To doing, to doing, to done?
Future Fire lists and listlessness
It was my great pleasure to work out of the DEECA offices today. The benefits are manifold: getting to know some of the BREPS* team, making some of the BREPS team vaguely aware of my existence, pretending I am a state government bureaucrat again (what with all the hot desks, high quality signage, meeting rooms, world class views (Level 14!) and functional kitchen), and generally trying to be useful.
*Bushfire Risk, Engagement and Predictive Services, an acronym so new that it does not return any search engine hits.
While in the office, I took some time to organise myself as part of my Monday routine. I benefited today from a thorough scan I had taken of my stuff last Friday. This resulted in a list of big stuff, medium sized stuff and little stuff. All I had to do today was prepare a list of time windows when I don’t have meetings during the coming week**, take my list of stuffs, and simply draw a metaphorical connecting line from one to the other. Hey presto! A sensible plan for the week. I more or less followed the plan but still ended the day feeling uneasy about the whole thing.
** This week’s scheduled meetings: a fortnightly hour with the boss, a half hour with the other group leaders in the team, four hours to plan for an end user research development workshop, an hour and a half to catch up with some end users and collaborators while at DEECA, an hour with my PhD student, an hour planning a Land Systems for the Future workshop, an hour planning resourcing with partners on our fire risk communication project, an hour tuning into a webinar that includes the word ‘coherence’ in the title, lunch with a science communication superstar at uni, an hour chatting with my teammate about that same fire risk comms project, two hours with four students as part of the Uni’s Academic Advising program, all day with colleagues and end users at the research development day, an hour with some fellow EMCAs and mentors as part of the Faculty EMCA program I was lucky enough to be enrolled in, a coffee with a professional staff colleague, an hour weekly group catchup, an hour discussing the latest synoptic charts, an hour discussion of that NHRA project that’s yet to officially start, and an hour and a half at a promotion workshop which I’ll hope I remember the details of if I apply next year. Phew.
Somehow, after several decades of adulthood, I continue to find it really hard to organise myself. I am consoled by the fact I have remained employed and ‘research active’ over an extended period of time despite this difficulty. Maybe being organised isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe being male, white, hetero, healthy, English-speaking and having an extremely supportive wife, family and network of colleagues, bosses and mentors is what really counts! I still have the sneaking suspicion that finding some new way to organise myself could be transformational - and I don’t mean in a Gregor Samsa sense.
I’d like the list/system to be on paper. God knows I stare at screens long enough as it is. The problem with that is that the list keeps changing. Can I really justify writing a new one every time a new task or meeting is added? It’s quite a long list.
The list on its own is sometimes enough. But often it’s not. I think it’s more effective when I write down how long the task will be, and exactly when I will do it. If I don’t (and even if I do) I often find myself spending more and more time on email, just hitting geyser after geyser of new distractions with uncertain correlation to my goals and those of my corporate overlords.
I’d like the list to seamlessly factor in my calendar (currently in Outlook). It should find the gaps, and should also realise that a 30min gap is perfect for some small admin tasks, and a 2+ hour gap should really include a big chunk of Deep Work on whatever my Big Rock for the week is.
The list should allow for occasional surfacing of important but less urgent things, like training, planning and looking into things. There’s a tertiary list with items ready to bubble up to the secondary list once those secondary list items have graduated to the big time of the primary list.
Reading is often on the list, often sacrificed, and yet I always feel great when I do it. Dagnabbit.
So what’s on the list right now?
My clear number one is a paper on overnight weather conditions during the 2019-20 fire season in south-eastern Australia. It was number two on the list two months ago. Currently in number crunching phase. Also in ‘despairing at seeing multiple other colleagues talk about their work in this exact same area which they are about to publish’ phase. Sadly, I didn’t make my end Feb deadline for the overnight weather paper, but I reckon a draft by end April is realistic. Hang on, school holidays are in April. Dang it.
Smaller items include
brushing up on the academic integrity process, after foolishly agreeing to chair the new school committee
doing a review of a major research organisation’s future fire report as a small consultancy
making a short submission to a few open calls - a federal govt one on national science and research priorities, another federal govt one on diversity in STEM and an NHRA one on near term priorities.
drafting some terms of reference and an expression of interest process for a potential new national natural hazards early and mid-career network
taking a closer look at some Australian Academy of Science awards I might have a crack at
catching up on a recorded webinar (hands up if you too never watch the recorded webinar) on storytelling for impact
Even smaller items include filling in some uni foreign interest disclosure form, booking airport parking, emailing a bunch of people, getting back to a very generous speaker invitation, getting back to a potential speaker for our group catchups, boning up on how to be an associate editor now I’ve accepted a gig at IJWF, getting back to some students, getting back to a brilliant designer and photographer, getting back to the IUCN about a new comms platform they’re trialling, and practicing a couple of talks, one for the annual Westpac Scholars Showcase in Sydney next week and the other as part of a research development day we’re holding at Creswick this Thursday with a bunch of our nearest and dearest end users.
And what about that list from last time? In about two months, I’m happy to say that there’s been progress on just about every single one of those items. And yet… it sure does seem like a whirlwind of activity for non-guaranteed gains. So many of those activities aren’t tied directly to research. Shouldn’t I just be publishing papers, applying for grants, and supervising students? Those are the big ticket items for a research-only academic such as myself. That’s where the lion’s share of my hours should be spent.
Isn’t it kind of insane the amount of time I dedicate to non-core business? Including this very substack?
When my energy is low, as it has been today, I’m both overwhelmed by this frivolously long list and confronted with my lack of deep engagement with the more important research stuff. Alienation and impostor syndrome rear their ugly conjoined heads. But I can’t help myself. All these other little things are interesting, strategic and connected, somehow, to understanding future fire, and my bigger goal of bringing science and society closer together. It is precisely these things that energise me much of the time.
And so it’s the fire mosaic for me. A patchwork of projects, connections, loose threads and left-field odds and ends, that I hope amount to more than the sum of their parts and leave my professional ecosystem in a fertile and resilient state.