibliographies are a shortcut for organizing your thoughts about the literature, and for staying on task with #3. I just keep mine in text files. No need to get fancy.

7. There are a lot of other useful sources of information that might be helpful. Don't skip over them. Read them in the evening before bed. This book comes highly recommended (although I haven't read it, I suspect if I read it I would do a lot of nodding). For academic writers in all walks of writing, I've found How to Write a Lot helpful, too.

8. For keeping the different parts of a research project organized, here's an idea of how I structure my files. I'll come up with a short name for the project and will make a directory (folder) for it. Within the directory, I'll have subdirectories for: datasheets, raw data (as it is entered in to the spreadsheet), figures, R scripts, and the manuscript. I'm not good at throwing things away, so whenever I generate new files, I make a directory within a folder, label it "Old," and stick the previous version in there.

9. I like Zotero as an open-source browser plugin for keeping track of references. I still download pdfs of references into a big (separate) folder, and label them with the authornames, year, and a few keywords. Note that this is completely separate from my annotated bibliographies.

I suspect I'll think of ten more pointers somewhere further down the line, but this should be a good starting list.

What work-organization insights have you wished you'd had at an earlier stage?

I think I've mentioned that I just finished reading How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, by Paul Silvia. He's a psychologist, so the book's audience is psychology professors. But when it gets down to it, biologists have plenty in common with psychologists, including the need to develop and maintain a productive writing schedule. I've been trying to treat this postdoc as a chance to develop into a full-fledged scientist, and part of that involves figuring out how to manage the whole process of science, from coming up with ideas and designing experiments, to conducting the experiments and collecting data, to analyzing samples and then data, and then writing up findings. I need to do writing in more than just that context, however. Scientists also have to write grants to obtain funding to pay themselves, to cover the costs of experiments, and to pay other people. I just finished writing a grant for funding for an awesome undergraduate minion, for example. This summer, I need to write more grants for whatever job I take on next. I'll need to write more job applications in the fall, too.

It doesn't stop there, either. Inasmuch as I wish to make scientific contributions, I must also evaluate the contributions of my scientific peers, by reviewing manuscripts submitted to journals in my field. That involves writing, too.

It's a lot of writing, which raises the question of what practices one should use to manage it all relative to other aspects of one's work. Silva does a good job of debunking many of the excuses people use for not getting more writing done, and you know, I have to listen to him. After all, my time as a postdoc is just about the only time in my career when I'll ever have this tremendous amount of scheduling flexibility. It's a double-edged sword, though, because free time can also mean extra time to procrastinate. Facebook has never been so thoroughly checked. At least up until now.

So far, in this first week of trying to schedule my writing time, I've seen a pattern develop. When I sit down to write at my scheduled writing time, I start a bit slowly and check the clock. Minutes drag on. Internet isn't allowed. If I'm stuck, I have to stare at the wall of the grim, empty postdoc office. But then, by the time the finish time rolls around, I'm not finished and want to keep going! I've had the luxury of doing so, for this week, usually for an additional hour. Next week, well, we'll see what happens.

I keep reading things that suggest scheduling writing time, but most of them then say, "For example, I write best first thing in the morning, so I leap out of bed, dash over to my typewriter, and get to work for an hour or two before I even have breakfast."

You'd think something like that would work well for me, as a morning person. Au contraire, I've never been that sort of person. It's probably because I either wake up with a list of ambitions, or I wake up to go rowing. I'm just not ready to write until I've had time to recover from rowing and work on other things. For now, I start in the midafternoon. Dissertation-writing also gave me a good indicator of my writing stamina. On my best dissertation-writing days, I would write for three or four hours in the morning, then eat lunch and go in to campus, then write for another three or four hours. Three hours in one sitting is therefore enough.

Silva suggests keeping a log of one's writing activities - he keeps a spreadsheet, which allows him to datamine his writing habits, and which also serves as a motivator, much as keeping track of one's spending habits helps keep mindless spending habits in check.

I am my father's daughter. I can feel the urge to start the spreadsheet coming on.

Through a mentoring program called Futures for Children, I am pen pals with a middle-school-aged Hopi girl. This is the sort of thing I don't talk or write about that much because the most important part of it is our conversations with each other, not with you. But I keep returning to the subject we've discussed in our most recent letters, the difficulty we often have in convincing ourselves to sit down and write to each other. She put it quite simply: usually, after she's finished with her homework, she just doesn't feel like sitting down to write out a letter. I can certainly relate--it's a quiet activity, and I like to be in the right mindset. It's hard to do after a long day of teaching and e-mailing and finagling things at school, so I usually end up writing on weekends when my mind is clear. [This could be an entry about paper journaling as well, though some aspects of the conversation would differ]

So I was left wondering, how do I reply? My role as a mentor is to provide encouragement to this person as she works on her education, but we both see our letter-writing as one more thing on top of so many other things. It also makes me think of my other attempts at letter-writing, some successful, some not. [How do I gauge success? Sustainability? Honest, open communication? A feeling of joy in response to both sending and receiving? Acting not out of guilt but out of intention?]. When I was in grade school, one teacher encouraged us to become pen pals with students in Lithuania, for instance. I think I wrote two or three letters, and then the project basically came to a halt. Lithuania seemed so exotic and far away, and I didn't know what to talk about and lost interest. But I probably still have those letters somewhere. In contrast, my friend C and I exchange letters when we feel like it--I think it helps that she is able to write quite freely and that inspires me to do the same.

