Especially when they want to chat.

I am not a small-talk kind of person. I’m not very good at it, and I don’t enjoy it. I’ll do it when it is socially required, and I always try to be friendly, but in general I try to avoid it. I especially hate it at work. I strive to be efficient and productive from nine to five so that I don’t have to work more than forty hours a week. I prefer just to get down to business in a meeting or when I have a work request for someone. But not everybody has the same work philosophy as I do, unfortunately.

There is one person in particular in my office who is a frequent offender. Let’s call this person Pat. Pat likes to check in with me on things that Pat is working on. And that’s fine – it’s important to me that Pat’s job is done correctly and effectively. But I really wish that Pat would send an email with information on what has been accomplished, or with questions about things, or with links for me to review. An email that I can review when I have a moment.

Pat thinks “face-to-face” communication is SO much better. Pat pops into my office. All the time. All day long. And asks the question or shows me the thing, and I try to deal with it quickly and get Pat to leave so I can get back to the thing I was working on that Pat interrupted.

Pat won’t leave it at that, however. Pat likes to chat. Pat likes to fill me in on all the tiny little details that I do not want to hear about (having to listen to all of the details for thirty minutes totally defeats the purpose of delegating a task to Pat, if you ask me) in order to remind me of how skilled and important Pat is. Often Pat will say outright how skilled and important Pat is, just to make sure that I know. If I’m REALLY lucky, Pat will also share an unrelated and unsolicited anecdote about the traffic or weather or family issues.

I try to be polite, I really do. But I have work to do. And don’t you have work to do, too?

Please. Just send me an email.

In fact, I realized that the only thing I’ve really enjoyed recently is my drum lessons (have I mentioned I am learning to play the drums?). My husband commented that I’ve been getting really good, and I laughed and said it was funny that I’m good at the one thing I’m doing with absolutely no goal in mind. Sure, it would be fun to play with a band in public, and if that happens, great – but I am playing just because I like it and it’s fun.

This was a revelation.

Like many ambitious people, I have a lot of goals and I work hard towards them. But sometimes it can be a bit draining, especially when you feel like that end goal is so far away. I remembered too that once I went off the traditional academic path, suddenly research was more fun. I’m publishing at a rate 2-4 times higher than when I was a postdoc looking for a tenure track job. I conduct and publish studies now not because I have to, but because I enjoy it.

I wondered if I was on to something, and turned to the all-knowing Google to look up “being too goal-oriented.” Apparently I am right on trend – there have been several pieces in the last few months, including this article in the New York Times, about the potential problems of focusing on one’s goals.

What to do, then? It seems that a better route to success is focusing on the process, not the outcome. For example, people who were asked to think about why they went to the gym and to state their goals (losing weight, etc) actually spent less time on the treadmill than people who were asked to describe what they do at the gym. The gym-goers who were asked to think about their goals perceived their workout as requiring more effort than did those asked to think about the process. It’s not that the latter group didn’t have the same goals, it’s that they weren’t thinking about the goals while they were at the gym. Goals might motivate you to get started with something, but they aren’t sufficient to keep you motivated.

Interesting. I’m not yet sure how to make this work in my normal life, but it’s certainly something to think about.

Like many others, I was appalled when I saw Dario Maestripieri’s comments on the attractiveness (or lack thereof) of women at the Society for Neuroscience conference. Janet Stemwedel wrote a really nice post about what is wrong with this behavior and why we need to address it. This casual sexism is far from unusual in academia – in fact, we see it pretty regularly. There’s just no winning for women in academia – if you’re unattractive, then you’re a bad female. But if you’re attractive, you’re a bad academic.

Image source: http://lolpetclothes.com/2010/cats-wearing-dresses/

Beauty is, arguably, as much about presentation as it is about genes. Most people have the capacity to look very attractive. Maybe not super model hot, but still attractive. Of course, only women are expected to take advantage of this capacity, and are disparaged when they do not.

When women in academia DO make the effort to look attractive, it can have very negative consequences. I think most women pick up on this pretty quickly in graduate school. If you wear heels and makeup, you must not be very smart, or at least not very serious about academia. (Because girly girls can’t do science!) Some women who put an effort into their appearance when they start graduate school later change when they realize how differently they are treated from the male graduate students. (It may not even be a conscious decision. Besides, who has the time?) And if the disdain from peers and professors is not enough to encourage an attractive women to change the way she dresses, well, the appallingly sexist teaching evaluations from horny undergraduates will usually do the trick.

When I go to a conference or other academic event – especially if it’s an event where I am likely to be one of the younger attendees – I take care to dress in a way that will not distract from my science. No bright colors, no prints, nothing feminine in any way, nothing cute. Certainly no cleavage – black turtlenecks whenever possible! I want to be taken seriously for my work, not ogled and assessed for my potential reproductive possibilities.

