The negativity jar

The Imposter Syndrome and other forms of negativity can keep people, especially women, from achieving as much as they should.  If you say enough negative things about yourself, eventually other people start to believe them too.

One of the things that we did back in graduate school (during the job market) was have a big jar named the “Negativity Jar.” Anytime we said something negative about ourselves, we would have to put a quarter in the jar (we were poor graduate students– you might want to up that to $1 or $5). That forced us to restructure to say things that were actually true– to get at what was actually bothering us, and not to reinforce the negative lies. It forced what Cognitive Behavioral Therapists call “Cognitive restructuring.”

After about 2 weeks there was no more money put in the jar. At the end of the year we were able to buy a little bit of chocolate, not the hard liquor we’d been planning on.

Have you ever had a problem with negative self-talk?  What have you done to address it?  Did it work?

Why academics don’t have Lazear contracts

There have been a lot of posts over the past few weeks about work-life balance and specifically the idea of face-time at the office.  Does face time equal productivity?  Should people in different life-stages and demographic groups be penalized for not putting in the same face-time times as people in other stages and groups?

In economics, this question is a large subset of the area of study called “Contract Theory.”  How do we enforce contracts to make sure that workers are productive?

One such method of reducing shirking is something called a Lazear contract.  In a Lazear contract, we assume that workers prefer leisure over labor if given their druthers, but they like being paid.  We also assume that employees cannot be perfectly monitored– that it isn’t 100% clear to the employer when a worker is being productive and when a worker isn’t contributing– perhaps they’re free-riding.

In this scenario, one thing that an employer can do is offer a lower salary early on when the person is just getting started and give raises until eventually the worker is making more than the worker’s marginal productivity.  At which point the retirement incentives (traditionally mandatory retirement, but these days more fancy benefits tricks) kick in.  The worker doesn’t want to get fired, so even though there’s only a low probability of getting fired at any point in which the worker is shirking, the penalty for shirking is so high that the worker doesn’t want to risk it.  Hence:  productivity.

You may have noticed that academia doesn’t seem to work like that.  Many of us are suffering under the heavy weight of wage compression.  Heck, my MOM is suffering from wage compression, and has been most of her life.  New hires get paid more than full professors some places.  That’s not a Lazear contract, even if you work at the same school your entire career.  *Especially* if you work at the same school your entire career.

How does academia differ from this standard model?  Well, pretty much on every assumption.  Many of us seem to prefer labor over leisure, so long as labor doesn’t include extra unpaid teaching or service.  It’s also difficult to fire us after a certain point, but tenure is actually somewhat endogenous (that is, tenure is something that we wouldn’t have if the assumptions of a Lazear contract held), so one can say we only have tenure because these assumptions don’t hold.

The biggest thing about why we don’t have Lazear contracts is that we *have* measures of productivity.  People who do piecemeal work at factories don’t need Lazear contracts because it’s obvious how many widgits they produce per hour.  In academia, it’s obvious who is getting publications, citations, etc.  Sure, those aren’t perfect measures of quality because of things like luck and discrimination, but they’re pretty clear measures, even if imperfect.  For the most part, face time is unnecessary.

You can also see how people who are most productive post-tenure are the ones to command higher wages because they’re more mobile– they move around and universities know how much they’re “worth” because all of that information is available on the cv.  That’s assuming that universities mainly care about research, which is a reasonable assumption for these high-flyers.

In terms of our other responsibilities, we just have to show up for class and the occasional faculty meeting.  Teaching it’s less easy to shirk because at the very least you have to show up, and students and administrators have ways of punishing people who do a cruddy job and aren’t good enough at other things to get a bye from teaching 101.  Service is really where the majority of shirking goes on, and it just isn’t valued by the academy for the most part.  (And where it is valued, it’s paid for– you should see how much my chair makes.)

