Up early and walked down to Patti's house, where we carpooled to the Creative Entrepreneur Expo 2013, sponsored by the Durham Arts Council. When I first saw the email advertising this half-day workshop, I thought, "No. I'm not a 'creative,' and I am not selling any services to creatives. So there." But then Patti forwarded it to the neighborhood listserv. And then Liz reforwarded it to me. At this point, the knocking on my door is getting so loud I can't ignore it any more. So I arranged with Patti that we would buddy-up and attend together. My intention was to have no goals or objectives about the day; I just wanted to expose myself to what was going on and see if anything resonated with me.

I have a coffee while we examine our materials and a young woman, Heather, walks up, introduces herself, and asks what our businesses are. Patti explains her business and I say, rather smugly, "I'm just exploring today. Just want to see what's out there and what's going on." She nods. Heather tells us about her business, which helps artists grow and manage their businesses.

Several memories and ideas bubble to the top of my brain and collide: this is an opportunity to try out ideas in a non-judgmental space, what can it hurt to put myself out there a little, follow the energy, one of Mike Uhl's early urgings to me to become a time management coach, since he'd benefited from our frequent conversations about his workflows and habits at the office, if the next thing I say isn't interesting then I can tweak it for the next person, oh come on what could it hurt.

So I tell Heather that, well, if I were to sell a service, it would probably be something like this (dredging up the old marketing template of "I help X do Y so that they can Z"): "I help artists and creative entrepreneurs solve their time management problems so they can get more of their creative work done." Her eyes widened, she smiled, she leaned forward -- I'm on to something! I mention it again later to an artist who we talk to; she's immediately enthusiastic and suggests a few venues where I could hold small roundtable discussions on the topic with artists.

Met a few of the vendors and talked to one fellow who's part of a non-profit that helps veterans get their own businesses started. I rattle off my spiel to him. He nods his head, leans forward, says I could register as a government contractor to teach stuff like that.

We go in to the keynote and receive some fabulous information on Durham's "Creative Vitality Index": in short, compared to the rest of the state, similar cities of our size in the Southeast, and the US, Durham is incredibly energetic and vibrant as more artists settle here and more revenue is generated from arts and culture activities. I don't know how they gather their data. I note that technical writers count as a creative jobs category and the numbers of technical writers in this area have decreased markedly since 2006, which confirms my observations.

I heard one of the vendors say that way more people showed up than they expected, and the second-floor theater was indeed packed. The keynote speakers were entrepreneurial gurus who have started their own organizations and teach at Duke. Their aim appeared to be to introduce common business  concepts and jargon to the artists, with their core message being that with the decline of traditional industries and revenue in this geographic area, the arts and culture are taking up the slack by bringing in increasing levels of revenue; therefore, more opportunities may arise for profit/non-profit collaborations.

It wasn't the first time that day that we would hear about how artists need to manage their work as a business. Fred Hathaway of Entredot gave a presentation on the basics of business, with the (to me) comforting idea that there is a method here and no one needs to create a business plan from the start. He echoed the keynote speakers' advice to stage lots of small experiments, fail quickly, and iterate often. Plan while doing and do while planning.

For me, the star presenter was Tivi Jones of Tivi Jones Media, who gave a great talk on creating a marketing plan. She called on people at random and asked me, "Sir, what is your business?" I cheerily waved my hands and said, "I don't have a business. I'm just observing." She moved on to  someone else and I was instantly besieged by thoughts: Why did you do that? This is the perfect place to try out the pitch. The energy in the room is great. You're never going to get a better opportunity than now. Just do it.

So after she posed the next question on her worksheet -- What problem does your product or service solve? --  I raised my hand and said I'd changed my mind. I said something like, "I help artists and creative entrepreneurs figure out custom time management solutions so they can end their days feeling more productive rather than tired." (In talking with Mike about elevator speeches, we'd noticed that the most memorable ones included a built-in duality or contrast.)

Even before I finished my pitch, Tivi sort of yelped and said, "I need this!" The woman sitting beside me asked for my contact information. A man asked me later for a card (I didn't have one! I was only going to explore!).

And oh, my brain is buzzing.

I'd already decided to take the rest of the day off from work. I check out a book from the library. I go by Parks & Rec to pick up free tabloids and giveaways for our Sunday neighborhood association meeting.

It's now 2pm and I've not had lunch. I grab a hotdog and eat it in the parking lot with my windows down. A woman in scrubs asks me to help her get a traffic safety cone unwedged from under her car. Why the hell did she run over the cone in the first place? Nonetheless, I crawl around on the pavement and somehow wrestle it out.

I go home, prune some tree limbs, and cut the grass, since light rain is being forecast every day for the next week and I hate cutting wet grass. I shower and nap.

Liz comes home and we go to a new restaurant for us, Dain's Place, which has awesome hamburgers. I debrief Liz about my day and show her the stack of papers, business cards, leaflets, etc. that I collected.

As we walk out, we see Peggy Payne walking down Ninth Street in a cobalt blue sequin party dress and cape, handing out cards advertising her new novel, Cobalt Blue, and inviting us to a reading she's giving with her friend Carrie Jane Knowles, whose novel Lillian's Garden has also been released. (Peggy and I were both in a creative writing class taught by Lee Smith in the mid-80's.) Liz and I agree: when you're invited to the party, say "Yes."

To pass the time before the reading, we go to a near-empty Francesca's and get ice cream. Thence to the Regulator Bookshop for the reading, which is very well attended and entertaining. I also see David Halperin there; I'd last seen Peggy at the book launch for David's novel.

