An Organizational System That Works (for me, sort of)

As promised in the last post. The next one will be about television.

I’ve mentioned my ongoing struggle to be more organized elsewhere on this blog. The chair position has forced the issue and I think I have a system that sort of works. It’s not perfect, but it’s alright. Keep in mind I hate putting things in their proper place and organizing, despite my love of classification in my intellectual work. Anyway, the system involves the following:

1. Microsoft Entourage calendar. I use this for all date-sensitive activities and as my calendar. It can be accessed from anywhere thanks to McGill’s exchange server (I could just easily use google calendar or any number of other similar products, I just like that it’s attached to my email, where more requests for meetings come). I no longer carry a calendar. This is slightly annoying for meetings but otherwise seems to work fine.

2. Stupidly expensive moleskine notebook. By stupidly expensive, I mean $15-20 (which is a very Starbuck’s-bourgeois price to pay for blank paper) — I picked it up at the paper store over winter break. This is the “little black book” mentioned in my last post and raved about on sites like 43folders.com. It opens to lie flat, has lots of small, thin pages, and closes with an attached band and there’s a sash to mark your page. I would happily spend less for these features, but the physical robustness of the book and the physical connection of the sash and band appear to be the keys and anyway I didn’t want to take the time to shop around since it was right there. There are all sorts of “hacks” for these things, but for me it is simply a compendium of to-do lists and notes from events I attend (facts, stuff to read, ideas, etc). When a to-do list has enough crossed off, I move all the stuff to a new one. Some lists are topical, but most are daily and weekly. There is no overall organizational system and no category system, which I found difficult to maintain in the hipster PDA. I’ve also never found a decent software solution for to-do lists. It’s so much easier to write and cross off. It fits in my pocket (my next one will be slightly smaller if I can find such a product) and will probably last me well into the summer. I’m not searching through index cards and trying to keep them in order (like with the hipster PDA, which fell apart in my hands a couple times) and somehow flipping through pages works better for me. I find myself flipping through it as I wait for stuff to happen (for instance, if I’m early to a talk) and so my “weekly review” [1] sort of happens during the down-times of the week. Anyway, I’ve been doing this all term and it seems to actually work. Really well.

3. Delegating memory. If I need to touch base with someone in a week about a meeting or an event, I tell them to remind me. It also helps to have staff, as I can tell my administrator to remind me of something on a given day. She also knows to remind me about things if I don’t get back to her. The less of this sort of stuff on my mind, the better. There are probably other things I could delegate. For instance, Carrie and I were talking about getting someone to email me every week or two about upcoming rock shows, since I miss many more than I go to.

4. The only thing that sometimes falls through the gaps is email, which simply gushes out of the server into my mailbox. I have a very bad habit of not replying to some emails that require a little thought (like notes from friends) and then forgetting about them. I hate that. I also get a lot of queries about this and that which I can’t always deal with right away and sometimes plan to get back to them later the same day or next day, but then more email comes. I know people have devised filing systems for email, but for me, it’s the same problem as the hipster PDA. I prefer not to think about filing if I can avoid it, though perhaps there’s a gross and simple system for me. Right now, I just move mail off the server on a monthly basis and then use my search function to find stuff. Fixing this will clearly be the next frontier.

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[1] The “weekly review” concept is basically the idea that you go over all your ongoing tasks at the end of the week and reshuffle your priorities so that the urgent stuff doesn’t overtake the important stuff. The Getting Things Done people have a very elaborate system and time-consuming system, but basically, it comes down to taking time to be mindful of what matters to you ask opposed to what matters to other people.

A Day in the Life

What a day yesterday was. Very admin, but also very Montreal. Blog’s been quite lately as I’ve had lots going on. Here’s one day. Some times are approximate.

