I get upset about work that doesn’t produce results. Some of that work needs to be done in preparation, but the completion of sub-goals is part of what helps me fend off distractions, like… other work that will produce some immediate results. It takes a big leap of faith to assert to myself that the best use of my efforts is banging my head on some thankless task, when I am putting off other things I needed/wanted to do; Things that are narrow windows of opportunity. It’s not so easy to prioritize a task that will take hours, days, weeks(!) and not bear any fruit. Time sure looks wasted when I do that.
This probably belongs in a discussion about long-term projects.
Posted in infogami-blog | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 22 May 2006 15:46:00 GMT
I’m hoping it does me some good to constantly complain. The particular hope is that I am forced to think about all sides of an issue. Although, I imagine it might cause the reverse; cause me to channel my thoughts on well-worn pathways.
It is with this idea in mind that I bring up some thoughts about Business Management in General, and this Project Management class I’m in, but most specifically… the Group Project. I promise not to merely complain! I have in mind a way to use my complaints as a rubric to apply to other problems:
When we sat down in our groups that first night of class, we were lacking some of the puzzle pieces. If I hear the phrase “That’s the way it is in Real Life” one more time, I’m going to scream. Here are a few ways in which that is correct, but I’ve added some rebuttals:
- You’re not going to know the people in your team. Not true all the time. You probably have some working knowledge of the people in your team. It may not be necessary, but that kind of familiarity is going to go a long way towards bridging other gaps.
- You’re not going to get to choose the project. Who says? And anyway, sometimes having a project imposed on you is pleasant. I see myself as a problem-solver. I like a challange. We wound up having a brainstorming session where we had difficulty communicating ideas with each other because, once again, we lack a shared background, and more than that, we’re not part of an organization engaged in business. A bunch of students are in the business of studying. A bunch of employees have already been engaged in that business activity. Add a few new hires to the mix, and it’s only different by degrees. BTW, do people really sit around in groups coming up with ideas for projects? Because, I think ideas come from immediate needs. In the Real World, I have to imagine that a superior either has an idea to peddle, or a widely acknowledged problem exists, and it’s just sitting out there like a target for the next clever person who cares enough to try / thinks they can get the glory. Yet another way that the people who will constitute your real group have a shared context.
- People have different strengths and weeknesses. Granted. You’re not going to know up front who is best suited for which tasks. But now I’m seeing a problem with group work altogether. I was looking at it like a sports team, and don’t I plenty of sports analogies in business school? But there are more customer-supplier relationships than anything else, aren’t there? We as a culture seem to love these scenarios where two groups of five guys battle it out on a basketball court, and it looks like they are “teams”. It’s not really about those guys - they’re only the visible part of the organization, so everybody tends to focus on them. Some of them are just there in case another guy gets tired, or injured.
- My list is falling apart. That’s a good enough reason to stop. Looking back, I haven’t changed my mind. No one Real World factor ruins it. It’s about how the deck has to be stacked for the sake of a class. If real world aspects are to be mastered, maybe this isn’t the forum for doing it.
In addition to all this, something I consider my own peculiar problem: Artificial situations bug me. Artificial situations do not fall on a spectrum from Abstract to Concrete, or from General to Particular. Artificial situations pretend to be more concrete or particular than they really are. You lose the power of being abstract or general without really gaining much. I think the class I’m in sends the wrong message: Through this process of making things up, you will prepare yourself. But you’re skipping the power tools of generality, and you’re not getting any real experiences that allow you to build up the tools from the particulars. The worst part of it is, those tools are laying out for the taking. Other people have developed the healthy attitude “Don’t waste your time with things that aren’t on the test.” And I’m under too much stress to really try out the tools in the short run.
Why would you want to be specific with false detail? Now I realize that I’ve suddenly tarred all fiction writing. But think again: Not all fiction is needlessly artificial. Good fiction is true in the details, even if that particular story never happened. The artifice in fiction is surely the source of endless debate. I don’t even care for narrative all that much. Give me an idea-space to explore any day. I’ve heard a lot of the arguments, so you can probably save it: I think I know what good fiction consists of, and I think there are a lot of crappy writers out there, in addition to the good writers who make good novels out of ideas I don’t care about. There is a lot of crappy non-fiction too. I like a good novel, when I can find one, I prefer good nonfiction that isn’t so worried about telling a story, but best of all is a textbook. That’s right, I said textbook. I guess deep down I’m a scientist.