I tried to explain at least some of this in my letter to my young friend (it will help if we are ever able to meet, for we aren't really all that far apart, geographically, and then we will have a fuller grasp of each others' personalities). Hopefully my letter will be encouraging for both of us as we learn to be patient with each other. This is the sort of mentoring relationship where I am not interested in producing any particular tangible result--I am most interested in how we learn to tell stories to each other, and learning how to do this telling is pretty important.

I always like to write posts about how I don't know if I'll be writing much in the near future, and then shortly after that some form of ample verbiage spills forth.

This will be a post about not posting for a while, and then posting nonetheless.

After a quite brief respite, I'm back to reading about agriculture. Yesterday, as a little reward to myself for surviving my committee meeting, I went to the library and picked up a copy of The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry. I think my father had recommended the book some time ago. But I was too tired to do more than read the Foreword. Berry's writing has been inspirational for a lot of the thinkers I admire; hopefully my reaction will be similar.

I keep thinking about expressions of one's life's work recently. I've been toying around with the idea that one's life-work could culminate in a single thing like a book, as though the entirety of something can be captured in a set of pages. Book-writing is often seen as an academic capstone. But I am particularly trying to answer the question of what I would write if I were to write a third-person narrative about myself, and you can be certain that it wouldn't be academically driven.

The "tag cloud" of this journal style is perhaps one way of viewing myself externally and getting an idea of what subjects are most important to me--more frequently used tags are in larger print. In contrast, many people keep blogs that cover a particular theme, whether it's cooking or politics or bicycles, and perhaps by thus focusing they attract a broader audience (for better or for worse).

But the messy tension of talking about everything all together is important--could it be succesfully included in that third-person narrative? I might risk boring more audience members by doing that, though. Perhaps it would be equally interesting to couple the views of an external observer with my proposed external perspective of the internal. Thus my narrative complexifies [sic] itself.

What it all gets down to is that I won't be writing this hypothetical book any time soon. Now I return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Do you ever have those weeks where you just don't feel like writing much?

Usually, those weeks coincide with the times when I'm supposed to be working on academic writing.

D pointed out that I cannot claim to hate writing in general, given how much I manage to write on my blog. (I'll refrain from making comments about the differences between volume and substance)

OTOH, I can say I find academic writing more challenging to the point where it manages to take over my life periodically, leaving me feeling stupid and overwhelmed.

In the long run, I'd like to make my academic writing work like my non-academic writing, something that I spend a short, manageable amount of time on every single day. But just as it's hard to get back in the saddle with respect to things like rowing, it's hard to get back in that particular writing saddle. I like to blame my woes on my workspace, but that's not really a fair thing to do, either. Occasionally, I'll switch and blame my woes on my writing system (typing on a computer screen instead of scrawling things out long-hand in a pretty notebook).

Amusingly, the thing that usually helps me get back to writing the quickest is the act of writing about writing.

Also interestingly, sometimes I have the feeling that more people will read what I write here than will ever read my academic writing. So what does that mean for the relative importance of the two bodies of work? The impact is different, though.

And with that, I'm off. Wish me luck.

Every once and a while, topics on academics_anon suck me in and won't let me go. Mostly, they are topics related to writing--today there was a thread on plagiarism and also a thread on coming up with an honors thesis topic. I can't help it--I'm passionate about writing. Whee.

I think I need to take this passion and put it to better use. I do get to help some students with writing through tutoring, but I'm starting to think it isn't enough.

Once again, I'm back to thinking about one of the most formative parts of my undergraduate education--participation in the Writing Fellows Program. It frustrated the hell out of me at times, but was also incredibly rewarding.

And now I should get back to worky worky.

...one of my favorite pens (a blue Pilot VBall Extra Fine) has just run out of ink. So I have thrown it away and must get out the next replacement (I keep a sizeable stash at home, just in case). I've written about these pens before; they're pretty much the only pens I ever use (although I keep on being tempted by Pigma Pens). It's kind of satisfying to have one run out because it has traveled around with me for several months and I have used it to write all sorts of notes in all sorts of notebooks [but mostly in my four "active" Moleskines: a planner, a small squared (odds and ends), a large squared (notes from journal articles I've read), and a large lined (books I've read and books to read)]. It's the little things that count.

There's a new word out in UrbanDictionary called anablog, a play on the words analog and blog.

ANABLOG

The old fashioned journal you wrote in with crushed tree pulp, binding, and maybe some kind of lock mechanism. For some reason people used to like writing opinions only they read. It is a fad past its prime but Borders still sells them for some reason.

I love it when I can spend the early morning hours writing a paper. My mind is so much clearer without the events of the day jangling around in there. I can still write at other times of the day if I have to, but it's easier in the morning.

I'm feeling tentatively better. Knock on wood.

*knocks on skull*