Being considered “hot” by a sexist male academic is not high on my priority list – not when I’m at a conference, and not any other time, either. If I were super model hot, however, I doubt it would help my career.

I spent a couple of years in the corporate world between college and graduate school, in the typesetting department of a financial printing company. As nice as it was making $50K/year with awesome benefits right out of college, the main thing I got from that job was the firm knowledge that I DID NOT WANT TO BE THERE. This was 1996-1998 – exactly the time period that the movie Office Space was based on. I almost cried the first time I saw that movie, because it was such a perfect representation of how awful my job was.

Just a few of the many things I hated about that job:

• Having to work overtime/weekends/holidays whenever needed, or else risk losing my job
• The mind-numbing tediousness of my tasks
• The petty monitoring and comparing of hours worked, by people who thought they did more than everyone else and that it wasn’t fair
• The stupid uniform shirt with the logo
• Salespeople were considered superior to all other employees
• Clients were wined and dined, allowed to smoke cigars inside the building while they waited for their documents, and regularly taken to stripclubs by the salespeople. Of course, only the male salespeople could take their clients to strip clubs, so the women naturally made less money…
• The never-ending reminders that we were expendable

By comparison, dealing with faculty egos and the shocking inability of academics to follow instructions seems much painless. While I don’t exactly make my own hours, I almost never have to work nights and weekends. I do have to dress somewhat professionally (at least, by academic standards) but nobody is making me wear an ugly polo shirt. There are no clients, no stakeholders, no stock prices – I actually care about my work. And above all, I (usually) feel appreciated and needed.

I just have to keep reminding myself of these things every time a faculty member asks me a stupid question or claims to be “too busy” to comply with the reporting requirements of their funding awards.

Spouse and I were commiserating about this phenomenon, and he added that when he really struggles with writing something, when it comes really slowly and it feels like everything you are writing is crap, his co-authors don’t edit much and say it looks great. But when something flows smoothly and inspiredly (is that a word?) from the beginning and he’s really proud of it, they make so many changes that it’s barely recognizable as the same piece.

Hmmm. I feel like there is a lesson here.

Another one of my favorites is envy – both sides of it. Yes, like most people I do enjoy being envied, though not because it makes me feel superior or anything like that. Being envied helps me remember to appreciate what I have and not to take it for granted. But I also enjoy being the envier. Lately I’ve realized that sometimes, it is more pleasurable to want something than it is to actually have it.

One I need to work on: relaxation, a feeling I’ve never been very good at. It often gets quickly replaced with boredom, restlessness, agitation, the worry that I should be doing something.

One I need to enjoy a little less: anger. And perhaps schadenfreude. It can feel really good to have negative emotions sometimes, but it’s probably not usually a good thing.

What about you?

Photo by Flickr user donabelandewen

I think it’s fair to say that I am a bit obsessed with the art of note-taking. I have spent more time (and money) than anyone should browsing notebooks and pens online and in stores. I buy Moleskine notebooks in bulk. And when I saw this book on an exhibitor’s table at a conference recently, I knew I had to buy it. Field Notes on Science and Nature includes essays by fourteen field scientists on how they take notes in the field, with scans of actual pages from their notebooks. Many of them include beautiful sketches of plants and animals. I love looking at other people’s notebooks – I like to see how they organize their thinking and what sorts of things they notice. But it also makes me feel envious and inadequate.

In meetings, at seminars and talks, and while reading, I take extensive notes by hand. My notes are often transcript-like and have served as a valuable record of many meetings. I maintain a numbered library of Moleskines in my office and refer to them often.

My field notes, on the other hand, are not beautiful. They are usually scrawled quickly, with the minimum amount of information needed to be transcribed. I can’t draw. Sometimes I draw rudimentary maps, but that’s about it. When I see exciting behavior in the field, I don’t write it down in my notebook – I relish the telling of the story at dinner at the field station, or I write about it in an email to my husband. My field notes will probably never be archived or kept for posterity. This makes me kind of sad… but not enough to do something about it. I keep many spreadsheets of my field data, which takes up a great deal of time. I don’t see myself investing any more energy into hand-written field notes, unfortunately.

Because every year, sometime around the middle of January, I start getting restless and annoyed by my comfortable, nicely appointed office. I get tired of sitting at a desk all day, writing emails and updating websites and spreadsheets and start daydreaming about being in the woods and catching birds. And then I tell my husband, “I’m thinking about going to the field in May,” and he responds, “I know.”

I pack up the car with all of my field gear and about 30 pairs of socks (you can never have too many socks in the field), a couple of laptops and grand plans to work on a couple of manuscripts during my downtime. Since I’m not at home and don’t have my usual responsibilities, I will have plenty of free time when I’m not actually doing fieldwork. I’ve read so many books in the field – so much free time!