Posted in infogami-blog, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 21 May 2006 16:10:00 GMT
We’re not 100% at the end of it, but it looks as if I am not going to BEA. I guess I never convinced myself that it wasn’t frivolous. In a sober choice, BEA will always lose. Perhaps if I had a lot of time and money, a book convention would make sense. I’m also not clear on the ramifications. We had badges. We probably got a certain number free with our American Book Association dues. So nobody spent money on me that I carelessly let fall down a drain. But the truth is, I don’t really know.
I don’t appreciate it when somebody pays me that sort of kindness. It’s like one lane of traffic blithely waving you across to the other traffic lanes that aren’t stopping. No doubt, someone is going to be hurt and upset that I didn’t rush to my splattering because - damn it! - they were being nice, and I didn’t take the offer.
I guess I never do see this coming: “Having the convention in our back yard makes it more accessible.”
Well, actually no, it doesn’t. It’s much less accessible. I make these remarks all the time, and I could go around gloating about how “I told you so.” But, in the long run nobody respects that kind of prescience. They all think I’m being pessimistic. Even just pronouncing self-fulfilling prophecies. But really it’s one more example of the same old Catch-22: Nobody here would have splurged to send me away to a convention - I even get the feeling I’m not supposed to go. The rest of my life isn’t going to step aside so that I can have a break and go to my precious convention.
It really shows when I talk about these things: I’m not interested in high-stress situations. My choice would be to lie around thinking. But, I’m smart enough to know that isn’t going to work.
Posted in infogami-blog, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 21 May 2006 13:43:00 GMT
I’ve been up since 4:45am. For all the reading and writing I did yesterday, I’m still falling farther behind in schoolwork. I was planning on going down to the Book Convention for a couple hours, but I never got around to it. The big risk with such a heavy load is that the weight of things I need to do can depress me. I can’t afford that kind of indulgence. It sometimes happens that I will sacrifice part of my work load - just admit that I won’t manage to do it, but work that much harder on everything else. It does wonders for my work ethic, but my total record is blemished. I find it strange that anyone else should care: Isn’t it my goal to work harder?
We scheduled another group meeting in MGMT404 for this afternoon. It’s in Bethesda.
Posted in infogami-blog, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 20 May 2006 10:18:00 GMT
A few times on the bus, I would be too tired to read effectively. My eyes could not scan text. Sleep would come for me, I could fight it off, but I would lose my place, take a breath, look at the page, and islands of words would pop out at me. Some phrase I wasn’t reading would take center stage. I would consider that phrase, but then have to backtrack for a while, and be unable to identify the last place I was aware of reading. What good is it to work so hard if I’m useless half my waking life? That’s what always pisses me off about the school grind. I couldn’t get federal loans taking part time classes, so I’m forced to work at too intense a pace, or nothing at all. Heck, I already know most of the stuff. But it’s the doing that always gets in the way. I could actually be learning at about twice the pace, but school assignments actually get in the way of learning. Now I won’t argue that I learn something by doing that work - my argument is that a) I’m not aware of what I’m learning, and b) the opportunity cost is too high. I could be spending that time and effort learning much more.
School is in a different bind, and I sympathise with them. When there are three people in a required class, nobody has to spell it out to me that something isn’t adding up. Statistics had three. BIS220 had four, eventually. Visual Basic was five. I think Web Design is six. Meanwhile, Project Management is about 20. It seems weird to say it, but I have ‘special needs’, and I thought this school was equiped to handle it, but I’m special even for them. There are a lot of students there who are my age, and have basically no clue. They don’t have the experience I have, or the focus on learning, reading, and knowledge that I had from an early age. I certainly know too much already, but like Socrates, I also knew for most of my life that it was only scratching the surface. So to this day, I see my priority is to lean more, not do more. Eventually, there is a point where it is time to start doing. I believe - I hope - that day is not receding into the future indefinately. I consider this writing to be an activity that draws that day closer. Because I’ve got linguistics on the brain right now, I’ll peddle one of my core beliefs: Children don’t start talking in full sentences one day after years of just absorbing - they blabber nonsense, and little bits of sense start to congeal, and it’s never over. We manage to communicate somehow, but we’re forever trying it out. I’m no different. I don’t suddenly understand projects or operations. I have to see it in action for a while, then try my hand at it. But in school, there is a sort of amnesia: we were all required to take other classes first, but it always seems like nobody remembers any of it. So I’m trying to knit together what I gleaned from those other classes; But, it’s recursive! Follow me here, I might get a little deep: In this class, we say “There’s only Eight weeks - No, I take that back - 49 days! So we don’t have time to mess around, we’re going to have to skip right to the end.” What good is that? In the classes that were preparation for this one, we were in the exact same situation, and we said the exact same thing! So there’s a long chain of uninformed doing when we could have been preparing ourselves to do it right.
