Updates

I’ve gotten no where near what I wanted to get done this break… but:

• I updated three more articles (Antisocial Personality, Beginning Therapy: A Primer, and Bowenian Family Therapy) with some additional explanation and expansion.
• The search feature now works as it should, so you can search either the article index using the built in function, or the PsychPage site using Google.
• I’ve created an error page that comes up for bad links and such.
• I have about 12 blog topics to write up in the next few weeks.
• I’m almost done tweaking the Things to Do wiki and have a clean and updated wiki for Student Tracking to post soon

Are you a John or a Neal?

I have two good friends in Saint Louis, John and Neal. There were my “non-psychology” friends in graduate school who fed me and kept me sane. They were also the friends who helped me move from Saint Louis to Chicago, and drove up to help me move again after my divorce. They came to our commitment ceremony and met my parents, and showed up to my 40th birthday party. There are really the only people, aside from family, I’ve consistently stayed connected to over an 18 year period. They have also been together for over 25 years, which makes them the longest-running-committed-gay-couple I know.

Every Saturday after Thanksgiving, they throw a Holiday Brunch. The food is amazing, the company is wonderful, and you always see someone you haven’t seen in years and meet someone new you wouldn’t have met otherwise. This year I talked at length with a fellow named Patrick. He’s in school getting a master’s degree, working with Teach for America, and his dream is to return to Saint Louis to start a new kind of school and learning experience for inner-city kids. We talked about teaching, education, generational differences (he’s about 20 years younger), and the topic of some of his course papers.

You see, he’s straight, but also very interested in gay couples and how we work, live, love, form families… He’s written several course papers on gay couples, reading scholarly literature and interviewing a gay couple to understand an “insider’s perspective” on it. And so, when he met me and my partner, he asked me the question…

“Are you a John or a Neal?”

John and Neal are the only gay couple he’s known, and every non-book-related thing he knows about gay couples he learned from them. At first the question struck me as tiny bit like the typical heterosexist question, “Which one of you is the woman?”, which assumes that gay and lesbian couples follow the “normal” model of couples functioning seen in heterosexual couples. However, I realized he was trying to understand us not from a heterosexual perspective, but from the only gay relationship template he has - John and Neal. John is the logical, calm, practical one. Neal is the creative, excitable, and “artistic” one. That’s not to say one never shows the traits of the other, but rather that they tend to love, work, and play that way. It has nothing to do with making money, house work and repairs, career interests, hobbies, intimacy… It really is about finding a person who is sufficiently different from you to balance out your weaknesses and benefit from your strengths, but not too different so as to be hard to connect and relate to.

What does this have to do with psychology in everyday life? I have two thoughts…

First, Jacobson and Christensen have based their theory of couples therapy (Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy) on sound research which supports this. The idea is that people in happy relationships are different but closer to the sufficiently different end of the continuum. Individuals in unhappy relationships are also different, but unfortunately are closer to the too different end. The things that drew them to each other originally now drive them apart. Therapy is focused on helping them learn to recognize this, and appreciate the complementarity while managing the clashes. Their therapy work is effective, works with couples who find other therapies ineffective, and has results that last after therapy is over.

Several others joined our conversation after a while, including some straight folks, and the question was given to them. They easily could identify with one or the other. Patrick felt he was a “John” as he thought in logical, calm, and practical ways. He thought I was too, and that my partner was a “Neal,” which to him highlighted a good match between us. Carol was a “Neal” and her husband Richard was a “John.”

This brings us to my second thought. John Gottman has been conducting research into what makes for a healthy couple for 25 years, and he’s devoted special attention to gay and lesbian couples. He found happy gay and lesbian couples were more upbeat, used humor to diffuse difficult situations, and stayed calm during arguments. They are also less likely to take their partner’s unhappiness as a sign of some fault or failure on their part. This is easier, I think, when all the things tied to gender roles (money, housework and home repair, child rearing responsibilities…) are not forced on to partners, and when even in the difficult times we realize that our partner is very different from us and that difference is what made them attractive to us.

In the end… I think we had a great conversation, and the “John and Neal Model of Couple’s Functioning,” while perhaps not exactly what was examined in the literature, received good “real world” validation.

