@Lynn O'Connor's Process Notes:

Severe Trauma does NOT Lead to Mental Disorders: The Case of Child Soldiers In Africa

2008-05-10T14:09:00.000-07:00

An article in New Scientist, May 10, 2008, written by Peter Aldhous, reports on research on the fate of children in Uganda and other African war zones, who went through horrendous experiences, such as being kidnapped and abducted, being beaten, taken from their families, and forced to fight, kill people and even commit atrocities. Instead being a 'lost generation" as has been predicted, many seem to reintegrate into their home environments after the immediate warfare was over. Furthermore these child soldiers seem to often turn out in better shape when compared to those who remained at home and didn't have to fight at all. They were more likely to be politically active and to function well in society in terms of being able to earn a living and being otherwise productive. This certainly casts doubt on the trauma theory of psychopathology.

But what is really the dynamic that would influence these child soldiers to do better ultimately than those who were far less traumatized? Perhaps the child soldiers who were not forced to passively watch the violence but instead actively participated, suffer from lower levels of survivor guilt. Perhaps being beaten oneself has far less effect than watching others being beaten. Perhaps being a witness to violence rather than participating in it is the trauma that leads to a psychologically poor outcome.

The report of data coming out of these extreme war situations has to have implications for the trauma theory of psychopathology.

Conducting Research: How to Write the Introduction to Your Dissertation Proposal

2008-03-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

A dissertation proposal (the the final dissertation) begins with the chapter titled: "Introduction". Students have asked me: "How do I write the introduction?" The question deserves an answer. Writing the introduction to a dissertation is no more magical than writing any other part of the work. While students have different styles, and professors have different demands and requirements, the opening chapter is literally what it is called, the introduction. I learned long ago that this chapter is designed to answer a simple question: "What is this study about?" I often recommend that my students use this as their opening sentence..."This study is about...." and succinctly in the first sentence, tell us, the readers, what the whole thing is about. When you are ready to do that, you are ready to write the rest of your dissertation proposal.

After stating in clear language what your study is about, a few more sentences to elaborate the opening sentence should provide the reader with the big picture. Then you are on to the rest of the introduction. I ask my students to lay out the big picture in the paragraphs following. Let me use an example. Lets take an example, and say that a student is studying levels of survivor guilt in adult children in alcoholics. The dissertation proposal begins with "This study is about levels of survivor guilt in adult children of alcoholics." Adult children of alcoholics are known to take a great deal of responsibility within their families, and some appear to have difficulties that relate to feeling overly responsible for others, and that give rise to feelings of guilt. (Here we make a few unsubstantiated statements that will be developed in detail, with numerous references to the literature in the literature review). Understanding the role of guilt in this population may contribute to our knowledge related to treatment, when treatment is needed.

From here the story is expanded greatly, and we, the readers, are told why it is important to discover this information --namely, how pervasive is this problem potentially, how many people are we talking about? How many alcoholic families are there in the United States (or Europe, or any specific country, or within any specific population, ethnicity, gender etc, depending on the focus of the study). In other words, the student lays a wider net for the story, describing the bigger issue, providing the context for the study. If the population overall has a very low rate of alcoholism, the reader wants to know that. That would tell us that not many people would be affected by whatever you find out in the study. If there is a large alcoholic population, we want to know that as it would imply there may be many people walking around with this specific problem. You go from the broad figures, demographics of alcoholism, to the more detailed picture, perhaps getting into the rates of alcoholism within sub-populations within the larger culture. How many disadvantaged people compared to how many higher socioeconomic class people suffer from alcoholism? Is this a problem that exists across class, race, ethnicity, gender? Or is it particularly relevant for sub-populations.

You might address some common myths about alcoholism and being the child of alcoholics. You don't get heavily in to the literature, except to reference perhaps a few major studies. You get all the government statistics possible, related to your study. You might give a few examples, to bring a story element to light. While you make the text meaningful, avoid any polemics or hyperbolic writing. You only get to polemicize at the end, if in fact your data, once its collected, confirms whatever hypotheses you might hold. This said, the whole introduction in a sense, is telling a big story. "Here is why I am doing this study, this is why it is important, meaningful," is what what you are saying. If there is a history to the story, a sociopolitical context, here is where we write about it. If there is a biological component to your study, you broadly describe that. You are using broad brush strokes so to speak, so by the end of the introduction the reader is into the story, and wants to find out the answer to the question that the dissertation is posing.