7:10am: Wake up, get ready, get to school.
8:30: Breakfast with the provost and six other department chairs. Conversation ranges across various administrative initiatives. This is a once-a-year deal.
10:10ish: Arrive in dept. See two colleagues, one who’s on sabbatical. Conversation ends when non-sabbatic colleagues says “I’ve got to go teach.” Sabbatic colleague says “I’ve got to go read books.” I have to go to my office.
10:30-1: Admin, which involves email, talking with staff and colleagues, doing things that result from reading email and talking with staff and colleagues.
1:00: Lunch meeting with Chris Salter, prof at Concordia who teaches new media design and media theory. We talk about ideas and bureaucracy. Cool.
2:45: Back in office. More admin.
4:00: Phone call with dean.
4:07: Hang up. Imagine designing decanal fan club t-shirts
4:07:05: Realize this is a bad idea
4:07:06: Begin desk clearing for weekend (metaphorical only; mostly involves reorganizing my “little black book”[1])
4:45: Leave office to walk over to 5à7 book launch with colleague
5:15: Arrive at event. Have good time.
6:30: Dinner at Prato. During dinner, an acquaintance walks by, sees us in the window and waves.
7:30: Walk to sound art performance featuring Tara Rodgers, one of my students.
8:15: Arrive at sound art performance, Tara asks me how it’s going. I try to answer but feel as though my life sounds completely lame. I am actually excited about the spreadsheet of departmental spending I received today. This surprises even me. But then, you don’t occupy the chair; it occupies you.
8:30: Performance starts, root for the home team
somewhere between 9:45 and 10, performance ends
10:30ish: arrive home, catch up with Carrie, who has done a full revision of a chapter of her book. We watch some TV on DVD [2]
Strangely, I am too tired to go straight to bed. I finally settle down around 1:15.

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[1] Subject of a forthcoming post
[2] Ditto.

Academic Labor Politics in the Air

It must be the season or something. Today, our TA union staged a demonstration outside the front gates in support of their ongoing contract negotiations. McGill teaching assistants are quite underpaid compared to their counterparts at other Canadian universities and “R1” universities in the U.S. It’s a Quebec thing, since they’re better paid than TAs at other schools in the province, but still, I was pretty shocked when I arrived at how little we pay our teaching assistants.

This week, when they’re not mulling over the Andrea Smith story, academic bloggers been all abuzz over an Inside Higher Education story about how, for the first time ever in 2006, less than 50% of the professional, full-time jobs in universities were held by professors. Now, I would not want to make light of the casualization of academic labor, nor the growing ranks of permanent part-time positions in the professoriate, nor the treatment of part-time faculty by universities or for that matter the full time faculty. But that said, the statistics in the Inside Higher Ed article don’t tell you anything. What kinds of these administrators are these? Are we talking about the ever growing ranks of vice-presidents, the academic advisor in my department, or the student support services professionals whom I never meet? I see no reason to begrudge the growth of the last two categories, especially given the increasing complexity of student life at universities. Endlessly proliferating higher administrators are another matter, but that’s for another post. My point is that “administration” is not a monolith or a thing. In any given university — and I get the sense that there is a great deal of variance across universities — administration is more like a field in Bourdieu’s sense. There are an agreed upon sets of rules of the game (and rules for transforming the rules), some endemic species of capital, and a really diverse range of actors whose positions combine with their dispositions in many and multifarious ways. The problem comes, of course, when higher education administration becomes an end in itself, and people in universities forget that the mission is to do research, serve students, and in some ways (but emphatically not others) to serve some broader “public.”

I’ve also been reading work on academic politics: Fuyuki Kursawa’s “The State of Intellectual Play: A Generational Manifesto for Neoliberal Times” in the latest Topia which I found disappointing in interesting ways that I’m trying to formulate more coherently; and Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works, which I’m slowly moving through on the metro and while waiting for stuff. Bousquet is an interesting figure since as far as I know, he’s the first scholar in the humanities to really make his career on writing about academic labor politics (correct me if I’m wrong; lots of senior scholars have turned to the topic, but that’s different). He also writes on lots of other stuff too but my sense is that his work on academic labor is best known. My reaction to both texts is no doubt colored by the fact that I’m now a department chair and therefore have a bit of a bigger window into the world of opportunity and constraint in higher education administration. I would offer the same critique that I offer of the Inside Higher Ed article to both, though there’s a lot more “there there” to both texts, especially Bousquet’s (and which I’ll say more about when I finish it — in the meantime, he’s the new kid on the blogroll).

If that’s not enough, last week my administrative assistant found the Art History Department’s annual report for 1980 (the materials from the Graduate Programme in Communication are either in the archives or they no longer exist). If I read the report correctly, professors of Art History at McGill did not publish a single text in 1979. But what is striking (and this is anecdotal evidence to support one of Bousquet’s arguments about the professionalization of academic administration) is how utterly unpolished the writing in the report is. I don’t mean that it’s not well written or eloquent, but that it doesn’t betray any evidence of the administrative slickness one routinely now expects from faculty who serve as chairs or program directors. There is relatively little in the way of data gathering or evidence presentation in the report, apart from some undergraduate enrollment numbers. I have no idea if it’s just one department chair in one year or whether it was typical for McGill at the time, but it does seem like a part of a bigger trend. I remember having a similar reaction to seeing the review of the University of Pittsburgh Communication Department from 1994 (vs. its 2003-4 counterpart): many fewer faculty were research active and overall the place seemed less professionalized. I’m too young to have really lived through these changes (except at the tail end) but it’s certainly quite striking set against the expectations I confront as a faculty member and department chair today.

