Editing, anxiety, and change

High Anxiety (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday, a workshop on "leadership in times of change".  This had no relevance to research, one would have thought, but in fact two ideas were transferrable:

1. change doesn't occur unless the fear of the consequences of not changing ("survival anxiety") is greater than the fear of the consequences of changing ("learning anxiety"). 

• The strategy for encouraging change is not to increase survival anxiety, but to decrease learning anxiety.  

"Start using Excel in 3 months or  lose your job!" is not nearly as effective as "Excel is really pretty easy, we've set up a couple of seminars to take you through the key concepts".

1. There are two basic types of problem: "technical" - nobody can hear the prof, say  - and "adaptive" - no one can understand what the prof is getting at.  
• Technical problems are easy to fix: get the prof to use a microphone. 
• Adaptive problems are much harder, because complex. Why doesn't anyone understand the prof?  Is the subject too difficult for this level of class?  Is the prof not explaining things clearly?  Is the class not doing the homework or the readings? Is the textbook badly written? Do the assignments need to be broken down more clearly?
• It is very very seductive to apply a technical solution to an adaptive problem.  

Nobody understands the prof?  Probably they just can't hear her! Let's get her a microphone! Problem solved.  Except most likely it isn't solved.  But we LOVE to use technical solutions because they are simple, quick, and we can tell ourselves we've done something and can move on to the next problem.  Even though what we've done has not actually fixed anything, usually.

So, how do these apply to research?

1. I am often tempted to persuade myself to embark on a new project, or finish an old one, by increasing the stakes ("survival anxiety").  I'll pick a project with a firm deadline set by someone else, because then the consequences will be awful if I don't finish on time.   But breaking the project down into doable steps ("decreasing learning anxiety") is actually much more effective both in getting the work done, and applying myself to the process. 
2. The solution to research snags is NOT to try out new word processing/ database software. I should cross-stitch this on a sampler and hang it over my desk.  

NEW SOFTWARE WILL NOT SOLVE YOUR RESEARCH PROBLEM.  RESEARCH WILL SOLVE YOUR RESEARCH PROBLEM.  

But playing with new software is so much fun, and look how productive I'm being! 

So: today, reading over the revisions on 3 articles for an edited collection.  Is this research?  Well, not my own research, but worth doing, anyway.

cool new software

I've found some Cool New Software!  Which should enable me to waste WEEKS re-organizing my notes into absolutely perfect, multiply-cross-indexed little notelets, which I imagine as being something like chiclets, all perfectly lined up, alphabetized, cross-linked, and absolutely everything but, you know, actually being an article.  Brushing, combing and massaging your notes, that's the ticket to endless weeks of happy non-productivity that somehow feels as if you're getting something done.  Without actually, you know, getting anything out the door ...The new software I refer to is Circus Ponies "Notebook" (only for Mac, I think).  I found a blog, "Organizing Creativity",  that gave a two-step process for automatically turning all your research into articles without human intervention of any kind, or that was my hopeful reconstruction of what he describes.  Essentially, he takes all his notes in "Notebook",  whose strengths he describes here, and also uses "Notebook" to produce a detailed outline which includes all of the secondary literature he will be referring to, with links to those notes.  (The strength of "Notebook" is that it automagically produces multiple links and cross-indexings). Then he uses "Scrivener", of which I'm already a huge fan, to actually write the article., with the "Notebook" file open beside the "Scrivener" window. He has another post here that discusses how to use Scrivener to write dissertations, or any lengthy project.

Image viaWikipedia

One touch I particularly liked is that he suggests that you use checkboxes in your outline.  Why?  So that once you've actually written something, you can check it off, and the text will grey out, and you will feel happy because you are accomplishing stuff.

Until now I had thought of "Notebook" and "Scrivener" as essentially duplicating each others' functions - or, at least, largely overlapping.  But "Notebook" does seem to keep everything much better organized than "Scrivener" does.  Though, I have to say, all this really produces is that illusion of control to which writers are so prone to succumb.  Surely "control" (of the subject, of the literature, of the whatever) is not the highest virtue to which writers should aspire?

However, the hell. For now, I can play with my new software, and pretend that I will soon have control! really! Control of eVERYTHING I'm supposed to have read!  And then it will magically all turn itself into finished texts! While I sleep!  Circus Ponies will mate with Scriveners and produce studious little centaurs of polished pieces, which will gallop off to publication in happy frolicking herds. I can dream.

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• Scrivener - Writing the old way is crazy (all-things-andy-gavin.com)
• Review: Literature and Latte Scrivener 2.0.2 (macworld.com)
• Scrivener Hits Mac App Store (themactrack.com)
• Meet the love of my life: Scrivener! (angelikadevlyn.wordpress.com)