That’s why these recent posts, many of them linked to in this post by the tightrope, arguing about how important face time is and how it is or isn’t fair that parents do or don’t get treated differently in academic settings are so befuddling.  It may be a bit different in the sciences because there’s more team effort, so it’s easier to free-ride… but my understanding is if you free-ride too much people don’t coauthor with you anymore, and if you’re the head of a lab it’s kind of hard to get by with free-riding for any length of time.  Monitoring is just not difficult for the research part.  And it doesn’t matter if you’re productive because you’re an efficient genius who is good at delegating to research assistants or you put in a ton of time (or your family situation is different), so long as you get the grants and the papers and the cites.

Oddly, it’s wandering scientist, who, to my understanding, is in a situation in which people are more likely to be able to shirk than in academia because there’s so much more group work in industry and so much less measurable outputs, who has been arguing most vociferously that facetime is not equivalent to productivity.  If the outputs are less easy to measure, then facetime is more important than if their are, precisely because of the monitoring problem.  How can we be sure people are working?  Well, they might not be working if they’re there, but facetime can be a proxy if there’s no better way of measuring output.  Not a great proxy, but at least time spent on the job is something we can measure, and we can occasionally walk by to see if people are at least looking like they might be productive.

So, other than service and teaching, which are often not valued much in research institutions, academics don’t need external monitoring.  Their productivity can be and is measured.  We might want to be having these work-life-balance-facetime arguments about who gets to shirk academic service, but at least in my experience, it hasn’t been the young moms who are doing the shirking.

If you’re in academia, do you consider facetime at the office to be important for productivity?

There are a lot of other ways besides Lazear contracts that businesses and economists try to deal with the monitoring issue– if you don’t work in academia, you’ve probably come across many ways.  What does your company do [to deal with  monitoring productivity]?

When you whine about your lack of current productivity…

Are you doing it because you subconsciously want a kick in the pants?

or

Are you doing it because you want permission to be a slacker?

or is there some third option we’re missing?  (Maybe whining for the sake of whining?  I dunno…)

#1 generally wants a kick in the pants, but sometimes #2 is an enabler, which forces #1 to stop being a slacker even though she’s got permission, which is probably better for her anyway…  #1, otoh, wants everybody to be miserably productive because misery loves company.  (When she says it’s ok to take a break because you need it… it means you really do need it.)

#2 Sometimes all three, but usually mainly the first.
(van down by the river!)

#1 tries to be more productive Day One: Internet Addiction

I was crazy productive the year after I had a baby.  I think part of the reason for that productivity was that I had enforced break-times  for pumping that were probably about ideal for optimal research productivity (~20 min every 3 hours).  When I wasn’t taking a break, I was super focused because time was precious, and I knew I’d be able to take a break for whatever I felt like doing.  This past year, DC long-since weaned, I’ve gotten pretty bad at separating my work time from my internet play time.  So I decided to reboot.  For the sake of productivity!  Viva la productivity!

Day 1 was a bit shaky.  Here’s my frantically written notes from that day.

I am mostly successful at keeping my internet time to while I’m eating my cereal.  We’ll see how long that lasts.  Bonus:  I make DC’s lunch instead of DH.  When K starts we will start making it the night before, but for today, I feel like a good and virtuous partner.

I get to work early enough to beat the traffic around the high school.

I installed leech block and blocked this blog and cnn, hours from 9-12, 1-3, and 3:15-4:40.

This leads to increased clicking on Not of General Interest and Bardiac and other sites with awesome blogrolls.  I tell firefox to forget these pages so they are harder to automatically click on.

I notice myself checking my bank account.  Hey, a reimbursement, that’s cool.  Of course, I can’t enter it into the checkbook register from work, so there wasn’t much point in that.

Argh, I want to write a blog post.  Instead I will jot down my thoughts on paper.

I muse on how when I’m doing mechanical tasks that don’t take any thought I need to have some kind of entertainment in the background or I stop doing the tasks.  For tasks that require thinking though, I prefer silence or familiar music.  I listen to Morning Edition online and Performance Today.

