Clocking Out

In a more traditional job, paid time off is a benefit that follows a strict procedure. Vacation days are accrued over time. Employees submit requests to their managers before they take these vacation days. These requests are explicitly approved or denied. When you take those vacation days, you leave the office behind and you fly off to Aruba without a care in the world. At least ideally.

When you are your own manager, it's hard to know whether to approve time off. Have you worked enough to accrue vacation days? Will the project get done on time without you? Is this a good time to leave or would it be better to wait and take a longer break later? When you do take time off, it's also more difficult to leave the work behind... the trade off of managing yourself is that the manager comes along on your vacation.

It's really important to take breaks away from work (and to leave behind the manager when you're off the clock). First of all, it's a chance to scale back from the nitty-gritty. It's easy to overemphasize the importance of the task you're hacking away at, whether that be a dissertation chapter or a set of documents or a stack of secondary readings on a particular topic. Leaving behind that tight focus for a few days provides a chance, upon your return, to reflect on the project as a whole. It's helpful to remember the relevance of that particular slice and to return to it with a renewed sense of purpose. 

Perhaps even more importantly, vacation is a time to heal the body and mind. Writing a dissertation is an extreme mental workout! You have think deeply AND exercise an enormous amount of self control. Vacation is a break from harnessing willpower; it's a few days to be impulsive and spontaneous and lazy. Vacation is also a few days to stretch out the spine, rest the eyes, decaffeinate a bit (just a bit!), and maybe even expose the skin to sunshine. 

I make a case for vacation in the interest of both the manager and the worker. Happy, well-rested graduate students produce more and better quality work. In summary, clocking out occasionally is an investment in the dissertation and not a detriment. 

Positivity

When you are the boss of yourself, you have to be the one to motivate and reward yourself. Rewards are easy. I've bribed myself with myriad things over the years, most egregiously with an embarrassingly expensive makeup brush. I simply wanted the brush badly enough that I stayed committed to my goal of writing every weekday. 

Motivation can be trickier than providing an incentive. It seems like it would be easier, and certainly cheaper. I find it much more difficult, however, to consistently tell myself that I should sit down to work because I am awesome at what I do and because I love what I do. Both of these points are  compelling and true. When other people remind me of this, I feel buoyant, confident, and enthusiastic. It's really, really hard to maintain this state on your own. Partially this is because telling yourself that you're fabulous feels inauthentic, and partially this is because I forget to practice positive self-talk until I've descended into a dark place of self-loathing and despair. It's much more difficult to dig yourself out of that pit than it is to keep your confidence riding high. 

I've been working really hard at practicing positivity. Here are some of my strategies:

1. Make a list of everything you've done today or this week or this month. Put down absolutely everything that required more than minimal effort. That includes loads of laundry, any form of cleaning that improved your quality of life, important emails sent, books read, pages written, lesson plans prepared, all incidents of exercise, and any meetings pertaining to your work (particularly those involving your advisors). Marvel at the labor it takes to move through life.

2. Go to a coffee shop or a yoga class or a bar--anywhere that you could feasibly run into a stranger who asks you "what you do." Explaining your work to a non-expert always makes you feel really smart. You know things!

3. Listen to your anthem on repeat. Internalize the message.

4. Pull out the first graded paper you wrote in graduate school and compare it to the most recent page you've written. Even the clunkiest page of your dissertation will look brilliant next to that first attempt at coherence. How could you not compliment yourself after facing this evidence of growth and intellectual maturity? 

5. I'm not above asking my partner or my parents to tell me I'm smart, pretty, kind, thoughtful, and a net-positive addition to society. I don't dig for the compliment because it feels desperate and then I feel loathe myself even more. I just ask someone to pick up their pom-poms and start cheering for me. After their rah-rah-rah I can usually rally for a few rounds of "2-4-6-8-who-do-we-appreciate." I have no shame. 

Ultimately, it's less about what you do than how often you do it. It's healthy to be self-aware and self-critical, but you have to balance it with a daily dose of self-affirmation. 

I CAN DO ANYTHING GOOD!

Petit Bourgeoisie

I've been incredibly happy and satisfied with my life over the past few months, and I've put a lot of thought into what exactly has contributed to my buoyant mental state. Certainly I have absorbed some of the joy and confidence my partner feels in his new job. He has also sustained and nourished me in more tangible ways, by feeding me delicious dinners most days of the week. My family and friends are healthy and happy and are experiencing successes in their own lives, so I feel naches about that. I'm knitting a sweater, which is a fun challenge. I've traveled to Boston, Gainesville, Baltimore, and New York City (several times). These trips gave me a chance to spend time with family and old friends. I also got a lot of work done in NYC, which was professionally fulfilling. 