What a rich, bizarre day for me. I met more people today than I normally meet in a week. I made a list of at least three new people I want to take out for coffee and a door has opened for me to ... do what? I don't know. But someone was knocking, and I opened it. I did some hard physical work that also made the house look good. We went to a new restaurant on a Thursday night (!) -- very out of character for us -- and diverted ourselves to an impromptu book reading.

Thence home, where I checked my email for the second time that day and saw that there really was not a lot worth spending my time on at all.

Thence here, where I wanted to write up the events of this day before their freshness faded.

And so to bed.

In the late ’90s, I decided I wanted to take piano lessons. By chance, a flyer at the Regulator Bookshop let me know about Mara Gibson, a Duke PhD student in composing, who taught piano on the side. I worked with her, I think, for about 2 years before she left Durham to finish her PhD. A few memories I have from that period:

• Those big dogs!
• Chatting about art, the art instinct, the artist’s life, etc.
• I found that when I practiced every day, even if just for 15 minutes, my playing got better. Weird.

Mara held an annual recital for her students at the back of Boyce Piano Emporium on 15-501. Her students all sat up at the front of the room, with the invited audience sitting behind us.

I didn’t realize up till then that she mostly taught kids from elementary age up through high school, with only seven or eight adult students. Mara had sequenced us so that I sat next to a junior high kid, I think, who was playing before me. He said, “That seat is for Mara’s students” and I said, yes, I know, I’m one of her students.

The younger students started by playing their recital pieces. After the last little person played their song, Mara called my name and I could hear the titters and amused murmurs from the audience as I lumbered up to the piano to announce my recital piece. You could hear them thinking, who the hell is this?

“Hi,” I said, “my name is Mike Brown and I started taking lessons with Mara about eight months ago. I’ll be playing three short pieces by Dmitry Kabalevsky. And,” I paused, looking around the room at the kids and parents, “I believe I’m the first person playing today who is over 6 feet tall.” That got a nice laugh and Liz said later it definitely broke the tension.

I think it was on the first or second piece, I burbled something and got a bit lost. So I stopped, smiled, excused myself, took a breath, and started in on it again. The pieces took less than 2 or 3 minutes to play, and it all went fine.

Many parents came up afterward to congratulate me and expressed their wonder and admiration at my performing a recital piece in front of a room full of people. I thanked them and then waved my hand at the kids – who had just done the same thing that I did. The parents seemed to think that performing was something children naturally did, whereas an adult putting himself in a position where one could fail (or succeed!) publicly was something they couldn’t conceive of doing.

Mara eventually left Duke to finish her PhD. Since 2004, she has been on the faculty of the Conservatory of Music and Dance, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and is now at Louisiana State University. She leads the life of a busy artist, academic, and mother, and I’m so happy to see her making so many big contributions to her art and her community.

Mara has also started selling some of her compositions digitally on Bandcamp. You can listen to the full pieces and then purchase and download them to your computer. It is so cool to have a Mara Gibson playlist on my iPhone.

Updated on 2026-02-25

In July 2010, I’d made the big decision to leave the PhD program. I was back working part-time at my old job, turning over the strange things I’d experienced. And feeling a bit adrift. The PhD promised a roadmap of sorts, after all, and I’d just balled up that map and thrown it out the window.

As i wondered what my next step would be, Christine Kane offered her Uplevel Your Life seminar. I can’t remember how I ran across her web site, but I had added her to my short list of RSS feeds and then signed up for her newsletter. I liked her story – she’d made herself into a singer/songwriter, then entrepreneur, then coach – and her blog posts struck me as sensible and sane bits of self-management advice.

I signed up for the course, enjoyed it, and still use some of her materials today. Christine is now launching an updated version of that seminar and as one of her alums, I’m happy to write about what I got out of her program.

Here are some of the things I remember about Christine’s course:

• I liked receiving an email every day for the 49 days of the course. I always looked forward to what would come next. The daily anticipation definitely added to the positive excitement surrounding the workshop.
• I liked the self-examination aspects. I’d lost touch with some basics about myself and while I can’t say I’m absolutely clear yet, this was the perfect time to ask those deeper questions.
• She provides a bewildering number of exercises, questionnaires, and tools – including the Essential Leak Repair List and the Gratitudes, Gifts, and Gains practice – that if you make them a part of your daily/weekly/monthly habits, will certainly change how you think about your patterns and make you more mindful of what you’re creating or inviting in to your life. That said, you can’t do them all! Find the ones that resonate and stick with those.
• Christine is great about giving you permission to do the workshop imperfectly. Many people called in worried that they were behind, how do they catch up, etc. And Christine was great about (repeatedly) telling us to breathe and relax. (The workshop’s emails were sent again after the 49 days were up, so you could re-experience and review what may have gone by too quickly the first time.)
• Christine is always forward-looking about the technology and she and her staff were quite well-organized. She provided the daily messages as emails, PDFs, and MP3 recordings for loading on an iPod. Her weekly calls were also recorded and downloadable. She had set up a Ning group for the participants (I expect it’s Facebook now). She was also among the first gurus who started using video essays and instructionals extensively and they’re now an essential part of her marketing.
• A bonus: the stuff I paid for I can still get access to, unlike some other programs where your access ends after the program is over.
• The program had its analog aspects too. A couple of binders where you could print out and store emails, forms, and journal. There really is something different about writing your thoughts out by hand. I created my own index to the materials so I could find specific topics or exercises more quickly.
• The workshop is a 7-stage “program” with each step forming the focus of a week’s readings. She says this is the process she used to heal herself from bulimia, and that it provides a foundation for the work she does today.
• Christine packs a lot of wisdom in her readings for the course. I recognized some of her anecdotes and messages from other of her blog posts, but there was plenty of fresh material. Like many another guru, she has her own vocabulary for some concepts I recognized from other gurus’ material. But her spin was feminine, gentle, humorous, yet still challenging.
• And memorable. I’m sure my mastermind partners are tired of my piping up, “Well, Christine Kane says this about that …”
• I think I was one of the few males in her audience. As you can tell from her web site, women make up her target audience.
• Because it’s a big group seminar, and there was only one group phone call a week, no one gets one-on-one time with Christine Kane. She’s running a business now, so if you want F2F time with her, you buy into one of her bigger programs where you pay for the chance to maybe interact with her in a smaller group or, for more money, more exclusive access. I wasn’t too bothered by this – a gal must eat and her business’s dollar targets must be reached. I got excellent value from the readings and the weekly calls (even talked to her on-air a few times), and it was worth what I paid.
• She responded to emailed questions in separate recordings and took the time she needed to give very thoughtful answers. There were some weeks where she’d record an extra 2 or more hours of Q&A and that’s where many of my questions were addressed. I still enjoy listening back to those recordings on my iPod; she’s an empathetic listener and sympathetic advice-giver. I love studying how she responds to a question, breaks down its components, and responds with spot-on advice.
• Yeah, she may be a bit woo-woo now and then (what’s your enneagram?) (I mean, she lives in Asheville NC, what would you expect??), but she’s also pretty hard-headed. As she likes to point out, she’s now running a million-dollar business. So take what works for you and keep an open mind about the rest.