Hm, 3 hours without the blog and nobody has commented.  Also nobody has written anything interesting.  Why does nothing interesting ever happen on the internet when I’m away from it?  You’d think I’d have figured this out by now.

So the above is what I typed in during my lunch break.  The following are my scattered notes, sans context, from the remainder of the afternoon:

“Reclaim 2 hours on weekend. “  What did this mean?  I don’t know!  Maybe it’s about me trying to start working on research on weekends again, which I have.  Except it’s more like 3-4 hours.  (Sometimes more when there’s a deadline!  I hate working on deadlines though.  :( )

“goofing off and getting distracted”  Probably a note about what I was doing.

“problem– work isn’t unpleasant, just not as pleasant as short-term alternatives”  Man, that sure is true.  It’s not that I don’t like work… I’d just rather you know, be watching cat videos on youtube or something.

“I want to make excuses for myself”  It’s true… I keep wanting to come up with valid reasons for me to waste time online.  But the truth is there’s always *something* I could be working on, even if what I planned to work on can’t be worked on for whatever reason.  There’s always a referee report or reading or writing or *something*.

“Lit review nice or mean?”  I have NO idea what this note was.  Following it is something that suggests it might have been a research note to myself.  Oh, I remember what this thought was.  A really good paper I was reading didn’t place as highly as it ought to have, and I thought perhaps it was because the author slammed all the previous literature in kind of a nasty way.  Not something to do to potential reviewers!  One can be polite and professional and build on previous (imperfect) research without being a jerk about it.  Previous research is what makes a field exist!

How do you keep yourself on task at work?  Do you have planned and enforced break-times?

Time = Money: A product plug

We got nuthin’ for today’s money post.  We have a lot of half-finished posts but no energy.  Work and family life are getting in the way for both of us this semester.  This post is about a product to help you put work and family life first, if those are your priorities.

Anyhow, one side of the “spend less than you earn” equation is earning more.  In our field keeping your job depends on productivity, and in these lean times, getting a raise is often tied to how attractive you are to outside organizations.  If I want a raise, I need an outside offer (presumably one I’d be willing to take).  (#2 has no hope of a raise, outside offer or no: my school won’t match, and there hasn’t been money for merit raises in over a decade.  It’s a good thing I’m filling all my time with my partner, instead.  And, you know, getting tenure.)

Regularly updating a blog when one is supposed to be doing research/class prepping/writing etc. is not conducive to staying productive.  Maybe small amounts of internet surfing can increase productivity, especially in regular break-times, but in general, feeding a blog keeps work from getting done.  So does reading CNN or whatever your internet habit of choice is.

If you have an addictive personality, these habits can be hard to break.  You need a commitment device.

Enter:  Leechblock.  This is a Mozilla add-in.  I wanted something that would allow me to set the times for working and the times for playing.  I wanted to be able to say:  No spending 3 hours on the internet in the morning– I don’t *want* to get up at 5am, I want to not be allowed to play on the blog at that time.  I want to work between 9-12, play from 12-1, and work again except for a 15 minute break the rest of the afternoon.  Then free-time after work.

Leechblock allows that.  It also allows you to be cut off from a site after a set amount of time… no more than 15 min or 30 min etc.

I spent a lot of time the first few days getting the same blocked screen.  Then instead of spending 15 min to an hour pleasantly diverted from the task I was avoiding, I would spend about a minute and then I’d go back to doing something productive, maybe not the same thing, but something off my to-do list.  That makes me happier about my work-life, but also leads to a much shorter queue in the blog.  (We may have to stop daily updates one of these days, which I understand is part of the amateur blog cycle.)

Of course, nothing interesting ever happens on the internet when I’m not there (obviously the only interesting stuff is reactions to things I’ve said(!)), or other people have made the points I was going to make so there’s no point in repeating.  So my evenings have been less full of internet and more full of family as well (filling them with work, so far not happening).  And we’ve been going to bed earlier (though a lot of that is having to get up for classes earlier than in previous semesters).