I must be some sort of Perfectionist.
Posted in infogami-blog, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 19 May 2006 14:45:00 GMT
It’s a nice day outside, I get to go to a convention downtown, but I’m still depressed. I function better with a lot of sleep. Last night I managed to get some, but it feels like I’m further behind, and not so refreshed that I could work harder. I just got back from doing laundry. My apartment is a big mess. I continue to do little things here and there when a momumental effort is necessary. When I hunt around trying to include everything in my laundry bag, it takes an inordinate ammont of time because I despair at all the things I don’t have time to do, and even try my hand at a few of them. So, an hour later, I’m on my way to the laundromat.
I’m still reading the Sarah Chayes book, but it’s slow work for a similar reason: every few pages she says something to make me stop and think. Her name in print didn’t make sense to me. I assume that I heard her reports on NPR, but I couldn’t place her. Somewhere in the book, she recounts a sales pitch she gave at a town meeting in Massachusetts, with a crowd of people frustrated about the outcome of our invasion of Afghanistan. Chayes rhymes with Hayes. And I figured it was corrupted Spanish, which makes more sense in print: think Chayes vs. Chavez. So trying to make it two sylables kept me from hearing it in my head properly. Now I can hear her in my memory on the radio four years ago. So that’s who she is. I get into this book, and it sends me away on naked examinations of my self. I have to think back. I never think I was traumatized by 9/11. But what sticks with me now is a sense that I didn’t have any response. It was one more symptom of a world gone mad, and I thought I already knew that. It was one more item in a long list of pushes in the wrong direction. The impact and the fall were garden variety violence writ large. For some reason it doesn’t bother us when that many people die gradually. We’re supposed to be reasonable. We’re not supposed to lash out in retaliation. It may be human nature, but that’s the real lesson. We do so much to be more than just monkeys attacking each other with rocks. Even if they are fancy rocks that can fly and explode. With that in mind, I read to the part where Chayes gets frustrated by her editor’s need for cliched stories, and goes out to interview Marines at the air base in Kandahar. Everybody was doing a “Marines at Christmas” story. The Marines are in foxholes. It’s a seige mentality. Afghans are starting to realize that the American troops are just another warlord force. When Chayes tells them what the locals say to her, one Marine responds “See, I knew they were bullshitting us.” The commanders said it was combat, but the Marines were not doing any fighting. I looked up from the book. I nearly cried. All this intelligence is used to construct clever ways to shirk responsibility. I think we’re in thrall to leaders who don’t care about us. It’s something more than the typical “ignorant masses” attitude of rulers. From before the election, I couldn’t fathom this president or any of his cronies ever being sincere. They didn’t seem like the right people to have on your side in a crisis, and they still don’t. I can’t imagine the people who would believe their lies - and the TV told me these people are Americans. But I’m an American. We must want someone to lie to us, but don’t I keep seeing evidence that we’re fed up? I can’t untangle the paradox.
Posted in books, infogami-blog | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 19 May 2006 14:02:00 GMT
BEA: BookExpo America is happenning. It’s the American Bookseller’s Association Convention, and it’s at the DC Convention Center right now. I thought I would be really excited about it, but I’m really bogged down in schoolwork this week, and every minute I’m not trying to catch up with all my responsibilities, I feel guilty. So there are plenty of important bookseller things to do… like, you know, PARTIES.
One more thing that ruins it for me is: I was going to get to see my girlfriend. She is on a school break, and she was planning to attend the convention. Now her Aunt has died, and she’s being dragged to the funeral in Delaware. It’s Friday and Saturday. My two days off, and the two main days of the convention. Gentle reader, I do care what you think, but you’ll have to allow me to vent some hot air here. I make no guarantees as to its accuracy: They all knew she had cancer. She has survived a lot longer than they expected. You can die any day, but we’ve known about this career-related event for more than a year now. I don’t think Christina was close to her aunt, her Grandparents are taking her along, and I would have expected her to say “have a nice time”, but she probably feels obligated to go. While I wouldn’t suggest an opportunistic, cynical sponging off the good graces of others, I would suggest casting off relationships that only drain away your vital energy to scant purpose. Never an easy calculus.
Becuase I can’t see Christina, and because we will now NEVER go to BEA together, I feel really bummed. It was not such a powerful dream, but I’m already letting go of it, and the convention just got here. It could be a cultural smorgasbord with delights at every turn, but that’s just too damn bad. I want to be able to pause parts of my life and return to them when I take care of other business, but that’s not possible. I’m less interested in everything all of the sudden.