Coming back

It’s been over a month since my last post… which sounds a bit like the start to my childhood confessions (”Bless me father for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last confession…”).

I didn’t expect a ton of comments, or any really, without some promotion of my blog. However, I read instead that I should build up some comment-worthy material and then trying to promote my blog. That way, an interested visitor who stumbled across the link could see the site, read a range of blog entries, and decide whether it was worth it to come back to the site.

So in the last month:

• I also changed the page banners to rotate some nicer graphics. One of them was taken by me, the other three by my husband. One is of a field in Missouri and the other three of some beautiful parks and scenery from Washington State.
• I’ve updated 32 pages from the old cobbled-together hand-coded html pages to the new leaner, cleaner format, and tagged and indexed them in the main article index.
• This has also meant reviewing each page and in many cases grimacing as I realize how out of date some of it was. I spent a few hours today updating an Introduction to Intimate Partner Violence and doubled the amount of information there and added 16 new references.
• I’ve also been trying to generate some ideas for new blog topics. Those should be coming soon…
• Finally, I’ve been bug testing the final version of my Getting Things Done wiki.  I also updated and am almost finished with a wiki for recording and tracking student issues which I hope to post this month.

As always, thanks for checking out PsychPage!
Richard

I kiss Akismet

Akismet is a plugin for Wordpress that catches and blocks spam.  It has allowed the two real comments to get through, and blocked 120 spam posts, mostly to Russian (.ru instead of .com or net) porn sites.  Many others seemed to be Chinese or Japanese sites.

I barely have time to blog, but certainly wouldn’t have time to individually delete 120 spam postings.

The Pareto Principle

I was reading about the Pareto Principle at James’ Organize IT blog, and it made me think. The principle is basically that 80% of what you value comes from 20% of your work, meaning a lot of time is wasted on less important things. James pairs this with Parkinson’s Law that work expands to fill the time allowed. That is to say… the not so important stuff sucks up 80% of your time because nothing (or no one) stops it from doing so.

If you want to change this, how do you determine which tasks are the valuable “20%” ones vs. the less important “80%” ones? For example, when is focusing on a “quality issue” a valued effort to save time and energy later vs. an example of less important perfectionism?

Last week I invested several hours into two tasks worth examining:

• The Midterm Evals - We received students’ midterm course evaluation results in an Excel spreadsheet with three tabs. Some evaluation questions are covered in the first tab and some in the second, and student comments are in the third. Thus, to see results for a single course, you need to scroll through three worksheets. I spent a few hours creating a fourth worksheet that provides a drop-down list of instructors and courses, and integrates all three tabs of information on that course in one place.
• Course Templates - I spent several hours last week polishing a course website template and tutorial on using it with our course management software. The software automatically creates a blank course website and enrolls your students in it for you, so students can quickly see… nothing. I created a template you can upload that creates a folder for each week of class and includes spots for weekly objectives, readings, assignments, discussion boards….

So were these “20%” or “80%” tasks? Both could have been “outsourced” to someone else to do, and neither brought me any immediate gains, so you could argue both were “80%” efforts. However, we have begun hiring instructors for Spring. Before re-hiring brand new instructors, I want to know how students experience their teaching, and so two weeks later am referencing this integrative spreadsheet much more. Course website templates may also increase our use of technology, may helps us recruit new instructors, and may help new instructors create good courses. All of these are goals for the Department, so I am inclined to think they were examples of “20%” work.

A few things occurred to me:

• In both cases some of the work could have been outsourced to a “technology person” … but ask anyone in my Department and they’ll tell you that person is me.
• I will have to follow up with both tasks to see how much of a difference the result makes. If the integrative worksheet saves 6 minutes of time as we review 10 instructors, then it is one hour saved, and I invested more time than I gained. If we can reuse the integration worksheet two more semesters, then I gain some time. How many additional instructors must use the course website software to justify my time? One, three, or ten? I’ll have to figure out how to set some kind of outcome goal, and judge the results.

So… back to the question. How can I differentiate the valuable “20%” from the less important “80%” tasks? Maybe I can’t. While some tasks could clearly be classified in advance, perhaps the rest must be “set.” Doing the work in a way that allows it to be reused, aligning the task with more than one goal, and establishing criteria to judge the outcome may be the way to determine whether a task will be an “80%” or a “20%” effort.