I enjoyed Christine’s program and I do recommend it for anyone who has questions about themselves and their lives and doesn’t know what to do first, wants to sort things out in a self-study format, at their own speed, and wants a sensible plan with an excellent guide. You’ll definitely finish the program with certain ideas and phrases floating in your mind that I guarantee you’ll access when you least expect them and most need them.

I have continued to follow Christine’s rise and rise, and here a few things I’ve noticed. I don’t think these observations should stop anyone from signing up for her workshop. This is me reading between the lines:

• The Uplevel Your Life program is the gateway drug for CK’s Uplevel Your Business program, where she teaches entrepreneurs systems and techniques for growing their businesses.
• It’s pretty clear that Christine’s creativity is now finding its fruition in growing her business (as I said earlier, she frequently touts that she runs a million-dollar enterprise) and working with her students rather than expressing herself through music and art. (I haven’t heard of her producing any new songs or performing, anyway.)
• Her miles-long marketing copy on the final landing pages for her programs look like all the other miles-long marketing landing pages I’ve seen for other programs: a blend of anecdote, marketing, testimonials, bonus offers (a $x value for only $y!), and calls to action. Christine is big on being authentic in your marketing, and I’m sure she is using authentic language to clothe her points, while using time-tested marketing and direct sale/copywriting techniques. Still – I instinctively resist being sold to and I have to kind of hold my nose as I read those pages. While her vocation is teaching and coaching, her business is getting new customers. And to stay on top of that million-dollar summit requires more assertive techniques. Hence, the landing pages, the free telecalls, etc.
• She holds similar free phone calls for her business programs, and the information she gives away on those free calls is always top-notch and sensible. But starting a business has not been a priority for me, so I listened to the first one and then passed. If you don’t already have a business, then I don’t know how much value you’d find climbing CK’s ladder of commitments. I certainly felt left out of the excitement, but then, that seminar isn’t for middle-aged men who don’t have entrepreneurial ideas.
• That said, if I had a business (and full disclosure: CK told me in one of the UYL calls that I should think about it), I don’t know how comfortable I’d feel at her business workshops, which include several in-person conference meetings. As I said, her focus is on women-owned businesses – I don’t know how many men attend or even if that’s an important aspect to consider. Or why that should hold me back, if I really wanted to go.
• Although I don’t know who else is teaching the stuff that Christine is teaching, I know that she had to learn it from somewhere. She talks a lot about the coaching she has paid for over the course of her career, and I’m sure much of what she learned is probably well-known the higher up you go in those circles. Just as the information she shares in UYL is pretty well-known and traded if you read a lot of other gurus’ material and self-help content.

I think only a few rare people can improve themselves all on their own. I, for one, am someone who benefits from the coaching model: someone who will give me assignments, hold me accountable, and kick my ass when it needs kicking. Even in this self-directed, self-paced format, I think Christine Kane proves herself to be an excellent coach, and I find myself coming back to her materials often.

Updated on 2026-04-13: Christine’s blog is now offline, replaced by a standalone page since her stepping back from running large coaching programs.

I remember reading somewhere online that she has a couple of Airbnb’s in Asheville. It looks to me that, particularly after the pandemic, she probably felt burned out running her business and ready to stop feeding the machine she’d created. More power to her. It takes courage to start a business and put yourself out there in the marketplace, and it takes courage to walk away from it when you’ve had enough.

Taking a leaf from Havi’s Friday Chicken, this post will review the semester just past, but with a few additional headings.

