It is the last day of January, so I wanted to check in about the 2014 Writing Challenge. We have a small group of people logging their weekly writing hours in our google doc. I’ll share how it’s going for me, and I’d like to hear from others as well.

We have a range of people in the writing challenge. They are writing journal articles, books, or dissertations. Their goal for the year ranges from 200 to 1100 hours. And there’s a range of work and family circumstances as well. I enjoy checking in to see how others are doing, and see others adding minutes to their cells every week.

In terms of how it’s going for me… I have been scheduling writing on my calendar every weekday. And because I am incredibly pedantic, during my writing time, I set the timer on my cell phone to make sure I really am meeting my goal for that day. The most effective part of setting the timer is that I make myself turn it off if I start the writing task. Pause to check email? Timer is paused. Someone pops in my office? Timer paused. “One hour” of writing can often include many stops and starts with email checks, social media checks, food breaks, etc. But when I time it, I’m much less compelled to do something else (an hour is an hour – it won’t be less time writing if I pause to check email), and I really cram a lot into an hour of scheduled writing time.

There have been exception days. Sometimes things come up in the middle of the day that pull me away from the block of writing time on my calendar. It seems that half of January has involved 2 hour delays at the elementary school. I try to make it up that night, if possible. If not, I carve out some weekend time.

These strategies have been successful so far. In January, I managed a 13 day turnaround, start to finish, on an R&R (they required 2 weeks so the 13 days wasn’t out of sheer motivation). On another R&R I’ve been sitting on, I went from start to e-mailed to co-authors. And for the issue my former student and I are editing, we mailed the full package of 6 chapters to the editor, which involved a fair bit of work in January. So I feel good about my January progress, and hope to keep it up in the coming months that involve more travel and other pulls.

How is it going for others?  If you are perfectly on track, you should be at 8.33% of your annual writing goal at midnight tonight. Of course, there might be exceptions, like if you do most of your work on the weekends, or you knew that January was going to be bumpy but upcoming months will be better, etc. On the other hand, resolutions are often their most robust in January, so if January didn’t go well, it  may be time to reevaluate your strategies for finding writing time, and/or your goal for the year, to make sure you are being realistic. Or, if your goal has been really easy, perhaps you need to increase your goal.

One person in the writing challenge said that she likes looking at others’ percentage of goal column, and if someone surges ahead of her, she is motivated to get more writing done. I confess I have a similarly competitive spirit, which is why, for instance, I prefer group exercise over individual exercise. Being around others engaged in the same activity motivates me to try harder. Though this competitive spirit is also what led me to hurt my knee in yoga. The teacher was doing a pose and I had the following internal monologue: “That would hurt my knee. But if I don’t do it, other people might think I can’t do it. Ow.”

If you’re not in the writing challenge, how has January been for your current goals and resolutions? And if you want to join now, let me know, and you can join and adjust your hours accordingly.

“The post 2014 Writing Challenge: 1 month check in first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on Janauary 31, 2014.”

This semester I’m teaching a graduate course in adolescent development. I used to really struggle with assigning readings in this course. The first 2-3 to assign would be easy – a review chapter, an important conceptual piece, and/or an important historical empirical paper. But I often struggled to assign a more contemporary empirical piece, because determining the one paper that could represent the entire recent field was challenging.

A few years ago I arrived at a satisfying (to me at least) solution. I assign some readings, but then each student is responsible for finding, summarizing, and sharing a recent empirical paper. They summarize this paper in a standardized google doc format, and everyone reads the summaries before class. I like this format because: (1) it increases the breadth of knowledge that we all experience before and during class, with (this semester) 9 recent empirical papers represented; (2) each student can connect the week’s readings to their area of interest (e.g., puberty and peer relationships; identity and peer relationships; transition to adulthood and peer relationships); (3) it increases ownership in the course content for each student, because every week, each student has some relevant expertise that no one else has.  It also improves our ability to talk about measurement given the range of measures represented across readings. You can find my current syllabus for this course here.