Leaving Sisyphus

Last post I mentioned I have been feeling like Sisyphus lately, stuck on a hill struggling to do something pointless. Here’s what I’ve been doing to get off the hill… in no particular order:

• Take Mini-Vacations - I have 16 vacation days, which expire at the end of December. Since I don’t have any big trips planned, I’ve been using one day a week to work on my website, write, read… and invest my uninterrupted attention in something where I’m productive.
  • This has helped revitalize me a lot. I day a week completely focused on my hobbies and a new creative outlet has helped me come back to work energized. Since some of it is about GTD and productivity (like this), it’s also helped me enrich my Weekly Review process.
  • This has also left less time for work each week, and I’ve been tracking my hours and refusing to allow work to simply “spill over” into another day a week. It’s partly related to Parkinson’s Law, which holds that work expands to fill the time allowed for it. Thus, by not working another day a week to make up for the day I miss on vacation, I’m forcing myself to prioritize and keep work inside some strict time limits.
• Set Pending Deadlines - My boss suggested we put deadlines on the pending things, make others aware of these deadlines, and if no answer comes by the deadline, then we take action and resolve it ourselves.
• Ignore Deadlines - I had a deadline to get some lower priority work to someone else so they could do it for me. Meeting that deadline would have meant delaying higher priority work. So, it was easier to miss the lower priority deadline and do it myself. This isn’t a good trade-off all the time, but in this case it was worth it.
• Get Help - As I look through what I do in a day, I’m starting a list of things I could “outsource” to someone else to do for me with minimal supervision. Once I have enough of them, I’ll give them to a Faculty Assistant to do for me. It’s that “20/80″ rule that 20% of your work is the most valuable, and 80% of it is grunt stuff that takes up more time than it should.
• Change the Desktop Wallpaper - I Googled for pictures of Sisyphus and use one as my desktop wallpaper. Like I said, I’m not in hell, and a reminder of that is good.
• Use the Pending Time - I’ve not been in the mood to deal with email, so I haven’t. Instead,
  • I’ve focused on trying to wrap up projects I can finish as a way to use this “pending” time wisely. Anything I’ve left undone, I’m trying to get done, which helps increase my sense of productivity. It also helps others in that if they’ve been waiting on something low-priority from me, they get it finally.
  • I’ve started planning ahead for things I want to do more effectively than last time. One of these is the review of fourth year students. We will do it differently this year and I so I am planning out how that should happen in advance.
• Bargain - A productivity guru would say I should just accept the “nagging” time and set a tickler to remind me to nag for things two to three weeks in advance of when I need them. While a good idea in general, it won’t work in most cases for me, as I need the information as soon as those I nag can get it. However, I am wondering about ways to bargain with other Departments. “Here’s what you need, here’s what I need… so, can we make a deal?”
• Recharge Work Batteries - I’ve found some folks not in this same funk, and tried to borrow some of their positive energy. I’m to the point of trying to lend it out again now.
• Get Help - We’ve talked about the sense of being on the hillside, and several people bringing this to “The Powers That Be” has helped. I’m not talking about general griping and complaining, but rather several folks at my boss’ level taking the state of things to the vice-president and generating suggestions for systemic-improvement has generated some “light at the end of the tunnel.”
• Ride It Out - I’m struck that my funk only lasted a few weeks, but some around me were not in a funk at all. Maybe these things don’t last very long in healthy organizations…

What do you do to get off the hillside of Sisyphus?

Sisyphus Revisited

So lately I’ve been thinking of Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology who was doomed for eternity to roll a huge boulder up a hill and watch it slide back down again before he could reach the top. In high school when we first read about him, I remember thinking this would be a bad way to spend eternity, as it would be constant boredom… doing the same thing over and over and over and over again for eternity. Now… I realize it would be worse.

You’d never do anything different, or fun, or challenging, or rewarding… or unexpectedly disappointing. You would just roll the rock up the slope, try to keep it moving, wondering “Will it begin to slide now? The next moment? The one after?” This tedious task would begin to dominate your thought processes and slowly consume your thinking. Your cognitive world would close in to just these thoughts, this task, this struggle.