Do you have problems wasting time when you’re supposed to be working or enjoying life?  What kinds of things do you do to keep on track?

[Disclaimer:  leechblock is a free program and they don't know we exist.  We don't do paid product placement.]

Monthly challenge update: old and new

So the monthly challenge for May was to clean and organize my house FOR REAL. I’ve been posting updates along the way, and it’s been going pretty well.  It helped that the semester was winding down; so, though there was some craziness, there was also some time.

Originally this challenge had been scheduled later in the summer, but things got moved around for an exciting reason: my longtime partner is moving to Blighted Town!  Hooray, we will be together again!  I can’t even TELL you how happy we are.  He’s going to work remotely at his current job while living with me.  It only took a few years to make this work out, augh.

What this means, though, is that I have to move to a bigger place in Blighted Town, as he won’t fit in my current place, especially with two home offices to account for.  We’ve already found a big place to rent, but you know how moving is: craziness.  That’s why I’ve spent May trying to organize, clean, and cull stuff, so there is less to pack in the next 6 weeks.

Next up is June, CSA month!  Deliveries actually started in late May but since I’m on a half-share, I will get them every other week throughout the summer and early fall, not every week.  The first delivery I had, I managed to use it all (largely by cooking it down and freezing it in lunch-portions for later).  This is good, as it gives me more time to complete the goals!

#2:  Still drowning in tenure-related activities.  And there’s a small conference I’m going to in my specific field subset after my tenure-packet is due.  I sent in a partly-done paper figuring it wouldn’t get accepted (because my much more polished work that has placed well never got accepted) but I’d still get an invite… and uh, it got accepted.  If I can pull off not looking like an idiot this will be great for my career, but if I can’t it could be deadly.  But I’m totally looking forward to joining #1 for the money challenge later this summer.  I have a ton of odds and ends I’ve been putting off!

OMG WTF Tenure packet?!?

So… one of us is going to be taking a month long hiatus from the blog, give or take.  Starting tomorrow, where tomorrow is a day some number of weeks ago because thank Goodness for queues.  You might not even notice.

Why, you ask?

Well, because her tenure packet was supposed to be due in two months.

But, she got an email saying that due to changes in administrative procedures, they’ve decided to make it due in one month instead.  Oh, and the tenure packet guidelines are changing and we’re not really sure what they’re going to be, but they’re longer and more extensive than they were last year.  I should get instructions in a couple of weeks.

Also, in a couple of weeks, grades are due, finals are next week, so… yeah, your life just sucks.  Sucksssss.  But really, 15 days to pull together a tenure packet shouldn’t affect anything negatively, no sir.  Not at all.  And that plan you had to send in those two papers that are almost done so you can put “under review” on your CV … piece of cake!

The other person in the department going up for tenure is actually going to be out of the country on a research thing (someplace where the internet is slow to non-existent) so ze may have difficulty getting in said packet without the instructions.

On the plus side, it’s only a month (starting tomorrow)… a month of no weekends, of not messing around on the internet.  It’s not like it’s the last year of graduate school or anything.  Surely I can be productive for a month.  Nobody will notice me falling off the face of the planet for a month.  All those decisions about my personal/family life… surely someone else can make them.  The CSA starting this month?  Well, someone else can process the vegetables…  I can kill myself for a month.

Sigh.  I’m too old for this.  Maybe I should just give up and focus on the damn packet and not worry about anything else.

And I hate them all.  One should not give such short notice on something like this.  I had things planned out pretty nicely with coauthors’ promises and other things set up.  But now, well, life is just going to suck.

It’s been a couple weeks now.  Did you notice I was gone?  Did you miss me?  Do you feel sorry for me?  ‘Cuz I gotta say I feel sorry for me.  Verrrra sorry.

#2 feels extra sorry for you, too, and thinks that your administrators should be run out of town on a rail.