What has made me happiest, however, has been the autonomy that I've gained since beginning my dissertation. I wake up every day and decide where, when, and how to do my work. Sometimes that means pulling my laptop into bed at 6:30 AM and diving right into my documents. Other mornings I force myself out of bed right away and head out to a coffee shop, so that I don't give myself the opportunity to fall back asleep, or do the dishes, or try on all of the winter dresses I just brought up from the basement. And once I begin working, I choose whether to start by writing or by reading. I set my own priorities, and I can give myself the time and flexibility I need to ensure that I complete the task and complete it well. There are days I work for six hours straight. Those days are uncommon and awesome. There are also days I barely manage to sit in front of the computer for three hours. Those days are also uncommon and, frankly, feel terrible. 

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It's not that I love having no structure. Quite the opposite, actually. My life is quite structured, in the way that a bounce house has a finite boundary. The walls of my work week span from 7:00 AM on Monday morning to (at the latest) 5:00 PM on Friday. I do not bounce in the bounce house on the weekends. That's when I do more sedentary activity, like watch Million Dollar Listing: Los Angeles and playing Bejeweled on my iPad. There's no height requirement to get in the bounce house. The only rule is that you bounce for at least three hours each day, preferably four, ideally five. There's no overtime though so I don't overexert myself. 

The problem with the bounce house, however, is that I rent it from a cranky, paranoid overlord who has goals and ambitions and gets very very worried about liability. It is amazing to bounce in the bounce house. What is really not fun is being responsible for it. 

It's remarkable that I get to be my own boss--well, within reason, since ultimately I'm accountable to my dissertation committee and to the university that pays my bills. As the boss, though, I can be really hard on myself when I don't meet my own expectations. My partner asked me once why I shamed myself so often over perceived shortcomings of productivity. Through fumbling to answer his question, I realized that I am at once a bourgeois and a proletarian. I own the means of my production, and I desire to maximize its potential for my own gain. I am also forced to work every day for my wages, and it's mentally exhausting work. The best I can manage is to be a petit bourgeois as often as I can... to manage the productivity, provide a safe and rewarding workplace for the worker, and try to keep the boss-lady happy. And lately, I've been doing a really good job at it.

Chronologies and Indices

Even with all of the clarity a pristinely organized database bestows upon a researcher, the soul-crushing volume of information necessitates additional strategies to help move the most important knowledge into the foreground. Two methods that I have used to help me keep track of details are making a chronology and making an index.

A chronology is a glorified timeline, a visual representation of change. It highlights patterns (economic growth!) and major disruptions (coup d'etat!). A well-done chronology is a valuable reference when you want to contextualize an event or debate within the larger history of what you're studying. For example, I created a chronology of the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights from its founding in 1917 up until 1980, the final year for which I have records. Since I want it to be a simplification of my notes, I do not record every detail I know about what happened in each year. I choose special events, like changes in leadership or the inauguration of a program, or notable debates, like whether to establish draft counseling and condemn the Vietnam War. That way, when I read a document about New York City's fiscal crisis in 1975 I can quickly turn to my chronology and see how the Y reacted to the threat of budget cuts for their municipally funded programs. 

In some unknown future, when I invent a machine to add hours to the day, I plan to create chronologies for other institutions I study in the dissertation (like the Jewish Welfare Board). I'll also write one for the history of New York City. Luckily my doctoral exams taught me the broad sweep of American history during the postwar decades, so I don't have make a macro-level timeline. I could imagine that a researcher could also benefit from creating chronologies for historical actors important to their study.  A "master" chronology of all the actors and organizations in a given project would be quite an undertaking, but could prove valuable. 

What I refer to as an index is my own personal encyclopedia of the historical actors and debates that appear in my work. It's hard to keep track of all the leaders in all of the major Jewish institutions in New York City (plus all the national organizations!) and so I like to have a handy document with the basic details on the most important people. I list whatever "vitals" about them that I can find: their birth and death dates, occupation, marital status and children (if relevant), and where they lived. I also note the organizations with which they were affiliated, especially if they served on a Board of Directors. If they were involved in a major debate, I write down what position they took (for example: X was in favor of opening the JCC on Saturdays). Basically, I commit to the index any information I think I will need if I have to jog my memory about an individual's identity. I try to make entries for most of my historical actors, even when I think to myself, "how could I forget this person!" Many of the individuals I study have similar sounding names, and it's possible that I could mix them up. Or, I could mistakenly associate someone with an organization that they didn't belong to. Keeping track of basic information in an index saves me from having to look through pages and pages of notes to verify small details like that. 