The Hard

• I never got around to writing all the blog posts documenting my semester, its ups and downs—which is one of the reasons I started the blog, so that it could serve as my diary/journal for this trip. It became one of many obligations I had to ignore as the semester limped along.
• About 3 or 4 weeks into the semester, I said to people that I wasn’t coping with school—I was trying to get to a point where I could start coping.
• The work, oy, the work. Mounds of it. Only some it was horrendously difficult, but it was all mostly time-consuming and came pelting on my windshield in clumpy wet blotchy gusts. And because few of the work products resembled each other, there was no way to build up any momentum so that you could leverage a day’s work on 2 projects, for example. Each task was too unique. This meant thin-slicing my attention to where nothing got my full attention (I hated this condition) or waiting till a deadline or question from a stakeholder forced me to pay attention to the thing. I was never able to work ahead to my satisfaction.
• Statistics. The homework that soaked up hours, the 56-question midterm that I could not complete in 75 minutes, the feeling that I was 4-6 weeks behind in understanding the Niagara of information washing over me, the frequent panics and dark moments when it hit me forcefully that I wasn’t getting it.  Realizing I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Definitely the worst experiences of my college career.
• Dialing down my expectations. Part of what made the semester hard was the writing on the inside of my skull that said everything had to be perfect, every page of every assignment had to be read, every commitment had to be honored. Re-negotiating my expectations for what I could realistically (as opposed to idealistically) accomplish was a major hit to the ego.
• Letting things go—and these were assignments and commitments I was on the hook for producing. It hurt to have to drop or ignore them because I didn’t have time for them.
• Not letting things go—the snack-information pellets I continued to read, the idea that I needed to give myself frequent breaks—the trying to hold on to the old parts of my life and personality that are holding me back from embracing what I think has to be a new part of my personality.
• Felt like I was still using too much nervous energy, not enough smarts, to get things done. I felt that I was counting too much on the Thanksgiving break and random days off to work on or finish assignments that could have been completed in a more reasonable, less nerve-wracking fashion.
• Always predicting disaster and failure erodes my nerve-endings and makes me no fun to hang out with.
• Found myself leading two groups and feeling very inadequate in the role of leader and project manager. Always the feeling that that I’m not measuring up and that I’m letting people down. This is a feeling that is not going away anytime soon.
• Guilt, guilt, and more guilt for not reading enough, doing enough, staying up late enough, accomplishing enough, being enough.
• The hours spent commuting. Some time can be filled with reading on the way to school, but I was too tired at the end of the day to get any good reading done. Still haven’t found a good way to use that down time except to relax and mull, which is probably what I need to do anyway.
• Felt like a whiner for most of the semester.
• Seeing my mentor graduate with her dissertation and leave the school; hers is the face I will always see first when I think of this school. Will miss her advice and availability.
• Flipping between two and three different time management systems through the semester, never quite finding The One.
• Forecasting mountains of hard work that makes it easy to want to give up. I have the following coming up in the spring: helping with a 3-day event in early January, helping with a student event in mid-January, conducting actual research for my advisors and writing up a draft, writing quarterly reports for our grant, helping plan and run a major week-long event in May—and did I mention I’m taking three courses (including the second statistics course)? And there will be extra impromptu projects that arise—they always do.
• Comparing myself to others who seem to be doing this gig more effortlessly than me.
• Trying to find 10 hours/week for my part-time job. Sometimes I couldn’t.
• Working against my natural rhythms—I really shouldn’t try to do hard-focus work from 2-5pm.
• Is there a good, easy, simple way to manage multiple projects that doesn’t require spending hours feeding tasks and end dates into an application? This is another case where I’m using too much brute force and brain cells instead of trusted routines and systems. I’m convinced I can manage most of these things with pen and paper or a text file and a calendar, but I haven’t found it yet.
• Giving up the comfortable, familiar handrails of a job, of a place where I felt competent and accomplished. Struggling still with the idea of whether this academic enterprise is something I really want, or whether it wants me. The idea of a life spent working is not at all attractive to me—unless it’s work I enjoy (and that’s a new thought for me). At this point in the game, I’m still taking orders from people and struggling to meet the expectations of others, so enjoyment is not part of the agenda.
• Fighting my distractions: YouTube, web smurfing. There’s more joy in my distractions than in the work.
• Wanting to hide when someone suggested a new project or new task when I didn’t know how I was going to handle my current tasks. Feeling very protective of my time.
• Discovering I’m not as smart as I thought as I was. But then, one of my goals was to get smarter, to learn to think more critically. As one of my advisors said early on, you’ll stretch and it’ll hurt.

