Dear Mom,
I have just come home from a lovely meal with my colleagues. I definitely ate too much, but for me the food was delicious and the company excellent.
Work-wise, we are having an uncharacteristic stress-free period. Last year, the two pushes to get 200 protocols published by July and 400 by the end of the year meant that there were ever so many manuscripts at various stages and it was usually pretty clear what needed to be done each day. At the moment though, while there are hordes of interesting things to do, none of them seem to be particularly pressing.
So, last week, I devised a work-plan and it goes something like this:
(1) Finding reviewers for manuscripts (0.5 hour)
(2) Checking manuscripts that have come back from the authors and, if possible, accepting them (x hours, where x = the number of manuscripts in the folder at the end of the previous day)
(3) Editing manuscripts with a complete set of referee reports (y hours, where y = the number of manucripts in this folder at the end of the previous day)
(4) Contacting authors who have agreed to write for us to see how they are getting on. There are about 70 cases where I am not really sure when the protocol is actually going to arrive…(1 h)
(5) Identifying methods that still need to be protocolised and contacting potential authors of these (commissioning)(most of the rest of the time)
(6) Tidying up stuff i.e. sorting out in my mind (by making excel sheets, usually) what topics we have already covered, and organising my paper and electronic information (1 h)
Because I do not have that many protocols in-process, this translates into spending most of the day trying to get protocols IN. The problem is that the routine-plan is not working all that well (i.e. I am not ending up getting as much as I would like done in a day). My hypothesis is that, because commissioning is a rather flexible type of activity, involving getting ideas, it is vulnerable to distraction.
e.g. Should I try to get someone to write on measuring water potential in leaves? Yes, people do seem to be doing this. What is the best method? Google search spits out a link to a forum. What an interesting forum. Let me sign up for this. What other things do they have? ...and so the hours pass… Sometimes I get lots of ideas, other times it goes nowhere.
Anyway, enough rambling – its time for bed.
Yours etc.
Bronwen
PS The promised photos from Alex’s leaving do:
Dear Bronwen,
Thanks for your note. It’s definitely interesting hearing what you get up to and I like hearing how you spend your day.
I don’t have a cup of tea in hand, but I am nodding wisely at the screen (and trying to avoid detection), so I shall do my best.
I think that the distraction element of work is essential to promote creativity. There was some research a while back that reported that people who daydream actually have improved thinking and can achieve more as it stimulates productivity. So there you go.
When you search for ideas, do you always search with an end result in mind or do you concentrate on the journey rather than the destination? Do you normally start off looking for something in particular, or do you have a more generic approach?
I would be interested to hear which part of your workplan you enjoy most. Does this have an effect on which order you do things in, or is it always the same order?
Hoping to hear from you again soon,
Mom
Dear Mom,
Just a quick postcard to answer the questions!
There are probably two main ways that I search for protocol ideas which go something like this:
(1) We need some protein analysis protocols. What protein analysis methods can I think of? Scribble a quick list. Search for the things on the list.
(2) We need more chemistry protocols. What areas have we not covered very well? Let me find a good review journal. Look at the tables of contents and hope that something jumps out the page at me. Search for a good author for that thing (perhaps by looking through the reference list in the review article, perhaps the author of the review is a good person)
For the most part, then, I do search with an end in mind, but there is always a background hope that I will serendipitously find something much more exciting. This means that very shortly after starting the journey I might wander off the path and explore other things.
At the moment the thing that I am enjoying best is tidying up a manuscript to publish on the Protocols Network. This is because I am learning a lot of new things. But this deserves a whole nother letter, and I should get back to the grindstone now…
Happy weekend!
Bron