A Checklist for Historians?

I've been having an obsessive week. In my working hours, I have delightfully obsessed over an amazing report written in 1968 by Irving Brodsky on how JCCs were reacting to the urban crisis. I spent five days poring over each page. In my non-working hours, I could not tear myself away from my SimCity. I played for hours each evening, erecting skyscrapers and stocking cargo ships on a little grid illustrated within my iPad. The final rabbit hole that I fell down was a book I devoured in two days, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009). 

In this book, Gawande argues that a well designed checklist can help trained experts reduce the potential for failure by highlighting some of the most easily missed steps in a complex procedure. This emphasis on the obvious or routine steps then frees more mental space for experts to consider subtlety, variance, or emergent factors in the given situation. I was familiar with many of the hospital/healthcare systems improvements that Gawande described because of my internship at the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, where I observed firsthand how the implementation of checklists improved patient outcomes in hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities throughout Western Pennsylvania. From The Checklist Manifesto, however, I learned about the origins of checklists in aviation and how industries like construction and finance have adapted them throughout the years to improve outcomes, mitigate risk, and increase efficiency. 

All of that was interesting in itself, but the central question that kept me obsessively reading was: could a historian benefit from a checklist? And if so, how? Archival research is incredibly low-risk, for ourselves and others, and most of our work is done solo. We don't have people relying on us for their safety, nor do we often engage in collaborative endeavors that require leadership, team work, and communication. Yet, historical research is a complex, multi-step process that can be incredibly inefficient. 

One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems--on assemblages of people or technologies or both--and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.

My system--which I have written about extensively--must surely have flaws and failures. I may not see them now, but what about when I start writing? Will I find that my notes are inadequate or inaccessible? In what ways? I've decided to spend the next week breaking down my system into all of its essential tasks and outcomes, to see if it will be possible to take Gawande's advice and create a checklist that increases my weekly reading input and writing output.

Animal

I spent these past two weeks hibernating. I aspired to maintain some semblance of productivity over the winter holiday, but my favorite person had two weeks off. My work just could not compete with his wit. I did immerse myself in some history, though. I watched The Americans! Now I'm all caught up on Cold War espionage.

It's always difficult to come back from vacation. I sat down at my computer this morning and was stumped by where to start. Where, exactly, had I left off? It took me almost half an hour to look through my task manager, database, and recent Word documents and orient myself back to the projects at hand. The number of loose strings floating around overwhelmed me, so today I've devoted myself to only a few small, manageable tasks. I'm hoping that if I catch just one or two of those strings, I can keep my various projects from unraveling. Or perhaps, more aptly, keep myself from unraveling!

Apropos fresh starts, I did not make any New Years resolutions. I prefer to set resolutions around Rosh Hashanah (the holiday celebrating the beginning of the Jewish calendar) because it coincides with the start of the academic year. I think of January 1 as a time to hit the re-set button. I clean up my workspace, catch up on sleep, delete distractions from my computer, and address any other environmental or emotional factors that have been detrimental to my work habits. Apparently I needed a lot of sleep this year, and I definitely met that need. My goal for this week is to channel the processing power of my well-rested brain towards some necessary revisions to the chapter outline of my dissertation. 

Stress Dream

A few weeks ago I began having stress dreams. I was never a particularly active dreamer until last year, and I still find them disconcerting. Recently they have reflected reality to a degree they never did before. Now my anxieties follow me from wakefulness into sleep, which can be exhausting. The silver lining, I guess, is that I get up some mornings with a certain clarity about how to prioritize my work. 

For example, last night I dreamed that I was in Washington Heights. I was sitting in a swiveling desk chair at the corner of 181st St. and St. Nicholas, by the entrance to the 1 train, and I was eating cold french fries out of a plastic bag. I found the fries underneath the chair when I sat down. I swiveled the chair back and forth, to the left and to the right, watching New Yorkers walk by on their way to work and school. It was obviously morning, which makes my choice of breakfast seem even more peculiar and suspect.

All of a sudden my friend walked by and we greeted each other. I politely extended the bag I was eating from and offered him some cold fries. He wisely declined. I asked him what he planned to do on this fine day. I can't recall what he answered but he did mention it was Thursday. 

I jumped up. Thursday!? If it was Thursday it meant I had a 9 AM appointment to do a follow-up oral history interview. I demanded that my friend tell me the time. It was already 9:48 AM! I had to get uptown!

I thanked my friend and ran down into the subway station. I only had to go two stops and I silently prayed that I could get there by 10:00 AM. I saw a train in the station, but I couldn't dig my Metrocard out of my bag fast enough and so I watched it pull away. I knew that if I walked to the furthest end of the platform and got in the first car of the next train, it would get me closer to the exit at my destination. As can only happen in dreams, bookshelves and tables and racks appeared as I walked farther along. Obviously the northernmost section of the uptown platform was a bookstore. There are worse places to wait for the train, I guess. 

That's when I realized that I was going to the oral history interview without my digital audio recorder. I decided that the recorder app on my phone would suffice. Once I resolved that problem, I remembered that I had not written any questions for this interview. Why not? I hadn't finished transcribing the past one, and so had not decided on my follow-up questions. As I contemplated my situation, a train finally pulled into the station. I somehow had the gumption to get onboard, convinced that I could wing it without my interviewee noticing.

My alarm went off about then, and I immediately advanced transcription to the top of my to-do list. Unlike Dream Me, Awake Me is not denial. I cannot wing anything.

Getting a Good Read on the Situation

I struggled to get out of bed this morning. I partially attribute this to the darkness of the early hour, and partially to intimidation. I have a long to-do list this week! I let a few tasks simmer on the back burner over the past two weeks while I focused on a time-sensitive project. I'm excited to get moving on a few of these tasks, like planning my travel for January through April. Inherent in planning this travel, however, is deciding what I will research, and where, and for how long. So many choices!

Although my heart's true desire was to spend the entire day in bed playing Bejeweled on my iPad, I declared today a dedicated reading day. Reading seemed like a decent compromise between productive efficiency and total evasion of responsibility. Reading is the most inert activity in my profoundly sedentary profession, and it's like green eggs and ham: you can do it in a bed, you can do it on a couch, you can sit stiff as the dead, or bend over in a slouch. 

The first three years of graduate school are heavily weighted towards reading, with a side of writing. Coursework in history usually demands you read a book a week per course. Preparing for doctoral exams forces you to read a book a day for about five months straight. After that, you read on an as-needed basis.

I've really struggled with incorporating reading into my life as a dissertator. I started out slow, and introduced fiction back into my routine. I rationalized that it would be easier to muster enthusiasm for stories about vampires than for stories about the past (though sometimes those interests combined in magical ways). Now that I'm getting further into the dissertation research, though, I recognize that I have to keep up with the history books (and articles) on the subjects I'm writing about. I'm finding it hard to switch gears from reading documents to reading a book, especially because I prioritize the former activity. I try to devote my most productive morning hours to the mountain of evidence that I'm digging through, and by the time I'm done it's hard to concentrate on a book. The consequence of this is that I haven't done much reading lately....

So, what is the point of this story? It's just a reminder to myself that a day spent supine is not a day wasted, as long as there's a history book in my hands. 

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I'd love to hear other researchers strategies for tacking between research, reading, and writing! Do you have any personal rules or self-imposed structures for finding this balance?

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.