The Good

• I know a little better now how I want next semester to go, insofar as planning my schedule, managing commitments, dealing with technical courses, etc.
• It’s probably just as well that I didn’t document on this blog everything that happened to me, as it would have been extremely tedious reading throughout the semester. Also, writing about it probably would have made me feel worse; I’d be spending the time practicing my angst rather than working on my projects.
• I passed Statistics, but not in the way I would have liked. My homework partner carried the burden of the hours-long homework sets, and my contributions were minimal. But I passed. (“P’s make degrees.”)
• Help is all around—fellow students, professors, friends, my wife. I just need to let them know what’s going on and ask for help or for some time to vent. I found that when I vented my fears in public, others also confessed their misgivings. So I’m not alone in this.
• Things usually—well, pretty much always—turned out better than I expected. How about that.
• Commuting via TTA worked out really well. I filled up my car maybe every other week, and rode the bus when possible. Mondays at home all day. Terribly essential when I needed big gobs of time to read or write or research. Discovering that one of our professors is interested in an esoteric subject that I’ve been interested in for years. I followed up on this with my advisor, who said this could perhaps be worked into a dissertation, but would require some massaging. The sooner I can find and define a dissertation topic, the better life will get.
• I got through the semester.
• I can look back and see how much work I produced at school while also mentoring a friend who took over my old job through the busiest time of the company’s fiscal year. One of the reasons for this career change was to improve my productivity, and I’m certainly doing that.
• Having a part-time job to make up the income deficit, and being able to mostly squeeze it into the tiny gaps of my day.
• My professor’s knack for assigning intermediate deadlines for term projects that forced me to create smaller products and thus engage with the material on a smaller scale over a longer period of time. When it came time to write the final paper, the ground had been well-broken and was familiar to me. This is a technique I need to remember and employ for myself. Trusting my writing instincts and creative intelligence—I know I don’t have to have it all figured out before I write things down. The very act of writing and sifting the material, and thinking about it as I walk or commute, creates the connections. I don’t have to force anything. It was good to be reminded of this.
• Settling at last on Google Calendar and a page-per-day planner book with my Autofocus lists in the back.
• The Pomodoro technique for breaking work into units. I would often start a work session thinking, “I need to get 3 pages written” or “I need to find 10 pieces of literature for the review”; instead, by allotting 25 minutes of focused time to the task—and then using as many of those 25-minute slots as needed or as I had time for—I still felt as if I was progressing. These were often useful at the start of a project, when I really didn’t know which way was up or how to get into the material.
• Discovering I could produce a lot in a little amount of time. Parkinson’s Law should be remembered; impossible deadlines tend to elicit focused work from me in an annoyingly productive way. Don’t tell me you want it next month, tell me you need it by Friday. But can I do this for myself? To myself?
• Deciding that going to bed by midnight was non-negotiable. For a while there, 1 a.m. was my limit, until I wised up. I hope to work this down to 11 pm in 2010, and then to simply going to bed when I’m tired. Never skimp on your sleep. Were I to fall ill, my empire would topple.
• During my last week of paper-writing, I stuck a big post-it to my monitor that said “80%”. A reminder that perfection isn’t needed for some jobs, just a good effort, and sometimes good enough is good enough; even if the paper isn’t as perfect as you’d like, let it go and move to the next one. Don’t go crazy.

The Questions

• Too much introspection and hand-wringing? Not enough action?
• What if I went forward in all my pursuits with the expectation that I will succeed and everything will come out all right? How would that feel?
• Can I schedule my distractions so that I can focus for longer periods of time? Knowing that I’ll have time to read or play, will that keep my attention from wandering?
• Can I set myself impossible deadlines so I can get routine work done faster?
• Can I make Cal Newport’s 9-to5 schedule work for me? Maybe on some days, not so much on class days. But in order to stem the flood of work and build in some down-time, the only way to do that, it seems to me, is to establish pretty rigid time boundaries and say, “I’ll commit to doing the work at this time for this duration, and then I stop.” Even so, I’m still at the early point in my career when I’m not as in control of my schedule as I will be in 2 years. Also, I’m way too overcommitted—but no way to get out of them for a while, so must grit my teeth…

Lessons Learned

• Front-load the semester—do as much work as possible as early in the semester as possible. This is particularly the case for long-term projects. As the semester wears on, there is less and less time to devote to big projects. One of the old project management sayings I remember is, “There’s always more time at the beginning of a project than there is at the end.” Don’t wait; I’m kinder to myself tomorrow when I get something done today.
• Leverage asynchronous communications. I don’t have to respond to most emails immediately, and I shouldn’t expect other people to do so. I can usually tell when a phone call will work better.
• I experimented with one composition book per class, but that fell by the wayside for the seminar classes. I now use a single Moleskine large-format cahier to take all class and meeting notes. I date each page. As I process each page into meeting minutes or, in the case of my Statistics class, into a separate notebook where my scribbles are cleaned up, I draw a slash through the page to indicate that it’s “done.” This becomes my everything book and user-capture device. (I don’t always carry my MacBook with me, but I always have this book with me.) I also kept a separate notebook for statistics homework, but I may incorporate it into the flow of my class notes next semester. I think keeping too many things in separate buckets fragments my attention.
• Learn as I go. This is especially true with statistics, where I trusted that I would have time and intelligence enough to figure it out later. That did not work. Next semester, take frequent office-hours meetings with the professor or TA (if the TA is helpful) starting the first week, start the homework early early early, ask the questions early, and make as much use of YouTube and web stats tutorials as I can. I believe that stats, for me, is a case of both hard-focus and lots of time. Don’t expect I can cram 14 weeks of conceptual material into a weekend. Also—I can understand things if they’re explained clearly enough and if I practice them often enough.
• Skimming is OK to do and I can still contribute in class.
• Feeling scared and intimidated is OK and is almost encouraged. These are feelings that have to be negotiated with no matter where you are in life.
• The Ineradicable Cassidy’s dissertation defense illuminated what had been often said: it’s up to the student. The student drives the process because the advisor is too busy to look after him/her. The student has to dog the advisor, the student has to harangue the committee, the student has to seek help if help is needed. Also, the student has to learn to put the pressure on themselves via deadlines—send in a poster proposal before the results are in, set a date with your advisor for the draft even if you haven’t started it. Without that pressure, none of us would get anything done. And this is in part how an academic must progress in their career. (Whether you want to continually be tricking yourself this way for the next 20-30 years, well, that’s a different discussion and part of my lingering discontent with this academic project. But that might also be a part of my old self resisting the changes to my new life.)
• When I had to push something out quickly—a lit review, research for a presentation—I was able to clear my calendar and do it. And, weirdly, the sooner I did this work, the more in control I felt of what was happening to me. The feeling of being on top of things is so powerful. There’s no reason to wait to start working on a project; some progress can always be made.