In the study of levels of survivor guilt in adult children of alcoholics, part of establishing the big context might involve discussing guilt in general and the history of knowledge about guilt, or excessive responsibility for others. You might get into the whole issue of dysfunctional families, families where communications are altered by the presence of alcohol or other substances; you might discuss the importance of communication in general, in creating functional family life. You might discuss family communication across cultures. You might suggest an evolutionary aspect to your topic. From telling the reader about rates of alcoholism in the nation, or in the world for that matter, in developed nations and developing nations, and in describing big issues involved, the larger context, you get us, your reader involved. This is your aim.

Towards the end of the introduction, you move in again, to the specific study, and you describe briefly what you are going to do. You might briefly describe your over all design, giving the name to the kind of research design you're using. You end the introduction by a restatement of the first question "What is this study about?" with the hopes that your reader knows a great deal more about your study, why you are doing it, what are the major issues involved, and why it is important. Hopefully, you will have your reader with you, eager to go on, and eager to find out what you discover when you collect your data.

I need to blog again

2008-03-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

What happened to my blogging?
My blogging waned over the year, from my daily posting to at best, once a month, when I had a specific message to send to my students. I would like to recommit myself to blogging. I find it the most rewarding kind of writing and since I write everyday in numerous emails, I write academic articles and notes to students and opinion pieces on news in psychology and psychiatry, I want to (note I say "I want to" not "I will" pick up blogging again. I am not sure what discouraged me. Perhaps it was a problem presented to me by some readers "I tried to write a comment, but failed each time I tried." Rather than going in there, figuring out the problem, and fixing it, I just left it alone. After a while of no responses, even in "private" I lost interest. I have lots of readers on my various listsesrvs, why not write to them, instead of to no one, here. Well one reason is that I can write more personally here. And I can put my commitments in public, something I would not dare to do on my academic listservs.

The anti-medication frenzy needs to be analyzed
I am in a spin about the anti-psychiatry, anti-medication tear the press and even the professionals are on now. In response to one of those articles declaring that medication doesn't work, the British government decided to pour money into training 10,000 new cognitive behavioral psychotherapists. My main collaborator and statistician Jack Berry, upon hearing about this , said in his driest tone "Awfully impulsive, don't you think?" Yes I do think.

So expect an upcoming piece about the state of the medication debate (hysteria would be a more precise way of describing teh current atmosphere.

Bottom line, a new in-box called "bedroom" is screaming out for help
I may think its time to resume blogging because I have a new 'inbox" taking over a bed room. The "inbox" has turned out to be a bottle next in my GTS system. I wrote to David Allen's people to see if they might direct me. I told them to get Allen back out here to San Francisco, I need a booster shot right now. The whole point of mentioning this is I need some kind of accountability, and I am hoping that by writing about this, even if I am downplaying it, may help me deal wiht the situation. So if I do nothing but what I started doing here a year ago, I have to do at least that. Track my progress on GTD and resume getting things done.

From Dustin Wax: A Great Summary

2008-02-14T12:26:00.000-08:00

50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily

We all want to get stuff done, whether it’s the work we have to do so we can get on with what we want to do, or indeed, the projects we feel are our purpose in life. To that end, here’s a collection of 50 hacks, tips, tricks, and mnemonic devices I’ve collected that can help you work better.