Our February Challenge Decisions and more

February is the best month for month-long Challenges.

We here at Grumpy Rumblings have decided upon two challenges: one for each of us.

#1 is going to do a boring challenge.  She will write for 30 min for work each and every day, including Saturdays.  There will be no failure.  No excuses.  (Barring things like hospitalization, of course.)  The hope is that after 28 odd days of that, going back to 5 days/week will seem easy.  Hope.

#2 will be doing the Steampunk Challenge.  My plan is to read 3 steampunk books during February (maybe ambitious?) and post brief reviews of each.

#2 is also considering doing different challenges each month.  These are instead of New Year’s Resolutions because I feel capable of keeping each one for a month, but not for a year.

Jan.:  Figure out list

Feb.:  Steampunk

March:  inbox zero at work

April:  Floss at least 4 times per week every week

May:  write every day for 30 min., without fail

June:  Eat less junk, more veggies (#1 suggests joining a CSA)

July: get-a-handle-on-my-money month

Aug.: TBA

Sept.:  Get at least 7 hours of sleep every night!

Oct.- Dec.:  TBA

Hm… #1 is intrigued by this idea, but is not sure that she has enough willpower.  Except for floss.  #1 is totally up on the flossing every night, but she does that already.  She’s awesome that way.  #1 is going to have to make a decision at some point about whether or not she’s going to go back on metformin this year and begin the long slow vomitty process of getting her body ready to reproduce, which would mesh with #2′s June goals since #1 has to eat like a perfect eating person in that situation.   More on that in an unfinished post that will probably appear sometime in March.

bloggity blog blog blog

Hello, dear blog readers.  I’ve been in and out of town, away from the blog off and on… did you notice?  I hope not, because my lovely other half did yeoman work in keeping the blog running.  Now we are back at full force (two!) and ready to blog for your amusement and ours.

Let’s talk about blogging.  The internets keep saying it is over, but apparently everyone I know is as behind the times as we are, because everyone’s doing it.  Over the holidays, I found out that my sister has a secret blog with 2 of her friends.  (Hey chica, if you’re reading this, holla at us.)  They’ve had it for over a year — don’t tell the rest of the fam.  (#2:  I hope my sister never knows, though I’m pretty sure I accidentally left the dashboard open when she checked her email on my laptop over Christmas.  If you’re reading this, hermanita, feel ashamed!)  It is an accountability blog where they all help each other reach goals, and it’s been really successful for them.  A work colleague of mine also started a blog recently, again to provide herself accountability in various life domains and goals.  She has it under her real name; she has tenure.  And I found out things about her hobbies that I never knew before, which is cool.  (#2:  I found out things about her fertility patterns… but apparently that was already public information for #1)

Maybe my mom should start a blog to help her accountability/ procrastination in her freelance work.  Wouldn’t that be hilarious. (#2 says:  can it be a secret blog?  Maybe she already has one!)

Also, over the holidays my partner got a Kindle and I was able to play with it.  I was not that impressed.  My favorite part is the pictures you get when you turn it off. (#2:  Mine too!)  The flash whenever you turn a page really bothered me, even after giving it a whole book’s worth of reading to get myself used to it.  I never did.  (#2:  This bothers me with some books more than others… haven’t figured out what the difference is though.)

And about that book!  Man it was bad.  That’s ok, because I just downloaded a free one in order to play with the Kindle and that’s what I get for downloading something free that was written in the last decade.  The worst thing about the book was that I knew what the sequel was going to be.  Before the book ended, the sequel sprung fully-formed into my mind.  I mean, I know whose POV it’s going to be from, which events will occur, which characters there will be, what the climax is and how it will resolve, all of it!  I don’t even know if there is a sequel but there must be, because it is obvious.  I won’t read it, of course, since I have it written already in my head.  (#2:  You should have gotten that Mary Roberts Reinhart I recommended instead– it was TOTALLY HILARIOUS)

What’ve you all been up to?