I recently finished a pretty big, for me, literature review that totaled about 17 pages, including the title page and two pages of references. Here are some scattered thoughts and lessons learned, at my customarily hideous length:

• I saw the wisdom of The Scholarly Cassidy's advice to begin the search haphazardly. I spent much early time floundering but tried various keywords that eventually led me to articles of interest. Have to get used to the feeling of confusion at beginning and make friends with it.
• As with most of the work at SILS, what I did wasn't really hard so much as it was time consuming. The keys are starting early (a lesson I'm always re-learning) and letting the work marinate. Because I'm deeply into self-justification, I am obliged to tell you that I started late because I was finishing up a different assignment and dealing with my full-time job, of course, so my research was tucked into the margins of my daily schedule (i.e., at night before bedtime) or relegated to weekends.
• I remembered advice to break the writing into three fairly equal time-sized chunks: a third searching, a third compiling and sifting, and a third writing. I altered that to make the writing take only one day, but this division let me know when to stop active searching and when to start writing. Although I did occasional follow-up searches, the bulk of my active searching had stopped days before I started writing.
• I adapted Cal Newton's Newport's Excel-based research database. I added a worksheet to track the lists of keywords I searched against. I kept a list of all of my sources in the main tab, with their citation (if it was easy to get), a URL to the abstract or document, the year it was published, its abstract, a theme or category to which the article belonged (such as "Community Attachment" or "Personal Networks") and a link to a PDF of the full-text article I'd downloaded to my hard drive. I pretty quickly compiled about 125 sources (plus some duplicates). I started scanning for quotations, but discerned that precise quoting wasn't called for (though page references to specific ideas were). I didn't need quotes so much as synthesis. That said, I still had way too many quotes -- the old reporter habits of tucking the evidence into the story die hard.
• I used the spreadsheet to scan the abstracts and judge immediately whether an article had relevance to me. (I kept reminding myself this was a short paper, not written to last 20 years.) Instead of deleting those rows, I colored the citation cell red. If I liked the abstract, I assigned a theme or category (and duplicated the row if the article fit into more than one category). This got me familiar with the breadth of my article grabs. Then I sorted on the Year Published column (earliest at the top), and auto-filtered by theme. I could then see this haphazard list snap into place: all the articles for the themes sorted from earliest to most recent, and the progression of thought visible in the abstracts. I'd already decided I only needed about 3-4 themes for this paper, so this process helped me identify weak themes (only one or two articles) and combine similar themes for later processing.
• When it was clear that I had too many articles for a category (about 25 for the Sense of Community theme, for example), I reduced the number to 3-5, which forced me to generate selection criteria and think about how they would fit into the story I was telling. I then printed out only these articles and read them more closely since they would form the spine of the lit review.
• I spent most of the days leading up to my writing in working this spreadsheet, finding new sources until I reached saturation (the same titles or authors cropping up), and in thinking about the story -- or as some may call it, "building an argument." Same thing, really. Set up the foundation with the themes you'll come back to, remind the reader of them as you go into the middle introducing new concepts, and by the end, you twine and braid the concepts, draw analogies, point out disagreement or overlap, and so on. As always, I found that these connections leapt out at me as I was writing or during my editing. They weren't there to start with.
• I took a day of vacation to do the actual writing, and the day went smoothly, without much stress. (Had there been an emergency that had taken me away from my home office, though, I would have been doomed.) I suppose, though, that I had a secret weapon, which is that I've been writing in one form or another since 1984. Most of the lit review writing advice I researched struck me as assuming you don't have much writing experience. I, however, know my writing process pretty well. I figured that if I soaked myself in the literature, and could come up with a logical storyline, then the writing would take care of itself. And I'm relieved to say that is, indeed, what happened (to my satisfaction, anyway).
• One section I left out of the first draft was the conclusion. I felt it was better to wait and do that after I had let the paper cool down and I had put in my edits. Having spent the day intensely with my chosen material, I was able to write a more coherent conclusion that reflected connections that developed during the first-draft writing.
• Still, I was up till, oh, the wee small hours. After I finished my draft, I took a two-hour break to do a workout, eat, watch a TV show, and practice my banjo. I edited a hardcopy printout, made notes to myself, and then typed in the edits and my conclusion. Ensuring the paper adhered to the APA style guide (and formatting my citations accordingly) actually was more time-consuming or felt like it.
• The night of the day I finished the assignment, still tired but unable to sleep, I started reading my assignments for the next week. Taking time to pause and rest was probably as much celebration as I could emotionally afford. The best thing to do, I'm learning, is to have another project or task to pour that nervous energy into. (And this has implications for the night of graduation day, whenever that will arrive.)
• I realized afterward my brain can make the connections between ideas all on its own without me having to force them, and that's rather a relief to discover. If I've stated the problem correctly, I'm interested in the question, and I'm not in a hurry, then all goes well. I don't have to be an expert, but I can be a sense-maker.
• Always interesting to reflect that any piece of writing is the tip of an iceberg hiding the hours and pages of thinking and drafts. Would be interesting to study the ratio of material/effort expended for a paper to the final page count, so you could calculate that a page of manuscript will require 12-24 hours of effort, or something like that. I imagine someone's already done that.