By the end of the semester, I’m exposed to a lot of new and exciting research across the field of adolescent development. To give you a taste, I’ve decided that each week I will (try to) write briefly about the articles we discussed that led to the most engaged discussion. Last week’s topic was puberty:

1. Stein & Resier (1994). It’s now 20 years old, and there are clear methodological limitations, but I still love assigning this paper.  Puberty is one of the few areas where we know more about girls than boys, and the societal sense of when a boy truly reaches puberty, and what markers he may experience is always murky. Talking about first ejaculation seems so much harder for adolescents, parents (and researchers) than talking about menstruation, and this paper always engenders interesting discussion.

2.  Jacobsen, Oda, Knutsen, & Fraser (2009). Our class this semester includes students from HDFS, sociology, and nursing. This paper on associations between early menarche, heart disease, and mortality led to discussion about biology as destiny and the age old biology/context tug-of-war.

3.  Ellis, Shirtcliff, Boyce, Deardorff, & Essex (2011). Again, the disciplinary diversity of the students in the class this semester created some engaged discussion around biology and context and their interplay.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Puberty first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on January 29, 2014.”

This post is NOT about multiple imputations or other types of sophisticated approaches to missing data. If that’s what you’re looking for, move right along. But if you want a simple technique for calculating a mean when you have some missing items from some participants, this syntax will change your life.

When calculating scale means, you almost always have a subset of participants who missed one or more items from the scale, but answered the majority of the questions.  And of course, not everyone is missing the same items, or the same # of items. My grad student a few years ago taught me this syntax, and it makes this situation easy to handle.

Come up with a decision rule for how many missing items are acceptable. Depending on the study/scale, I’ve seen rules of allowing 20% missing or allowing <50% missing. In the example below, we used the <50% rule, so for a 10 item scale, we required data from 6 or more items. With this syntax, SPSS will calculate the means for anyone who has 6 or more of the indicated variables not-missing:

COMPUTE ESTEEM_T=mean.6(ESTEEM1, ESTEEM2, ESTEEM3_R, ESTEEM4, ESTEEM5, ESTEEM6_R, ESTEEM7, ESTEEM8_R, ESTEEM9, ESTEEM10_R).

Done. I’m too embarrassed to share how we used to calculate it before I learned this syntax.

“The post SPSS tip #1: Calculating the mean when some items are missing first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on January 24, 2014.”

2 ½ years ago, when I began as Professor-in-Charge (PIC) of the Undergraduate Program, I started an Excel file that listed all of the Undergraduate program tasks, by month. It’s a long list – it now has 149 rows in it. At one point in the process, I asked one of our administrative support assistants to prettify it for me. After she returned it I was looking through it, and the one addition she made, in July, brought a huge smile to my face: “Go on vacation :)”

Look at your calendar and then look at your to do list. What’s the difference? Your calendar likely has all of the things you need to do for other people, or at least that have external deadlines. If you’re a grad student, there are classes to take and/or classes to TA. If you’re faculty, there are classes to teach. Then there are meetings, often requiring you to prepare in advance (run some analyses for your adviser; read a dissertation for a defense…). And your classwork, lecture notes, grading, and meeting prep gets done, because you need to report to someone else.

What are the most important things on your to do list? They are likely things without external deadlines. You need to work on your dissertation. Finalize a manuscript. Make progress on a grant proposal. Most of these tasks that are important for your own career development do not have external deadlines, but yet are just as important as grading and classwork and meeting prep.

Now, what is important to you that doesn’t even make your to do list? Exercise? Sleep? Preparing a nice dinner occasionally? Catching up with a friend? Generally, non-work, non-mandatory things don’t even make it to on your to do list. But often, these are the things that energize us, and potentially increase our productivity by making us healthier, more focused, and/or happier. 

Successful people are successful because they make time for writing/research. I used to try to use my daytime for meetings, course prep/grading, and prepping for meetings, and save nighttime for writing. But writing often requires the most mental energy, and doing so at night, even for a night owl like me, can be challenging. Instead, if you block off a chunk of time every day for writing, at night you can grade and reply to emails, things that do  not require the same mental energy as writing does (for many of us, at least).

