Demands of life

I don’t think you realize how much stuff “happens” until you try to quantify it or compete against it with one large focus like a thesis. Like travel, friends and family. Or the demands of balancing health, work and school. Or the unexpected delay in required approvals (see The Spam Filter Ate It). Or a combination of all of those.

The past few years of my work in Vancouver have not required me to fly much for work. In a typical Murphyesque manoever, this spring when it's ever more important to be grounded at home, I’ve already travelled twice and have at least one more trip planned before the draft is due. It’s not that the laptop doesn’t travel with me anyway, it’s that the demands of being on the road, in addition to wrecking any kind of routine or sleep pattern, affect the thesis output. I was fortunate to have done a research interview while I was away just now but otherwise must really squeeze the rest of the people in at also their convenience during my upcoming hours and days in Vancouver. New job responsibilities are also going to change how I do work and school as they require dropping everything and cracking right on the responses – great for the spirit of approaching my thesis, but at the expense of the time to work on my thesis with that motivation in mind. Fingers crossed for fewer emergencies this spring!

Health – mine and others – can also be a challenge. Unfortunately, since the beginning of December I’ve been sick 4 times, each bad enough to trap me home from work but uselessly on the couch feeling crappy. Sometimes I blame it on the work travel when I’ve been on airplanes. Just when I want to get out and about more actively, I’ll be struck with something, but of course am trapped in the catch-22 of needing an active regime to stay healthy, and then not being able to achieve it because I’m not healthy. If only I’d always had exercise as part of my day – but trying to add it in now is more difficult. Spring should help as the days are longer, brighter and warmer – and walking home is again a good bridge between slogging at work and slogging at home. I’d never thought to account for extra time to cover sick days for thesis writing – I wonder if there’s a guideline for that? 20% contingency?

The trick I figure is in the approach, or follow up. I've learned some lessons already - like allow extra time just because stuff happens. And despite the call of the thesis, make some time for me - whether friends, family, outdoor activities, a bit of a novel, a movie, etc. Helps to balance the mind, get it out of the work or panicked mode, and increases the thesis pressure!

Inevitably, there will be more to say on this topic!

Environment

Due to an increasingly serious headache I can’t manage actual thesis writing (see other posts!) but thought I could describe some of my personal environment for thesis writing. If environment is food, water, shelter plus some other elements, I’ve generally got it covered. My habitat is simple, a one-bedroom apartment with a desk in the big bright living room. It’s a good setup, I like the southfacing window to my left, the light, and the art around me as I sit here. I write best when there are no distractions for me – so a fairly clean and tidy house helps. I don’t mind music or TV or even people (see Soundtrack of a Thesis) but I still find it really hard to just sit down and get started.

My food of choice this year has been…almost anything my parents bring me (soup, farm eggs, and spanakopita being the main items), salmon burgers, peanut butter, grilled cheese, and of course chocolate. Nurse Ratchet approves my choice of dark, often organic/fair trade, chocolate. Water is generally regular Vancouver tap water. Often I convert it into Moroccan mint-green tea, regular orange pekoe tea or various herbal teas. Sometimes I go all fancy and drink Pellegrino sparkling water with some lemon just for a different flavour. Do the bubbles give me more brain energy?

Two weekends recently I’ve been luckily enough to travel to a more natural environment – cabin in a forest by an ocean – which was amazing. Some friends I know are lucky enough to actually live a life like that, not just visit. It’s a nice change of pace from the city, and makes environmental education that much more relevant. And on one of the weekends I actually got some good schoolwork done.

Recently for work, I went to Ottawa for a week including skating on the Rideau Canal. Although not very productive from a thesis point of view, the change of scene was nice and a great chance to stretch my legs along this famous stretch of ice. My next travels take me to a different part of Ontario, southern Washington State, and aside from that, I'm pretty much grounded here. Good thing it's comfortable!

Soundtrack of a thesis

So much of my life has been driven by musical influences. In my childhood the opening bars of Pachelbel’s Canon signalled the CBC afternoon show Off the Record with Bob Kerr; as an adult I avidly attend gigs of my favourite and friendly local bands like the Paperboys and Spirit of the West: music has always been a huge part of my life. Thesis writing has not and will not occur in silence. Last year, during Masters classwork, in the background of my living room there was often a rotation of 5 CDs, the television, and/or the mutterings of my then-roommate. Favorites in the CD player then and now include the Garden State soundtrack, Coldplay, In Good Company soundtrack and other similarly grouvie - yet acceptable to both members of the household – tunes. In the earlier hours of the morning late at night I might respectfully defer to my minidisc player for celtic and folk music like James Keelaghan, Martyn Joseph, the aforementioned Paperboys, Indigo Girls, and the like. I find I have to be familiar or comfortable with the music I listen to so that it remains in the background, and doesn’t dominate my thought process which so critically needs to focus on writing, not singing along!

Now thoroughly into thesis time the soundtrack is similar, with new music added. I have benefited from friends’ burned CD mixes both raucous and quiet (thanks Logan and Rich for enlightening me about the merits of both 50cent and Arcade Fire, for instance), gained a strong appreciation for James Blunt, and learned of up and coming bands like Stars, The Fray, and Metric. The Paperboys latest CD, Road to Ellenside, will have a starring role in the background music to this particular thesis. My Scottish cousins have also done their fair share of contributions, with Beta Band CDs in rotation and the advent of a new band, The Aliens, who provide their own unique groove. When circumstances require, I default to classical or jazz instrumental music, and when particular inspiration is required, I crank up either Handel’s Messiah or Beethoven’s 9th Symphony of which I’ve long been fond.