1. I unpack my stuff in the SILS liberry [1] and start researching.
2. The Maternalistical Cassidy wheels in with Anastasia and asks if I have lunch plans.
3. I pack up my stuff and we go to lunch (very pleasant).
4. I unpack my stuff in the SILS liberry and start researching.
5. People people people walk by and want to chat. Very pleasant but no work is done. [2]
6. I get an email from Dr. T saying I've been accepted into SILS' doctoral program (!) and I was granted a DigCCurr II Fellowship (!!).
7. I sit there stunned and forward her mail to various folks, like Liz and Cassidy. I also send her a thank-you mail.
8. Not really knowing what else to do, and wanting to settle myself down, I go back to my research. About a minute later, Cassidy comes down and hugs my neck and is giddier and more excited about the news than I am. We chat a bit and process the news.
9. She leaves to go back to her work and I return to my research. It's a little after 3pm.
10. Dr. T finds me in the liberry and wants me to walk with her over to Daily Grind so she can get a coffee-booster before her 3:30pm talk.
11. I pack up my stuff and we walk and talk about the offer.
12. I finally give up and go home after getting about 20 minutes of research work done. This will be a hard semester.

[1] Many and many a year ago I worked in one of the tech-writing gulags of Northern Telecom. A young Southern lady who managed the Interleaf publishing resources often told us about the templates and files stored in the "liberry." Sorry, but that pronunciation just stuck in my head and I don't want it to leave.

[2] Lori says I should get used to this.

Cover of 7 Up

Since our 780 Research Methods class doesn’t have a Blackboard site for the class, I’ll post my various links and thoughts to the blog, tagged with “780.”

What I admire about Seth Roberts is his abundant idea-generation and his zeal for measurement and record-keeping. His goal is to experiment on himself first, then if his data indicates that there are possibly interesting results, then he proceeds with more methodical testing and inquiry, possibly leading to more formalized studies (or not).

When I’ve been thinking about possible studies I might like to try, I remember this quote from one of his blog posts:

SR: Tell me something you've learned about research design.

BW: When I was a graduate student [at the Stanford Business School], I would jog on the school track. One day on the track I met a professor who had recently gotten tenure. He had only published three articles (maybe he had 700 in the pipeline), so his getting tenure surprised me. I asked him: What's the secret? What was so great about those three papers? His answer was two words: "Cool data." Ever since then I've tried to collect cool data. Not attitude surveys, which are really common in my area. Cool data is not always the easiest data to collect but it is data that gets buzz, that people talk about.

Thinking about what “cool data” might mean in a digital curation or archival or info-science context can be tough. I think the social networks are certainly perceived as cool and you can do cool stuff with them, certainly, but I’m not that curious about them. I feel like, were I to study one of them, I’d just be chasing a parade that’s got a five-mile headstart. Better to find my own parade. :)

Curiosity is probably what drives me. Certainly, one of the itches that a researcher must scratch is his or her own personal obsession with some nagging question or detail that no one has really addressed or answered to their satisfaction. (The same way most writers have to write their own poems, stories, and plays, because no one else is publishing what they want to read.)

Check out his numerous posts tagged scientific method (though he’s more usually critical of scientists’ behavior than the method itself) and self-experimentation for more.

Instead of this negative critical thinking, I like his suggested questions to ask instead, especially the simplicity of his fifth question: “What’s interesting or enjoyable about it?” Even if I find the writing of an article stilted or atrocious, I think it should be possible to at least admire a piece’s energy, its intent, its point of view, its ability to stir thoughts in me, etc. Saying something constructive is not about becoming a positive-thinking ninny; it's about seeing more sides of the issue than only one.

Even for a piece (Mabry's "Reference Interview as Partnership") that didn’t really touch me, I appreciated that this was the author's distillation of a career’s worth of lessons that she wanted to impart. In my summary of the piece, I said I could see it being used to start a conversation about one’s own personal manifesto for serving at a reference desk. We’re not often asked to reflect on our larger purpose or philosophy when it comes to our jobs, or even our career, so I saw the Mabry piece as a terrific starting point for such a conversation.

Inspired by Rani’s post about her upcoming work (hope that’s going well for you, Rani), it’s probably a good idea for me to look at the months ahead.