One way that people succeed in finding time to write is to block off time on their calendars every day for writing and refuse to schedule meetings during those times. Otherwise, your calendar can fill up and suddenly you have no time to write. If someone asks to meet with you then, you can try moving writing to another time that day. If you don’t have any other free time on that day, you can tell the person you aren’t free then. You don’t need to explain why. Of course, emergencies come up where you may need to use that time, but very few meeting requests are actually emergencies, and you need to value your writing time as much as you value anything else on your calendar.

Don’t stop with writing, though. If exercise is important to you but you rarely get to do it, block it off on your calendar. Again, don’t move it or schedule something else then unless it’s urgent. If you don’t have that time physically on your calendar, it’s too easy to schedule something else in that slot. If a good night’s sleep is important, schedule a bedtime on your calendar. Give yourself the visual cue that you will go to bed at midnight every night this week.

To do lists are great. I love crossing things off (checking them off in Outlook). But to do lists don’t structure our time as well as calendars. Calendars tell us where to be when, and sometimes that’s just what you need to yourself writing, or to the gym, or to bed.

“The post Put it on your calendar first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on January 20, 2014.”

Sometimes I really, really, heart google.

I am prepping my notes for tomorrow's class. It is late. When I post a version for the students, I like to remove all of my own notes in the notes section. In the past I have gone through this process slide by slide. But tonight I wondered if PP could do it all at once. And google found this information for me (apologies - there is a very loud embedded video).

Essentially, it's a feature in "inspect document" where you can choose to have it check "presentation notes." Then when it comes up as identifying information, you can ask it to delete all of it.

That saved about 10 minutes of my life. Which I have filled with this post. So you should thank google, too.

“The post Powerpoint trick #1: Remove all notes at once first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on January 12, 2014.”

One quarter in grad school, I decided I wanted to take Spanish. Living in LA and collecting data with Latino American families, it seemed more practical than my 6 years of middle/high school French. I told my adviser. She was less convinced about the wisdom of 5 days a week of intro Spanish and intro Spanish homework. What about comps? And publishing? And TAing? And lab tasks?

I tend to want to please people. But, I also can be stubborn. I sat down at my computer, opened Excel, and made a schedule of every day in the upcoming quarter (all 77 days of the 10 weeks + finals). I filled in what I was going to do every day, including Spanish homework, Spanish tests, comps prep, manuscript writing, TA responsibilities, etc. Then I presented it to Marian. She said…. Okay. I took Spanish for the next 7 quarters. It helped me a bit with data collection, and a lot with riding the bus.

To some degree, I continue to use a similar strategy. It’s easy at the beginning of a semester to say, I’m going to finish this in-progress manuscript and complete a new one. But how do you translate that to 15 weeks of work? In January you see the big expanse of Spring semester in front of you. Time can feel infinite and expansive. And suddenly it’s April and you’ve done about ¼ of the work you wanted to get done for the semester, plus you’re grading papers and/or writing class papers of your own. 

My current strategy is to think about my general goals for a semester, and then try to translate them to a week-by-week plan. It helps me check whether I’m being realistic about what I can accomplish that semester (2 manuscripts in 5 months can sound doable. Sometimes, when you start filling it into a weekly calendar, and you realize you have 2 classes, 3 conferences, comps scheduled, TAing… it may start to seem less realistic). The week-by-week plan also helps me stay on track. If I’m far behind the schedule I made, I know I either need to pick up the pace, or revise my expectations for that semester. 

This July I made a weekly schedule for the full 6 months of my sabbatical. I confess I didn’t accomplish everything on it, but it did help me pace my work. I also personally find it useful not to have to think, week-by-week, what should I tackle now? I use the big picture focus and my relatively clear head at the start of the semester to come up with a plan. Then, each week, my schedule tells me what to work on, and I can focus on smaller decisions throughout the semester.  