I got my very own badge, so I plan to spend some time tomorrow walking the floor. I’m hoping to find it fascinating. But as I pause a moment to turn inward, here is what I find out about myself: It’s too late. I love books, I would probably rather spend the time reading. I don’t see my future in a bookstore. The past eleven years I’ve been working in the office of my bookstore. I’m even worried there is no future in bookstores - at least, not in bookstores as I know them. I’ve gone way past my loss of innocence. I can avoid being bitter by moving on to the next thing. And, that reminds me: What is the next thing for me? I have some clues, I’m collecting scraps of what I will need to get there, but I’m still quite lost.
Posted in infogami-blog, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 18 May 2006 15:48:00 GMT
I’m really slacking on this Web Design class. I can almost identify the pathology, but not quite: I can’t understand why I would make a decision before it has to be made, when I can continue to consider my choices. But add to that: I have to select a website project idea from a wide open field. I just thought when time ran out, I would make my decision, but not so fast! There’s a lot of work left after I make the decision. I ought to know by now that when somebody says “Do something You want to do.” It’s INSTANT DEATH.
I want to sit around doing whatever fun things come to mind. It tends to be overly technical. When I try to funnel ideas into a category, like It Has to Be a Website, my head starts spinning. Nothing I think about fits well into that frame. And besides, you can get web sites from a can these days. I almost can’t imagine rolling your own anymore - I can do it, but why bother? I hate to say this too many times, but I like it when somebody comes up with a challange. Solving other people’s problems is fun!
To accomplish an assignment, I have to make an end run around it. Suddenly there is a lot more work involved. I think that I’m actually doing the right thing at this moment by writing furiously about the issue.
no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 16 May 2006 21:52:00 GMT
Maybe I’m just really tired, but there’s a weird revelation dancing in front of me, and I don’t want to do anything I have to do. I just want to figure out the meaning of this half-formed idea in my head…
I started reading a galley of “The Punishment of Virtue” by Sarah Chayes. She was an NPR reporter dispatched to Pakistan to cover the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Years later she figured out that the pressure of coming up with an accurate story every week for All Things Considered, or whatever else, meant they got the story wrong. That’s interesting enough, and remind me to follow up on that some time, but as I sat on the bus trying to read, my biggest problem was keeping track of everybody’s name. With this mundane issue to hand, I started reviewing in my mind all the other books that caused the same problem. I didn’t get far.
Don’t be disappointed, because something else happened next: Last night’s Project Management class came back to life in my tired brain. Some phrase in the book suddenly evoked a whole range of compaints I haven’t been able to voice. Kandaharis have a lot of cash. Every interloper throughout history had to pay them off. They run a toll booth on the Silk Road. They’re like the children of divorce, but transported to the Great Game of Central Asia. Everybody wants to buy their love. Nobody ever succeeds for long. International redevelopment aid goes in, the goods are sold, somebody pockets the money, and no workers are hired. Projects don’t accomplish anything, but managers sign off on it anyway.
I nearly fell out of my seat on the bus. How could I have been so blind?
About Class: We got a damn good score for some piece of crap I handed in at the last minute. Meanwhile, I get really good scores on all my other work, so I’m in good position if the group project flops. I was wracked with guilt because I should have been working on it much earlier. That way I might have seen where more work was needed; where I needed to direct our efforts. I just handed in what there was when I reached the deadline. The more I worked on it, the more questions I had. A spreadsheet with budget details is a far cry from a couple hours of informal discussion. The professor’s comment boiled down to “Do you guys even know what you’re doing?”
Of course not. We don’t have a clue. This isn’t the way to find out, either. I thought I was skilled at breaking apart tasks and figuring out details. I just do what comes naturally. I’ve never really known why I do anything. I’ve never been the source. I want someone else to tell me why. That’s why I wanted to preach to my group about the Customer. When there’s money involved, there’s a Customer. Let the Customer decide on goals, then I can start my work. This is the central struggle. On the one hand, I’m only going to get good at doing it by practicing it. But on the other hand, I need to see it happen. I can’t make up fictions about Project Management until I’ve lived through some real examples. Suddenly the thought of doing this in an eight weeek class seems terribly misguided.
I won’t know what I’m doing until I can tell it as a story. There were things I couldn’t enter on a spreadsheet. We might have mentioned in passing: We can omit X, because of Y. So where do I mention the things I chose to omit? The assignment doens’t say anything about that. But once again, I know what I think is important, and it doesn’t match what I’m being told. At the same time, I haven’t lived with that truth long enough to be sure I can defend it. It’s not a matter of self confidence. I have to have confidence in the equipment, and I won’t have that until I’ve accomplished simpler goals using that equipment.
Posted in infogami-blog, books, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 16 May 2006 11:55:00 GMT