• The spring semester starts tomorrow. I’m spending today cleaning up my office, recycling pages and pages of article printouts, putting away the CDs we used for the road trip, filing away end of the year stuff, etc. I’m working this project a little at a time.
• I noodled on the fellowship essay over the Christmas break, trying to find my way into the material.  I want to work on the essay this weekend, also. I was advised to emphasize that I want to teach and also talk about my research areas of interest. The former is easy, the latter is more difficult. Digital curation covers a lot of conceptual and technical ground, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s a conundrum that will never be solved, only chased. Still, I find actually having to write out and make a case for myself forces me to confront many of these still-nebulous issues. The thinking and writing also provide me with the words, phrases, and thoughts I need when talking to advisors about my plans.
• I’m taking the Research Methods class; generally, you take this the semester before you work on your master’s paper (which is usually your graduation semester), but I wanted to take it early. I have an idea for a neighborhood survey and wanted to get it started.
• I’m also taking an independent study to be supervised by my friend Carolyn. We opted to go for the 3-hour option, which means about 9 hrs/week of outside work. We decided to go for a research study; I did some reading, sent her some ideas, and we’ll discuss them next week. The goal is to create a paper, a poster, or a product of some kind that can be published. I’m hoping the Research Methods class and the independent study activities dovetail. I view the independent study as a road-test for my interest in research and in digital curation; if I really have to flog myself to get to the end of the track, then I should reconsider the PhD in this field.
• UNC is hosting two conferences this spring I want to attend: the iConference and the DigCCurr 2009.  The former is interesting to me as a place to see academics in the wild, so to speak. and how I resonate to their discussions and concerns. Same for the DigCCurr, though I’m more interested there in talking to folks, introducing myself, and getting a general buzz from the attendees on the state of play in the field. Since I'm targeting that field for my doctoral studies, I need to get familiar with it. I registered for the iConf and volunteered for the DigCCurr, but am wondering whether registering for the latter would give me more free time to roam and mingle.
• I opted not to sign up for the full-level of coaching this year, mainly because I didn't have the money. I will have enough, though, to sign up for a lower-level membership that still gives me all I need. Since starting my coaching in 2006, I’ve noticed big and small changes in myself that I can’t imagine having made on my own and so I want to continue my association with PJ Eby, especially with the book he’s writing that seems to be drawing together into a single narrative all of the myriad tools he’s refined over the last two years. PJ has the goods.
• I’m beta-testing Mark Forster’s latest time/task management scheme, dubbed AutoFocus. You can sign up to be a beta-tester here. It’s not an application, more a set of instructions and simple rules to create a structure that balances the rational and intuitive parts of your mind to help you decide which tasks to do next. He recommends implementing it via pen and paper (which I prefer) but many users on the forum are describing electronic ways of implementing it. All that's needed is a lined notebook or journal. Radically simple and I’m finding it very effective for shaking loose a lot of tasks I’ve procrastinated on. The danger that some of the beta-testers are experiencing is in overthinking the system, adding more rules, creating exceptions, etc. Will be interested to see how it copes when school starts!
• And I suppose I need to think about the PhD, too, don’t I? Yes, well. I’m hoping the independent study and my general immersion in study and research this semester will illuminate things for me. I’m going to have to make some decisions very soon, perhaps by February, that will affect what happens to me in the fall.  My manager and I expect that by June the wheels will either be in motion for me to leave my job and start my doctoral studies, or I’ll have decided that a PhD (or this PhD) is not for me at this time. After spending the last 2 years getting to this point, I am still unsure of what I really want out of this experience and where I will be when it’s over. I do still struggle between the academic and the practitioner roles; they seem to be at loggerheads, though they shouldn’t be. But there seem to be more days when I want to be the latter than the former.
• I'm noticing that lately I say "no" to myself a little more easily when it comes to spending discretionary time to read another news feed or do a web walkabout. I'm foreseeing the next 5 months being as intense as I want to make them. So if I can't wholeheartedly say "yes" to something, I'm inclined to turn it down.
• Assuming I do leave my job, then our household income takes a mighty hit. So we're starting to hunker down and get frugal, in preparation for the lean times.

• Packed about 15 books (about half of them small cartooning or graphic novel-type books), of which I expect I’ll read 1.5. Right now am knocking back about 40 pgs/day of Lewis Shiner’s Black and White, which makes excellent use of its Durham background and locale.
• Was up till about 2 am the other night troubleshooting my brother-in-law’s computer setup. I brought my Apple Extreme Router with us, thinking I could set up a wireless network so Liz and I could maintain the filthy computing habits we wallow in at home. Discovered that his modem already had wireless routing built-in, so spent most of my time getting our laptops to recognize the network.
• Was up till 2 am this morning reviewing 1000+ emails in my “to read later” pile on Gmail. Decided that this cannot go on, as it falls squarely in the not urgent/not important quadrant. So have been unsubscribing from RSS feeds and newsletters as they land in my inbox.
• Writing in my journal about what I want less/more of next year -- less input, more  output. Less fat, more muscle. Less spending, more saving. That kind of thing. (I’d actually wanted less computering and more reading over my Christmas break, but that’s not happening :D )
• Playing with Phil’s kitties, Luke (aka Stinky Pete) and Zorro (aka Sweet William). Luke is now splayed across the dining room table, flicking his tail.
• Decided I’d like to accomplish just 3 things a day, and they’re all the same things: 40 pages in Lew’s book, one blog post/day, some exercise every day. Anything else I accomplish above that very low bar is gravy. (One of those things being messing around with MacVim, for some unknown reason.)
• Continue with thinking about the independent study, about how I want to organize myself and my time in the spring, and in general unplug myself from the all the web feeds and inputs I bombard myself with. While I enjoy the novelty of this intellectual snack food, I want space in my day to sit and think and mull and process what I’m consuming. Fewer diversions, more time.
• My coach has asked us at recent seminars what qualities we want in our lives right now. I’m extending that to include what do I want in my life everyday in 2009--a little exercise, a little reading, a little quiet time, good social interactions, a better sleep schedule, etc. Part of what I’m doing now is wondering/imagining/picturing how that would work.

I was not terribly interested in the spring courses being offered, and The Ineluctable Cassidy suggested an independent study might be an option.

I poked around and discovered that another friend, Carolyn, could supervise it. Because Carolyn is a doc student of some years standing in the school’s digital curation discipline, knowledgeable, energetic, and incredibly savvy about making the most of opportunities, this is a tremendous way to jump-start an academic career. I hope to learn as much about how she looks at life and work as I do about digital curation.

Anyway, she is an excellent guide to this strange new world of academe and to this field. We decided to work on a research study and she sent me several links to follow up on, read, and think about; suggested I start a research journal; and asked me to suggest some possible areas of interest where we could do some work. The output will be an article, or paper, or poster, or something that can be put on a CV.

This research was, in fact, another drain on my attention as I tried to finish up my fall assignments. I barfed out some ideas an in email to Carolyn but they struck me as too big, too vague--showing, no doubt, my unfamiliarity with the field. No matter. That’s why I’m doing the research.

When January comes, I’ll be taking the Research Methods course and the independent study. We decided the indie study should count for 3 hours credit, which means about 9 hours/wk of work. Because I’m not having to travel to campus for this extra class, I expect that should fit into my schedule OK.