TheBigUpshot

Hallo from Munchen! It’s a fine afternoon in Bavaria. I am in a wonderful bakery where I had what appeared to be a large pretzel covered in cheese. It was great. Also I ordered a coffee and botched the order. I like a large cup of black coffee… I got a small cup of creamy coffee. I like coffee in any form, and I can use the calories what with all of the walking and excitement, but it’s outside my usual. Unusual fits the pattern of my life at the moment, really. In personal news: I just got engaged. That’s even better news than surprisingly good coffee!

So I was thinking about how I was going to manage this whole seeing-my-fiancée thing, what with her living 10 time zones away from me. That’s time zones, not area codes – as in: if it’s 1 PM at home, it’s 11 PM where she is.

For those of you who didn’t “tune in” during the last month, I managed to get the last data for my dissertation. I’ve been writing up while I am here. I’m going to defend one month after this little post, so things in the education department of my life are moving along. If I can get the PhD out of the way, I can start up as a Post-Doc in the same lab while I negotiate career and location changes. I expect that will take most of a year, and I would like to spend as much of it as possible in Ukraine.

I think I’m going to have to come up with a useful thing to do that I can do in Ukraine because this site (as much fun as it is) will probably not pay the bills for a while yet. Still, I’m enjoying it, so I’m going to post here some of the story of this somewhat unique and romantic journey as I try to accomplish several things:

Acquire a K-1 visa for My fiancée

Advance a scientific career

Earn enough money to live

Maintain health, sanity and contribution

What I learned last month is something about efficient work on individual projects. In group projects, “efficiency” can be counterproductive if it comes at the expense of production capacity. Production capacity in collaboration is rooted in strong relationships. Demanding efficiency degrades strong relationships. QED. Individual projects are another matter. Few people have very individual projects. I happen to have both kinds. For collaboration, patiently dealing with interruptions in a way that is relationship-building and helpful makes it possible to ask a lot of people.

In my current job, production is measured in publications. I can help make publications by doing two things: 1. write papers and 2. help people write papers. But I only get credit for production in case 1. So when I help others, I expect a bit of quid pro quo. So I can be the most productive both in the global (overall papers from the lab) and personal (papers with my name in front) sense if I work on my own, personal project and also have projects in which I help others and they help me. The projects in the quid-pro-quo category inevitably take up 6 hours every day. They require meetings, interruptions, discussions, and so on. There’s no way to avoid it without crippling the process. But 2 hours a day is not enough to make rapid progress in the personal-project department. I need about 8 hours a day for that (4 for thinking, planning and set-up, 3 for experiment, 1 for clean-up). That’s 14 hours a day. And that’s what I did in July. And it sucked, but it made more progress in 1 month than I usually make in 3. Why? Because normally I can only steal 1 day per week for the whole 8 hour personal project work. Working 14 hour days, I get maximal personal-project without sacrificing collaborative production. We’ll see how that works out.

-Peter

Tags: Life Management //