What would it be like to think this way forever? Each new moment of powerlessness would feel like the previous ones. You’d walk the same steps over and over, and recall these same feelings over and over, since you actually were in the exact same state and exact same place as the last time you felt them, and if never aged… then you would be in the exact same moment as the last time you felt them. Your emotional world would close in to just these feelings. You would just recall the same memories over and over, and just feel the same feelings of powerlessness and frustration over and over, and just recognize the pointlessness of your work over and over.

So my job’s not that bad, but why have I been thinking of him?

Lately, work has become mostly like pushing a rock up a hill. Nothing can be accomplished quickly or easily no matter how simple it is. Every issue needs ten emails with five people over three to four weeks to reach the point of discussing what we might do. I’ve started focusing mostly on the “pending” matters I need to continuously follow-up on. They never resolve so I can never finish what I started doing. They never move to “done” so I can focus on something new. Each time I check my inbox, I see more complaints about the same things; the longer a problem continues, the larger its scope and impact. Each email is a new moment of powerlessness, which I compare to the previous moment. This becomes tiring, so I stop reading email. Ironically, I realize this spreads the sense of powerlessness to others fairly effectively.

So what does this have to do with Getting Things Done?

• This kind of environment makes it hard to “get in the flow” of productive work. It’s a constant interruption to once again follow up on something that’s not resolved, once again say “I don’t know because I haven’t heard back but I’ll ask again….” More and more things become “pending” and nothing moves to “done.” You never get the feeling of accomplishment or success.
• This has started to consume my spare thought processes. The other day while walking home I thought, “I should start of list of Good Ideas I Finally Abandoned. It might be easier to let go of the fact that some reasonable things just can’t be accomplished now. It might be easier to think, “One day, when the situation changes, I will go back to this list and look up these ideas and try them again.” I would make the list and put things on it, but that’s one step closer to the point where I stop trying to be innovative.
• This feels like being in exactly the same place as the last time. Time to nag someone again with an email I know won’t be answered, but if I send it, then follow up, then follow up again, THEN I can cc someone else and say I’m getting no response…. You just plan on wasting two weeks with things since you can’t get it done quickly or easily.

So like I said, it’s not as bad as being in hell. But what do I do to get out of the funk? That’s another post.

Stop Email from Killing Me Part 5

Here’s tips 7 - 9:

• I am trying to model good emailing behavior:
  • If I can reply in person, I do instead of emailing back; I schedule meetings to resolve larger matters or bulk process smaller ones.
  • I try to be brief myself, and follow five sentences (Five Sentences) when I can. I “get to the point” in the first sentence, or set off the start of “business” with “The point of my email is….”
  • I use bullet points.
  • I asked others how to decrease email. Faculty suggested a single, Weekly Department Email with all that week’s updates in one place instead of daily updates.
  • I asked my staff to not send useless emails. For example, apparently there were several women on the main campus who took off their earrings to use the fourth floor women’s restroom. The left them there, later realized it, returned, but found them gone. Staff at the main campus would send a School-wide email asking if anyone had seen these earrings. Like another 1000 or so people there, either I’m not on the main campus, or I don’t have pierced ears, or I’m male and haven’t been in the women’s restroom.
  • We sent out a SNAP! survey to our students to help us build a database of important information. It took about 60 seconds for them to complete, we got a 73% response rate, and we check this instead of asking folks to provide information we already have. I created “The List” of students who did not complete the survey despite three reminders, and they do not get help from me with questions, registration issues, etc… until they physically come in and complete the survey.
  • If there are several people I need to send an email to, I introduce the issue, then for each person bold their name and speak directly to what they need to be concerned with.
• I am using Xobni. This is really an amazing product that indexes your email, and shows a picture for each sender, their contact information, your discussions with them, and any attachments you’ve swapped… all in a sidebar in Outlook. (Supercharge Outlook with Xobni).
• I have considered templated answers. These aren’t as useful to me as I had hoped, but I have been using some Autohotkey (Automate Windows with AutoHotKey) snippets. These include:
  • various abbreviations for common terms (typing “dc” auto-replaces with “Department Chair”)
  • abbreviations for common email addresses (typing “bk@ bh@ cs@ ch@” auto-replaces with the email addresses of the other three Chairs and our Department Manager)
  • a standard explanation that we no longer have a copyediting course… I got tired of that question…
  • a standard explanation that my Department Manager schedules my appointments, and in fact can do it faster than I can since I may not be able to email back for one or two days

Stop Email from Killing Me - Part 4

Here’s tip 6:
I triage my email.