I did the same thing last week. Last Friday I received an R&R with a 2 week deadline; I also have a co-edited issue to finish up by mid-month, so no room for other writing there. I have another R&R to tackle after that. I have two other manuscripts in various stages of completion to tackle, though getting them both done may not be realistic. I’m giving a talk in February, and presenting twice at SRA in March, so both require planning and time away. There’s Spring break. And in planning, I thought about my teaching workload at various times in the semester (the week I’m grading final papers is not a great week to do huge chunks of writing).

For the rest of the semester, I will start each week by opening the Excel file to see what I will be working on. At the end of the week I will highlight the things I completed, and as the semester progresses, I enjoy seeing lots of yellow (the default highlight color in Excel; though maybe I should change to a color I find more pleasing). 

There has to be some flexibility in this system. If I’m lucky, I’ll get an R&R on the third manuscript I submitted in the Fall. I’ll receive co-authored papers to review, and when they converge, that takes up chunks of time. Winter always brings big stretches of sick kids (and sometimes parents; last April I had a 9 day fever after being home with sick kids) at home. But I find it reassuring to have a plan in advance.

As with any productivity strategy, my strategy won’t work well for everyone. If you hate Excel, use Word (and really, how can you hate Excel? Excel makes everything better). If you don’t work well with structure, you would likely find this strategy constrictive. So, if you’re looking for different strategies to get your semester off to a good, productive start, here are 10 ideas from profhacker.

Nowhere on my big picture plan did I include “write blog posts.” I enjoy writing these posts, but I’m still trying to sort out how to balance writing them with… everything else. I’m hoping to continue posting about twice a week, but one of those posts might be a very short one, like tricks for SPSS, excel, PowerPoint, etc. I will start trying those soon, and would appreciate feedback on whether you find those useful. Also, if you have questions that require short answers, feel free to post them and I’ll try to answer them in future posts.

“The post How will you structure your semester? first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on January 13, 2014.”

The two responses people most frequently had when learning I was on (or going on) sabbatical were:
It must be great to have a 6 month vacation! (non-academics)

And

Where is your appointment? (academics)

So, here’s the truth. It was not a 6 month vacation. I would explain to non-academics that it is different work, not less work. If I added up the total number of hours I spent working, it probably would equal less than my non-sabbatical life, if only for the difference in hours spent in meetings. But just like in my non-sabbatical life, almost every week night, and some weekend nights, I stayed up late after the kids went to bed to get additional work done. It was not a giant vacation.

In terms of where my appointment was, I made a conscious decision NOT to affiliate with another university during sabbatical. I wanted 6 months where I was minimally responsible to other people. I personally really appreciated this arrangement, though it did make me realize that in general I enjoy social interactions with my colleagues almost more than I enjoy being home in yoga pants all day.

I’m a list/quantifying type, so I decided to make some lists about my sabbatical accomplishments:

Work accomplishments:

• Submitted 3 new first authored manuscripts
• Submitted 5 new co-authored manuscripts
• Worked on 6 other (2 first-authored) papers not yet submitted
• As issue co-editor, wrote 1 chapter, co-wrote 1 chapter, and edited and sent feedback on 4 other chapters in a forthcoming volume 
•  Submitted 8 first or co-authored conference presentations
• Gave master lecture at the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (SSEA)
• Gave poster at SSEA
• Organized new mid-career invited symposium for Society for Research on Adolescence
• Chaired review panel for SRA
• Gave talk at Brandeis, my alma mater
• Visited lab groups at Clark and Tufts
• Supervised one completed master’s thesis, 1 completed masters proposal, and 1 close to completed masters proposal

Some not-really-on-sabbatical activities:

• Served on committee for student who finished dissertation
• Interviewed candidates for staff position in department
• Interviewed candidates for head position in department (one at 11:00 PM EST)
• Dealt with some (but relatively minimal) Undergraduate Professor-in-Charge and Graduate Professor-in-Charge tasks
• Reviewed admissions candidates and called some admitted students
• Wrote letters of recommendation
• Wrote one external tenure review

I had fun, too.