Hacking my work habits

(What is a hacker? Let’s please get away from thinking that hackers steal your password — those are crackers — and get back to the original idea of a hacker as someone who tries to make things better, more elegant, more efficient, more effective, or just new and cool…)

This semester I am desperate to get more writing done.  It not only betters my career chances but it also gives me a sense of accomplishment that teaching never does.  It would alleviate a lot of personnel-evaluation angst if I could get some things accepted pretty soon.  I am trying so hard to carve out times to get my brain into research-mode, and then to actually execute on my plans to write.  My brain is not being cooperative, though.  It keeps being obsessed with how I haven’t seen my partner of over a decade in a month, and it’s another month until I have time to fly and see him.  I am so lonely.

So I am hacking my work habits.

Usually my writing must take place off-campus.  In my campus office I am constantly getting interrupted by students, and if I close the door my office gets hot, and sometimes I have to leave the office to use the bathroom (thereby betraying my presence in my office).  So I write at home, and I try to also write in a local indie coffeeshop.  I know it’s dumb to pay for coffee when I have both a home office and a campus office (and I can get cheap coffee at either), but I will do whatever it takes right now and see if it works.  Sometimes I will do a sprint, such as working constantly until my laptop battery dies, and then plugging it in and taking a break to switch tasks.

I need to use external controls on myself, like accountability partners, because self-control is a limited resource, especially without my partner around to encourage me.

I have a colleague in the same position I am: too many things to write, too little time.  The two of us have made dates on Friday afternoons throughout the semester to meet up off-campus and have research time.  During this time we may not do any teaching or service work, and no surfing the net randomly — only research and writing.

When in the afternoon doldrums or at other times when I am craving a nap and yet have work to do, I have tried something new, which is the idea of a standing desk.  I first saw this idea, in various forms, at Lifehacker, which tends to show off fancy custom-made standing desks.  I have a simpler method that I’ve tried in my campus office: making a stack on my desk of a ton of textbooks, and putting my new small laptop on top of that.  It’s easy to go from standing to sitting just by moving the pile of books.  Working on the computer while standing definitely keeps me more alert and can be combined with the sprint idea.

Have I mentioned how much I love coffee?  I find it to be not only an alertness-enhancer but also a mood-elevator.  Cheaper than therapy.  All hail coffee.

Virginia Valian is an amazing scholar of, among other things, women in academia.  She has written two incredible chapters about hacking your work habits.  One is Learning to Work (PDF): how is writing like sex?  I think Boice would approve of what she says here about working in very small, but constant, chunks of time.

Solving a Work Problem (PDF) details her updated system as an assistant professor in trouble (hi!). She is now a distinguished full professor with major research in not one but two areas.  You should read this because I want to quote whole entire paragraphs of it, way beyond what is fair use.

One thing I took away from this chapter was the idea of treating yourself as a research subject and trying different things, recording the results to see what is most effective in getting the desired behavior (in this case, writing) from yourself.  I am giving myself more permission to do whatever works this year, even if it seems weird.  In a memoir I recently read, a creative writer talks about how he finally managed to work out a routine that produced excellent results every time — but it was really complex.  It involved turning out all the lights, jogging in circles, lying on the floor, etc.  His behavior, explained out of context, seems… well… maybe a bit insane.  But the thing is, I understood how he had gotten there.  I don’t want to have to go that far, but I’m giving myself more permission to engage in whatever rituals or behaviors will produce results (publications).

If you are at the point of tl;dr by now, then:

Boice says to proselytize and I am infecting my mom with these ideas.  Not only have I sent her some books about writing for her birthday, but she is also on our writing accountability site and has even started trying to moderately hack her own work habits.   Last week she IM’d me in the middle of the day to ask me if I would call her at a certain time that night and ask her if she was done with her freelance work yet.  She reports that it really did help her get motivated and complete the work.  Go, accountability partners!