Most Important Tasks (MITs): At the start of each day (or the night before) highlight the three or four most important things you have to do in the coming day. Do them first. If you get nothing else accomplished aside from your MITs, you’ve still had a pretty productive day.
Big Rocks: The big projects you’re working on at any given moment. Set aside time every day or week to move your big rocks forward.
Inbox Zero: Decide what to do with every email you get, the moment you read it. If there’s something you need to do, either do it or add it to your todo list and delete or file the email. If it’s something you need for reference, file it. Empty your email inbox every day.
Wake up earlier: Add a productive hour to your day by getting up an hour earlier — before everyone else starts imposing on your time.
One In, One Out: Avoid clutter by adopting a replacement-only standard. Every time you but something new, you throw out or donate something old. For example, you buy a new shirt, you get rid of an old one. (Variation: One in, Two Out — useful when you begin to feel overwhelmed by your possessions.)
Brainstorming: The act of generating dozens of ideas without editing or censoring yourself. Lots of people use mindmaps for this: stick the thing you want to think about in the middle (a problem you need to solve, a theme you want to write about, etc.) and start writing whatever you think of. Build off of each of the sub-topics, and each of their sub-topics. Don’t worry about whether the ideas are any good or not — you don’t have to follow through on them, just get them out of your head. After a while, you’ll start surprising yourself with some really creative concepts.
Ubiquitous Capture: Always carry something to take notes with — a pen and paper, a PDA, a stack of index cards. Capture every thought that comes into your mind, whether it’s an idea for a project you’d like to do, an appointment you need to make, something you need to pick up next time you’re at the store, whatever. Review it regularly and transfer everything to where it belongs: a todo list, a filing system, a journal, etc.
Get more sleep: Sleep is essential to health, learning, and awareness. Research shows the body goes through a complete sleep cycle in about 90 minutes, so napping for less than that doesn’t have the same effect that real sleep does (although it does make you feel better). Get 8 hours a night, at least. Learn to see sleep as a pleasure, not a necessary evil or a luxury.
10+2*5: Work in short spurts of 10 minutes, interrupted by 2 minute breaks. Use a timer. Do this 5 times an hour to stay on target without over-taxing your physical and mental resources. Spend those 2 minutes getting a drink, going to the bathroom, or staring out a window.
SMART goals: A rubric for creating and pursuing your goals, helping to avoid setting goals that are simply unattainable. Stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
SUCCES: From Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick, SUCCES is a set of characteristics that make ideas memorable (”sticky”): sticky ideas are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories.
Eat the Frog: Do your most unpleasant task first. Based on the saying that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a frog, the day can only get better from then on.
80/20 Rule/Pareto Principle: Generally speaking, the 80/20 Principle says that most of our results come from a small portion of our actual work, and conversely, that we spend most of our energy doing things that aren’t ultimately all that important. Figure out which part of your work has the greatest results and focus as much of your energy as you can on that part.
What’s the Next Action?: Don’t plan out everything you need to do to finish a project, just focus on the very next thing you need to do to move it forward. Usually doing the next, little thing will lead to another, and another, until we’re either done or we run into a block: we need more information, we need someone else to catch up, etc. Be as concrete and discrete as possible: you can’t “install cable”, all you can do is “call the cable company to request cable installation”.
The Secret: There is no secret.
Slow Down: Make time for yourself. Eat slowly. Enjoy a lazy weekend day. Take the time to do things right, and keep a balance between the rush-rush world of work and the rest of your life.
Time Boxing: Assign a set amount of time per day to work on a task or project. Focus entirely on that one thing during that time. Don’t worry about finishing it, just worry about giving that amount of undivided attention to the project. (Variation: fixed goals. For example, you don’t get up until you’ve written 1,000 words, or processed 10 orders, or whatever.)
Batch Process: Do all your similar tasks together. For example, don’t deal with emails sporadically throughout the day; instead, set aside an hour to go through your email inbox and respond to emails. Do the same with voice mail, phone calls, responding to letters, filing, and so on — any routine, repetitive tasks.
Covey Quadrants: A system for assigning priorities. Two axes, one for importance, the other for urgency, intersect. Tasks are assigned to one of the four quadrants: not important, not urgent; not important, urgent; important, not urgent; and important and urgent. Purge the tasks that are neither important nor urgent, defer the unimportant but urgent ones, try to avoid letting the important ones become urgent, and as much as possible work on the tasks in the important but not urgent quadrant.
Handle Everything Once: Don’t set things aside hoping you’ll have time to deal with them later. Ask yourself “What do I need to do with this” every time you pick up something from your email list, and either do it, schedule it for later, defer it to someone else, or file it.
Don’t Break the Chain: Use a calendar to track your daily goals. Every day you do something, like working out or writing 1,000 words, make a big red “X”. Every day the chain will grow longer. Don’t break the chain! That is, don’t let any non-X days interrupt your chain of successful days.
Review: Schedule a time with yourself every week to look over what you’ve done that week and what you want to do the next week. Ask yourself if there are any new projects you should be starting, and if what you’re working on is moving you closer to your goals for your life.