Non-work accomplishments:

• Exercised 91 hours (pilates, yoga, cardio classes, running, and walking)
• Picked kids up at school every day at 3:00 (except Tuesdays and every 6th Thursday at 12:30)
• Volunteered at kids’ school in library and art (It would not surprise anyone who knows me that I am a more helpful library volunteer than art volunteer)
• Took the kids to swimming, art, karate, and tennis lessons

• Explored Boston, including:

• Walked full Freedom Trail
• Visited historic sites including: State House, Paul Revere House, Boston Commons, Granary Burying Ground, Faneuil Hall, Old North Church, Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, Bunker Hill Monument, USS Constitution
• Rode the swan boats in Boston Public Gardens
• Rode the carousel in Boston Commons
• Boston duck tour
• Elevator to top of Prudential Building
• Stray Boots tour
• Visited the splash pool at Wharf District Park
• Visited Brandeis (my undergrad) and Harvard (husband’s grad)
• Walked along Charles River
• Went to Minuteman National Park and walked the Old North Bridge
• Museums: Museum of Fine Arts (2X), Isabella Stewart Gardner, Children’s Museum (2X), Museum of Science (4X – free with Discovery Space membership!), Aquarium, Mapparium, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Institute of Contemporary Art, deCordova Sculpture Park, Holocaust Memorial
• Went to Providence and the Roger Williams Zoo
• Went hiking in NH, visited Portsmouth, NH, and Kittery, ME
• 5 different beaches (Cape Cod and North Shore), 3 different pools, and a pond
• Ate 10 different types of cuisine (Italian, Chinese, Hot Pot, Ethiopian, Indian, Mexican, Tapas, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese)
• 10 different playgrounds
• Rode the red, blue, orange, green, silver lines and the commuter train. But mostly the green line.
• Perhaps not mastered, but handled driving in a city even though I’ve never owned a car while living in a city
• Saw Wicked at the Boston Opera House

• Updated family blog from January 2013-December 2013, including going through 1000’s of photos and videos from the year
• Had 22 different overnight guests
• Saw an additional 15 friends and family in the area
• Read or listened to 15 books

This list is evidence of what happens when you put an overachieving, to do list oriented person in a new city for 5 2/3 months – I kind of approached showing Boston to the kids the same way I would approach any work task. Made a list, worked on crossing things off of it.

Things I wish I had done, or done more of:

• Sleep (why was I still up past midnight every night?)
• New forms of exercise.  
• Non-academic class for me: Painting or cooking maybe.
• Cook more new recipes at home. At the start of sabbatical I was trying new recipes every week. Once the kids were back to school I was back to my regular tried and true recipes.
• Worked harder at getting the kids to make friends. They never really integrated into friendship groups at camp or at school. I know I should have worked harder with playdates etc. (I made two all year), but it always seemed like either there would be plenty of time, or like there was barely any time left, so what was the point? And some of not doing it was because we spent so many afternoons and weekends exploring Boston or having the kids in activities.
• Printed years of photo books. I had this grand plan to go through old photos and print some as books.

One of my very favorite things about sabbatical was the decline in emails received. I spent fewer hours every day dealing with email. Maybe only about 50 emails a day? But some of them I could ignore or forward to other people, because… sabbatical.

Non-academics looked at me like I was crazy when they learned that we moved our whole family to a strange city for 6 months. The work to do so in June was incredible, and the work to undo it right now… well, it isn’t all undone yet (I’m filling out school epipen forms 8 hours before the kids restart school, if a snowstorm doesn’t stop that). But I have no regret about the decision to do sabbatical away. Being away truly felt like being away. I had less guilt about the things I wasn’t doing back at work, and more free mental space to work on the things I really wanted to work on. And the 4 of us had the opportunity to explore a city with a limited-time-frame mentality while living there for almost 6 months. How cool is that? Not a 6-month vacation, but a fabulous opportunity nonetheless.

“The post What I did (and didn’t do) on sabbatical first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on January 2, 2014.”