Off I go, and it’s great for the first couple of weeks. I’m in the mountains, surrounded by beautiful scenery. I’m getting paid to walk in the woods and poke at birds. I enjoy the time with the other members of my field crew. I give myself a week or two to adjust to my new schedule before I start working on the manuscripts or reading the papers that I’ve brought along with me.

And then it’s three weeks into my time in the field, and I haven’t written a single word on either of my manuscripts, and in fact haven’t given them a moment’s thought beyond, “Did I really think I would have time to write those while I was in the field? What kind of an idiot am I?” Because, while there may be downtime in the evenings, the truth is that in the field I work 11-12 hours a day, seven days a week, and in the evenings I am not capable of doing much more than drinking that much-needed beer, reading a chapter of whatever novel is on my Kindle, and falling asleep around 9 pm so I can get up before sunrise the next morning and trudge back out into the woods. Every 9-10 days, the emails and things I have to do from my regular job – plus the manuscripts that I inevitably get asked to review every single time I’m in the field – pile up enough that I take a half day off from fieldwork to catch up on all of that.

Now I am fondly remembering that pleasant office back at the university. I am longing for the forty-hour work week and going home to my spouse and my pets at the end of every day, and having real weekends. Suddenly that hour or two between meetings seems like a huge expanse of time in which to get things written, a great time to work on manuscripts.

I think the best thing about fieldwork may be the shift in perspective every year that allows me to continue appreciating my regular life.

Coffee helps too. Photo by Flickr user interpunct.

Recently, I read Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, which I found to be a very enjoyable read. One of the things that resonated with me was the fact that in many experiments when they asked subjects to monitor their own behavior (such as eating or studying habits), that behavior improved. I’ve found this to be true for myself too. I used to keep a spreadsheet where I recorded my daily word count, and what papers I read. But at some point I got tired of keeping up with the spreadsheet and abandoned it entirely—and my writing and scholarly reading went down, too.

The book mentioned a program called RescueTime that will monitor how you spend your time on your computer automatically. You spend a little bit of time (very little) at the beginning classifying what activities are most productive for you and which ones are distracting, but after that, it runs pretty much with out any help from you. I almost immediately downloaded it, and even signed up for the paid account that would give me more information. And just like that, I have found that I’m getting a lot more work each day.

You can set daily goals—I am using the default of aiming for more than 4 hours a day of productive time and less than 1 hour a day of distracting time. This feature alone is helpful—for example, if I check my current stats and see that I have not yet fulfilled the four hours of productive time, I’ll figure out something that I can work on for a solid hour and get right to work.

It’s also got a “Get Focused” feature where you can set it to block your distracting sites for a certain period of time (default is 30 minutes).

So, here’s a look at how I spent my time last week:

Facebook is my biggest productivity enemy. To be fair, the program can’t tell the difference between when I’m using social networking for fun or when I’m using it for legitimate research center activity (I run our center’s Facebook and Twitter accounts). But to be honest, I use it primarily to keep up with roller derby business. Oops.

But THIS is my absolute favorite part of this program:

Yes!! I am more productive than 82% of people. This feature satisfies my competitive nature and makes me feel very proud of myself. Maybe it’s a little silly, but hey, whatever works, right?

Photo by Flickr user raider of gin

When you choose a little-studied research topic, you are suddenly regarded as an expert on that topic. I conducted my doctoral dissertation research on a little-known creature in a remote part of the world, encountering many difficulties that quickly made it clear why no one else had done this before. By the time I was done with a year’s worth of fieldwork, another year’s worth of labwork, and compiling every bit of published information that had ever existed on this species, I felt like I had learned very little. From the point of view of the rest of the world, however, I was the leading expert on this animal. Graduate students who were interested in studying the same species, documentary filmmakers who wanted to make a movie about the place, conservation organizations who wanted to save the region – all of them wanted to talk to me. This attention seemed so strange and unwarranted at the time, but eventually I adjusted and realized that I really did have something to offer others who were interested.

My current area of research is quite different than what I did in graduate school, but it is again in a little-studied field, and once again I am becoming known as an expert in this area. This time, it’s a little less surprising and a little more gratifying. It’s a new area, and many other researchers are getting in on the action too – and most of them cite me, which is great. I love getting those notifications that I’ve been cited!

Now that I am becoming established in my career as a research center administrator, I am being viewed as an expert in other things too. Recently, I was invited to give an informal talk on communicating science to the public. This topic is one that I am very interested in, and one that is an important part of my job, but not something that I feel terribly qualified to teach others yet. I was surprised by the invitation and unsure if I could pull it off. But I cobbled something together, gave an interactive presentation, and it went very well. The audience was engaged and appreciative. Since I feel like I am still learning how to do this kind of outreach, I was sort of surprised that the things that I presented did not seem boring and overly obvious.

I suppose this is one of the symptoms of the insidious impostor syndrome that affects so many of us in academe. Clearly I still have a lot of work to do to overcome it!