thinkfetti

A subtitle for this post might be: “on saying ‘no’.”

In the last month, I have said “no” more often than I ever have since I was two years old. One difference between now and then is that when I was two, I imagine my “no” frequency probably owed a lot to having recently learned that “no” is a power word — a word that apparently contains much more influence than the mere sounds or ideological content associated with it. “No” makes a difference. “No” is a declaration of individual relevance.

Now, the reason I’ve been saying “no” so frequently is that I’m a department chair. More specifically, as a department, we (and also as an individual, I) have come up with some goals for how student registration should be treated so as to distribute teaching loads among our faculty. Part of the idea is that if students unable to enroll in their first choices for courses are channelled to courses that will satisfy their needs as far as graduation requirements, our faculty may have balanced teaching loads (within a factor of two or so). So when students not getting their first choices have been coming to see me, part of my responses to them has frequently been to say “no.”

“No” isn’t the end of my interaction with them, though. I try to find out what they’re trying to accomplish. In almost all cases, I have been able to help or direct the student to an alternate way (an alternate course, with available seats) to satisfy their primary interest: making progress toward their undergraduate degree.

In a very few cases (usually medically-related or students planning to graduate at the end of the current semester), I have, after exhausting the alternatives I tried instead, authorized them to what we call “overrides” into the courses they were trying to enter. I’d say this was in about 5-7% of the cases.

So my “no” is not generally “no.” It has been “no, but….” followed by a (frequently successful) attempt to accommodate interests, rather than positions. (For a good summary on the difference, take a look at Fisher and Ury’s Getting to Yes) I’ve done a lot of problem solving and facilitating. And although my job can be very wearing (more on that later, when I write about the tragedy of the commons), I feel confident I have provided a service — both to the individual students and to the department I work in — by saying “no.”

The numbers are terrifying.

I just finished my first real weekly review of my Getting Things Done setup, which I’m running on OmniOutliner Pro with the kGTD scripts. I’ve been doing GTD since December, but I’ve had a lot of time out of town, so up to this point, I had only done one moderately real weekly review.

The weekly review is, in large part, a survey of what projects I have going, and what things I have listed under “I’d maybe like to get to these someday.”

A project is pretty much anything that will take more than one step to accomplish, and anything I have listed here anywhere is something I couldn’t have taken care of, once and for all, in a couple minutes.

OK, then, the numbers…

• I have 23 next-items that are just single tasks, not part of any larger project.
• I have 27 projects on my someday/maybe list.
• And I have 144 projects going now (!!!), each with a next-action I’ve figured out to be the very next thing I need to do to make progress on the respective project. Remember, none of these next-actions is just a “few minutes” thing.

Geez! And some qualitative observations:

• Almost all of the 144 projects are things I’m doing for my job.
• Many, if not most, of the 27 projects being put off for now, on my someday/maybe list, are much more interesting to me than the lion’s share of the 144 projects on the live list.

Hence the title of this post. This is, however, very useful information for me - it’s quite impressive to be able to see this so blatantly available. Clearly, some changes are in order here!

I’m an “outside member” on a search committee. “Outside” means I’m in a different department from the one looking to hire a new professor. “Member” means I was invited to participate in the selection process, and my opinions make some difference.

The search is for a Chemical Engineering position, and although I know the chemical engineering job panorama isn’t as grim as mine (music/conducting/humanities), I hold to the somewhat old-fashioned idea that applicants should take the time to make sure the materials they submit for consideration are professional-looking and as error-free as possible. (I’m sure that part of the reason I hold to this idea is that I spend hours upon hours paying attention to these details whenever I apply for anything, and that I feel slighted whenever I receive a poorly-worded rejection form letter in reply. But enough about me.)

The applications I read today were, on the whole, indicative of souls who loved research, were tolerant of the expectation to teach while at a university, and were absolutely impatient with the expectation that they were expected to communicate effectively and thoughtfully in their job applications.

I am far from the final say when it comes to the selection process. I will express my discontent (and even exasperation) to the other members of the committee, but the final selection will possibly have little to do with my commitment to thoughtful, careful writing in the job application venue. But I will offer this plea to future job applicants:

Please pay attention to what you write - even if you’re applying on a statistical basis (oh, let’s see. I have a 0.5% chance of getting this job, if the recipient is chosen at random. I’ll just throw something together, and if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t), please show — in a convincing way — that you care. Merely saying that you care isn’t enough, for me, at least. Be professional. Be detail-oriented. Don’t let the first page of your resume end with a heading….with the content only continuing on page two. In your statement of teaching philosophy, don’t say how you “would” without saying how you “do,” except if you haven’t yet had a chance to teach. In that case, why haven’t you? Just tell me - don’t hypothesize without context.