I must admit there has been a certain degree of television performing as soundtrack – recently, the CBC Winter Olympics coverage provided patriotic inspiration, and although I will dedicate an hour a week to actually watching the medical drama House, I am certainly happy to just have the hilarious antics of the Mythbusters duo playing in the background. Television is not nearly as distracting as it once was with the roommate laughing hysterically at shows like MXC. Luckily with my desk facing away from it, TV is easy to forget about.

Soon once my interviews are underway there will be musical silence as I transcribe the words of public service environmental educators into print. Ideas for new thesis-appropriate music are also welcome! I'm thinking a little Johnny Cash...

11 weeks left

Where did February go?? I find revising this schedule a good reminder and kickstart of all there is left to do. Not to mention everyone here keeps asking when the thesis is due...and the date is getting closer.

Revised Timeline (Sunday evening deadlines):

Week of:

March 6 – write researcher perspective (coming clean on biases), article review and summary (3), study conduct AND LEFT OVER FROM PREVIOUS WEEKS THE FOLLOWING: notes on methodology from Lincoln & Guba, summarize remainder of printed articles, Refworks all relevant documents, have initial discussions with sample participants, prepare and print invitation letters and consent forms, mailing envelopes, write statement of research problem/opportunity, research questions (whys), study limitations/delimitations, need or significance, tell RK/DK about editor.

March 13 – schedule interviews, transcription, research methodology details (data collection, participants, site, data analysis, reliability and validity), article review and summary (3), literature review research and confirmation of direction (check Creswell's book).

March 20 – schedule interviews, transcription, introduction – background (what, why, outline theoretical framework, context),

March 27 – analyse interviews, coding, clean up anything not finished yet for analysis purposes [am at environmental education workshop most of this week]

April 3 – results and findings, outcome – descriptive first then specific to research questions, think about tables and figures

April 10 - follow up to interviews, transcriptions, results and findings

April 17 – discussion and conclusions re findings – hear the voice, summary of study, findings, interpretation of data, conclusion, implications, recommendations, need for future research

April 24 – write/edit

May 1 – write/edit

May 8 – write/edit, APA, references

May 15 HAND IN DRAFT

OK better crack on 'er...

The Spam Filter Ate It

As many will attest, I am a serious procrastinator. I've been saying lately I'm more likely to get a Masters in Procrastination than I'll ever get one in anything else...except I'll work on that later. :) However, when the crunch comes I buckle down and get the stuff done and am usually pleased with the result. The thesis proposal was one such example - many drafts starting in the summer and continuing sporadically through the fall. Promises to myself to have it done before the end of 2005 seemed reasonable, but a nasty flu after Christmas shot that down, followed by another evil bout in mid-January. So I started to aim for the end of January. (Given the thesis is due in May it seemed time to get going on it). The thing I have to keep reminding myself about the thesis is that if I don't get it done - I've only myself to blame and didn't I sign up and pay for this whole experience? So why deny myself the satisfaction of completing it? Anyway, lame or legitimate excuses I may have used over the years are of no use to me now. Surely by the time I'm a Masters student I have learned all the possible lessons of lateness and excuses? I also retain an everpresent hope I will not need any excuses because the universe will unfold as it should. And, as Judith Timson observed in the classic March 1st, 2006 Globe and Mail article "Defined and deranged by how we deal with deadlines",

And, of course, you should definitely not lie or offer lame excuses. The few totally acceptable excuses include a death in the immediate family or the words "I'm in the hospital." I'm not sure your pet's demise counts although in these pet-centred days, it just might. Pathetically lame excuses have been around forever which is why there's a whole series of books entitled The Dog Ate My Homework. There is also a new technological version of the homework-eating dog. It's called The Spam Filter Ate It.

My most recent lesson is: always make a phone call to confirm receipt of an email (plus making the email confirm it for you). My second lesson: there's always another excuse I hadn't yet thought of. Legitimately, and this isn't an excuse but an explanation, I think the spam filter stuff happened to me about a month ago. In all good faith I finished my thesis proposal, emailed it proudly to my advisor DK, and awaited his comments. I think it was a Wednesday or Thursday. By the middle of the following week when I hadn't heard anything, I figured he'd just been busy or out of town, but that I would follow up at the end of the week. As circumstances had it, I went out of town only to leave a phone message for him the following Monday, about 12 days since I'd pressed "send" on my work of academic art. At that point I was hoping he would have extensive comments and edits to improve it even more. To my chagrin, on Tuesday he returned my call to say, "what proposal?"!?!?! WTF?!?!! There the message was in my Sentbox...but not correspondingly in his Inbox. Alas...I think The Spam Filter Ate It. I probably had some (evil) exclamation mark indicating my excitement (academically, not regarding the availability of Viagra, Nigerian trust funds, and the like) in the subject line and the university sent it into the damn spam vacuum (beware the dsv). End of this story is a few days following, my proposal was approved and ethics forms were forwarded to the university ethical powers-that-be. Still waiting to hear on that; better make a phone call.