That’s what happens when I make promises. . .

. . .that I can’t keep. But it’s been quite a couple weeks, as we’ve gone from lizard. . .

>

(on the grounds of the resort where we were staying)…

…to yet another blizzard, this one putting us within 30cm of the all-time record for snowfall. Here’s a pic of where we would have parked our car if it weren’t in the garage.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that they have plowed our alley up to our garage but not far enough to get the car out. Not that I’d want to drive anywhere in the city for the next week.

I spent last week ramping back up to my various chair duties and attending some special events. It was also a big weekend for entertaining. Despite the awful weather, we fed 20 people over two nights. Saturday we had a dinner party for some colleagues and our esteemed former colleague Cornelius Borck. The fact that other guests actually left their homes attested to their love for Cornelius. Sunday, our Wire “study group” had its final meeting.

From the range of responses to the TV recommendations post, I can see that I ought to be blogging a lot more about television. I’ll work on that. For now, I’ll just link to one of the smartest things I’ve seen about my “we’re living in the Golden Age of Television” hypothesis (well, I’m not original in thinking that) courtesy of Steven. I just think it’s yet another reason why TV is so much better than movies.

Speaking of the Golden Age and all that, the end of The Wire marks the end of HBO’s last good series in quite awhile. They haven’t seemed to be able to get it together lately (perhaps, like a record label, the visionary people have left but the patina remains for awhile), while Showtime and a host of other networks (American Movie Classics? Who’d have thought?) are stepping up to fill the void. The year the mainstream networks tried to get “intelligent” on us was too much to hope for, but I’m glad that other networks are actually investing in quality TV now.

And while I’m on the subject of Intelligence, it’s no surprise that CBC cancelled the best series in Canada (possibly on television, I kid you not) and about the only fictional TV series that could get Carrie and I to turn away from football on Monday nights in the fall, but it is disappointing nonetheless.

This week’s blog topic: our vacation in Mexico

That’s the plan anyway, if I can get the time free to write (even though I swore I was done with book reviews, I’m finishing a review of Steven Wurtzler’s Electric Sounds for Cinema Journal). In the meantime, I would like to briefly comment on two things only loosely vacation-related:

1. The Orlando airport is not a true international airport. From the customs forms one fills out to the layout and arrangement of the place, the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people involved in designing the traveler’s experience of the airport clearly never contemplated that someone might arrive in that airport from another country and depart on the way to another country. The expectation is that you’re coming into the U.S. to be in the U.S., and if you’re not, you’d better have a loooong layover. This is one of those things that now that I live in Canada, strikes me as “annoyingly American.” I say this, knowing that I probably sometimes strike my friends here as “annoyingly American.”

2. I came home to learn that the Harper government (that’s the governing Conservative party, non-Canadian readers) wants to retroactively revoke funding (in the form of tax credits) for films they don’t like. Now, this is a very Canadian form of conservatism: you can still get a federal grant to make a movie (or TV show or form a rock band) but if Stockwell Day is offended, they might ask for their money back. I worry that it’s a prelude to cutting the programs altogether, but Canadian nationalism has for 80-odd years underwritten all sorts of Canadian media policy, so I doubt it’s going to stop now. The thing is that there’s a whole level of hypocrisy to it. You know that they’re not going to subject the American film industry to that sort of insanity when they’re doling out the tax breaks for crews to film in Vancouver.

3. Sunburned lips. Ouch.

So much for February

Somehow I thought I’d get a bunch of writing done this month. Instead, I accomplished a lot of entertaining (of candidates and guests), many and varied chairing tasks and a little bit of writing. Which is better than nothing, certainly. After a bunch of interviews, we moved on to hosting Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler for several days — they each gave two talks — and showed them around town. The following week was the MISC “Are We American?” conference which culminated with a keynote by Gilberto Gil. The event was definitely one of those “I can’t believe how cool this is” sort of affairs. Of course Gil didn’t say anything new or revolutionary; it was more that he was saying it.

We are now heading off for the Rivera Maya for a week, where I will have no internet access and am mostly bringing things related to leisure. As I told Carrie, my only goal for the week is to not be in a hurry for anything. That in and of itself will be relaxing. See you in March.