I want to read your application - I do, and we all do. But please, take my time as seriously as you take your own time…for both our sakes.

David Allen’s book is called Getting Things Done. If you look around the web, you’ll find evidence of GTD’ers, talking and blogging about their experiences with this project-management/organization/de-stressing tool. The blog 43 Folders is named after an example in Allen’s book of a “tickler” file system, a particular way of using a set of file folders as a (nearly) foolproof reminder system.

About two weeks ago, I bought the Getting Things Done book, and about 10 days ago, over the weekend, I invested about 14 hours at my office, getting things set up to use the time-management system.

The first thing I’ll say is that even if I were to give up on the “GTD” method right now, those 14 hours have paid off by providing me with an excellent perspective on where I stand: with respect to work, with respect to my personal goals, and with respect to my previous relationship to the work I felt was hanging over my head.

The second thing I’ll say is that the subtitle of the book (working from memory here), “a guide to stress-free productivity,” is apt. I have been working very, very hard the last 10 days, because I have had to, but I am getting much more done, and done more effectively. I’m exhausted, yes, but I think that without GTD, I would have been nearly as exhausted while feeling more stressed and getting much less done. I am optimistic that in a few weeks’ time, I will be feeling even less burdened.

I’m sure I’ll write more about my experiences later, but for now, I can simply say: if you’re feeling overwhelmed, trying to be productive while holding on to indeterminate lists of everything you “have to do” in your head, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

Frozen accidents are chance happenings that have become ad hoc standards because it would take too much effort to switch to another configuration. The term “frozen accidents” is primarily used in discussions of Darwinian evolution. An example: the heart is generally a little to the left of center in a person’s body. There’s no particular reason that evolution didn’t roll the dice differently early on, leading to hearts being a little to the right of center. But once the original configuration was set, it got locked in.

In the abstract space of the working world, frozen accidents are ubiquitous. Even if, in principle, there are fifteen ways to route the paperwork, there’s only one way for which the boss (or the bureaucrats pushing the paper) say, “but THIS is the way it’s done here.” Because a decision was made sometime in the past, it has become an ad hoc standard. Now, the logic behind some decisions made in the past may still be apropos, but we all know situations in which a) the logic employed at the time of the decision is inappropriate in the present context, or b) there wasn’t logic - it was a choice that could have been made by rolling dice or some other chance method.

Sometimes, institutional memory is insufficient to figure out why a decision was made the way it was. Many decisions made in the past can seem like they were accidental choices.

In any event, the decisions have been frozen. I like to call them “frozen accidents” because the idea behind the term is so powerful.

Here’s what it looks like:

1. A choice is made between various perceived, available configurations in a very specific context.
2. Later, the context has changed, but the choice that was made remains active, a “frozen accident.”
3. At this later time, other configurations can be perceived, but they’re no longer “available.”

The idea of “frozen accidents” is helpful in understanding why good ideas sometimes don’t get off the ground. It is part of the reason organizational change isn’t easier.

Here are some examples of frozen accidents in the abstract “space” of work, in the specific context of the university where I work. Some of these are specific to my workplace, others are more general:

• Saturday and Sunday are the weekend days. Need these always be the same? The same for everybody? Do weeks have to be seven days long?
• There are two regular semesters and a summer semester per 12 month period. Other universities have quarters, for example. But it’s rare for a university to switch from one system to the other, although some do.
• Faculty and students interact through “courses” taught within “disciplines.” There are other models besides “courses” for learning. Most people learn much more outside of courses than they do in them. Internships, problem-based learning, etc…
• Student transcripts record pretty much only what “letter grade” a student “earned” in each course. We do it because that’s how it’s been done, it’s simple (although oversimplifying what happened in the student’s learning), and it’s an ad hoc standard that employers understand.
• Courses all begin at the beginning of a semester and end at the end of a semester. Why should all courses/topics have the same duration of treatment? When courses all end at the same time, all the final projects and exams fall at the same time, inefficient at best and a recipe for burnout at worst.

For anyone who perceives the tensions between the way things are and the way they “should” or “could” be, frozen accidents are both interesting and frustrating. They represent the “inertia” of the system, and we know that organizations with too much inertia invariably decline.