I prioritize my email as more important using a few simple criteria:

• The email has a useful subject line. I’ve started using
  • ACTION: for tasks I send to my direct reports
  • REQUEST: for tasks I send outside my department
  • MEETING: when I have follow up meeting information
  • INFO: general low-priority information
  • UPDATES: updates on several issues for teammates as opposed to sending multiple emails throughout the day
  • DELIVERY: information I was asked to provide
  • ESSENTIAL INFORMATION: information students must read

When an important email does not have a clear subject line, I change it when I reply to include the point and key words I would search for later if I tried to find it.

• The email has a clear purpose. After the subject line, this should be clearly stated in the body of the email. (Write effectively for the Web)
• The sender was “e-considerate.” For me, the #1 considerate behavior is including our previous correspondence in the email. If I have to take time to search for the context of their question, the email is automatically lowered in priority. I know… if you just reply to the original email, Outlook does this automatically, but some people don’t do that.
• The sender has some legitimate crisis and has tried to find the answer on their own.

I prioritize a message as less important using similar criteria:

• The subject line is unclear, or worse, blank.
• The email has no clear purpose. If the text is more than seven sentences and has no paragraph breaks, it is rambling. If I can’t scan the screen and quickly determine the action or deadline, it is rambling.
• The sender was not “e-considerate.” For me, the #1 inconsiderate behavior is not answering my emails, as this is a basic point of etiquette. Other behaviors includes cases where
  • they don’t realize I already sent them the answer
  • they want me to take the time to write a thoughtful answer, but they did not take the time spell check or proofread their email… not to be unkind, I’ll point out that I am a terrible speller, and so it has to be bad for me to notice it (Automate Spellcheck in Outlook)
  • they request a meeting, but include none of their availabilities
• The sender has no legitimate crisis. This includes cases where
  • they could have looked up the answer themselves
  • the problem could have been prevented with some forethought
  • my previous emails to deal with this before it reached a crises were ignored

Email is a party to which English teachers have not been invited - Craig Hogan

Stop Email from Killing Me - Part 3

Here’s tip 5:

I categorize and color code my email. I have five groups:

1 The Cabinet (the President, VPs, AVPs…)
2 DCs (other Department Chairs and Directors, as well as key people around the School)
3 Depart Staff (the Chair, Associates, Department Manager, and her assistant)
4 Students and everyone else
5 Emails from outside The School

I really can scroll down the page and see what’s most important this way by color.

Here’s how you can do it too:

First, to create a category, choose “Edit” from the top menu, then “Categories” in the drop down. In the Categories window, choose “Master Category List.” Create whatever categories you like in the master list.

Second, click “Tools” from the top menu, then “Organize” in the drop down. In the “Ways to organize…” box, choose “Using Colors” on the left, and then “Automatic Formatting” on the top right. This opens the Automatic Formatting box.

From here, click “Add” to create a new rule, and name it after the category you created. Next choose “Condition…” then the “More Choices” tab. Click “Categories” to choose the category you created, then OK. You return to the Automatic Formatting box.

Next choose “Font” and choose the font, weight, size, and color you want apply to your category. Click OK to return to the Automatic Formatting box, and OK again to finish.

Finally, click “Tools” from the top menu, then “Rules and Alerts…” from the drop down.

• Click “New Rule” and start from a blank rule. Leave “Check messages when they arrive” as the default and click next.
• When asked “Which condition(s) do you want to check?” select the first option “from people or distribution list” in the Step 1 box, and select these people in the Step 2 box.
• When asked “What do you want to do with the message?”, select “assign it to the category category” in the Step 1 box, and select your new category in the Step 2 box. Click “Next” twice.
• When you reach the “Finish rule setup.” box, you can choose to run the rule now. This rule will color code all new email, but checking to run the rule now color codes all existing email.

Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler - Einstein