Again, these are tedious extra steps that often cause me to shake my head and wonder if it's worth it... the last thing I want to do is waste my time! From experience, however, chronologies and indices become valuable reference tools that I rely on throughout the duration of a project. 

Should [It] Stay or Should [It] Go

In yesterday's post, I emphasized that notes are most effective when they focus on details that support your argument or that help you tell a particular story. That raises the question, however, of how do you know when a document will contribute to your study? Sometimes you go into a project already knowing what events, themes, or arguments you plan to make. Other times you go in thinking that you will  write about one of thing, but then the sources lead you to make a completely different point. It's also possible to just begin reading sources without a particular intention. You just hope that the sources will inspire a question or present an interesting story for you to tell. 

During my first foray into archival research, I thought absolutely every word that I read was relevant and compelling, that each source presented a simple, uncomplicated truth. I couldn't see the forest for the trees. That became problematic when I began writing my paper. There was no clear place to start, and when I went back to look at my notes it seemed that every conflict, every policy, every decision was equally as important. After many hours of paralysis, I stepped back and re-read some of the sources I remembered most clearly. I figured those were the ones I must have found to be especially engaging. The story that jumped out at me ran through a set of document from the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights, in which a building fund campaign committee described how difficult it was to raise money for the construction of a new home for the Y. My question became, "Why did such a such a desirable and necessary neighborhood institution struggle to raise funds for this badly-needed capital project?" I was then able to reanalyze the documents I had collected and to clearly identify which records helped me answer this question, and which records were tangential. Some of them provided context but did not support my argument. I was glad to have those, but I certainly did not need copious notes on each of them!

Three years later, I've gotten much better at "triaging" sources.  I ask myself the following questions in order to sort documents into the categories of relevant/important, contextual/necessary, and irrelevant/tangential:

1. Does this document (or set of documents) tell about an event from start to finish? Does it/they provide all of the information I need to describe what happened?

2. Is the event, controversy, or debate described in this document related to other events/controversies/debates that I plan to study in my research project?

3. Does this document help me answer a question I am interested in?

4. Could I find other sources that I could use to "cross-examine" this document? Do I have any way to check if the event(s) described happened that way, or if the event(s) were interpreted another way by other people? [You need to have other evidence that support your documents, just like a lawyer needs evidence to support the testimony of a witness].

5. Is this source trustworthy? Who wrote it and with what intention?

If I answer yes to these questions, the document is a keeper. I let myself take notes freely, with gusto and verve. If I answer no to the first three, but think that it's a source that will help provide context--for example, to show how an organization worked, or what a particular individual was like, or to describe the physical surroundings of a place--then I would consider the document necessary but would try not to spend more than a few minutes taking notes. These sorts of documents are useful at the writing stage, when you need to fill in the details. They can also be useful for cross examining your most important documents, because they can corroborate small details that support the veracity of your interpretation. 

If I answer no to all of these questions, I force myself to put the document back in the folder from which it came. I may be dying to read it, to see if there's some juicy story buried inside. I constantly have to remind myself that there are many good stories buried in the past, but I can only tell a few of them in my dissertation... and those few stories all have to make sense together.

I used this same process to choose case studies for my dissertation. I surveyed urban Jewish Community Centers across the U.S. and quickly decided whether the experience of each Center could help me answer one of my questions about postwar urban JCCs. I also asked: Does an event, controversy, or debate experienced by this organization represent a larger historical trend in American (or American Jewish) history? I had already studied the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights and wanted to include it as a case study in the dissertation, so I decided that I would narrow my focus to other Centers that experienced a Jewish to Latino demographic transition during the 1960s and 1970s. That's how I chose JCCs in Los Angeles and Miami as my other case studies. To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure if I've done a good job selecting case studies. I may decide to reevaluate as I continue the research, because the more I learn the more unsure I am that Los Angeles and Miami can help me represent a larger historical trend in American Jewish history. That's how it goes, though. As my advisor says, writing a dissertation is not fulfilling a contract. You're allowed to wing it a little! There's always contingency in research, and you can only have fun with it if you learn to accommodate and enjoy the surprises.