Roles: Everyone fills several different roles in their life. For instance, I’m a teacher, a student, a writer, a step-father, a partner, a brother, a son, an uncle, an anthropologist, and so on. Understanding your different roles and learning to keep them distinct when necessary can help you keep some sense of balance between them. Make goals around the various roles you fill, and make sure that your goals fit with your goals in other roles.
Flow: The flow state happens when you’re so absorbed in whatever you’re doing that you have no awareness of the passing of time and the work just happens automatically. It’s hard to trigger consciously, but you can create the conditions for it by allowing yourself a block of uninterrupted time, minimizing distractions, and calming yourself.
Do It Now: Fight procrastination by adopting “do it now!” as your mantra. Limit yourself to 60 seconds when making a decision, decide what you’re going to do with every input in your life as soon as you encounter it, learn to make bold decisions even when you’re not really sure. Keep moving forward.
Time Log: Lawyers have to track everything they do in the day and how long they do it so they can bill their clients and remain accountable. You need to be accountable to yourself, so keep track of how much time you really spend on the things that are important to you by tracking your time.
Structured Procrastination: A strategy of recognizing and using one’s procrastinating tendencies to get stuff done. Items at the top of top of the list are avoided by doing seemingly less difficult and less important tasks further down the list — making the procrastinator highly productive. The trick is to make sure the items at the top are apparently urgent — with pressing deadlines and apparently large consequences. But, of course, they aren’t really all that urgent. Structured procrastination requires a masterful skill at self-deception, which fortunately bigtime procrastinators excel at.
Personal Mission Statement: Write a personal mission statement, and use it as a guide to set goals. Ask if each goal or activity moves you closer to achieving your mission. If it doesn’t, eliminate it. Periodically review and revise your mission statement.
Backwards Planning: A planning strategy that works from the goal back to your next action. Start with the end goal in mind. What do you have to have in place to accomplish it? OK, now what do you have to have in place to accomplish what you have to have in place to accomplish your end goal? And what do you have to have in place to accomplish that? And so on, back to something you already have in place and/or can put in place immediately. That’s your next action.
Tune Out: Create a personal privacy zone by wearing headphones. People are much more hesitant to interrupt someone wearing headphones. Note: actually listening to music through your headphones is optional — nobody knows but you.
Write It Down: Don’t rely on your memory as your system. Write down the things you need to do, your schedule, anything you might need to refer to, and every passing thought so you can relax, knowing you won’t forget. Use your brain for thinking, use paper or your computer for keeping track of stuff.
Gap Time: The little blocks of time we have during the day while waiting for the bus, standing in line, waiting for a meeting to start, etc. Have a list of small, 5-minute tasks that you can do in these moments, or carry something to read or work on to make the most of these spare minutes.
Monotasking: We like to think of ourselves as great multitaskers, but we aren’t. What we do when we multitask is devote tiny slices of time to several tasks in rapid succession. Since it takes more than a few minutes (research suggests as long as 20) to really get into a task, we end up working worse and more slowly than if we devoted longer blocks of time to each task, worked until it was done, and moved on to the next one.
Habits: Habits are as much about the way we see and respond to the world as about the actions we routinely take. Examine your own habits and ask what they say about your relation to the world — and what would have to change to create a worldview in which your goals were attainable.
Triggers: Place meaningful reminders around you to help you remember, as well as to help create better habits. For example, put the books you need to take back to the library in front of the door, so you can’t leave the house without seeing them and remembering they need to go back.
Unclutter: Clutter is anything that’s out of place and in the way. IT’s not necessarily neatness — someone can have a rigorously neat workspace and not be able to get anything done. It’s being able to access what you need, when you need it, without breaking the flow of your work to find it. Figure out what is “clutter” in your working and living spaces, and fix that.
Visualize: Imagine yourself having accomplished your goals. What is your life like? Are you who you want to be? If not, rethink your goals. If so, then visualize yourself taking the steps you need to take to get there. You’ve got yourself a plan; write it down and do it.
Tickler File: A set of 43 folders, labeled 1 - 31 and January - December, used to remind us of tasks we need to do on a specific day. For instance, if you have a trip on March 23rd, you’d put your itinerary, tickets, and other material in the “March” folder. At the start of each month, you move the previous month’s folder to the back. On March 1st, you’d transfer your travel information into the “23″ folder. Each day, you move the previous day’s folder to the back. On the 23rd, the “23″ folder will be at the front, and everything you need that day will be there for you.
ToDon’t List: A list of things not to do — useful for keeping track of habits that lead you to be unproductive, like playing online flash games.
Templates: Create templates for repetitive tasks, like letters, customer reply emails, blog posts, etc.
Checklists: When planning any big task, make a checklist so you don’t forget the steps while in the busy middle part of doing it. Keep your checklists so you can use them next time you have to do the same task.
No: Learning to say “no” — to new commitments, to interruptions, to anything — is one of the most valuable skills you can develop to keep you focused on your own commitments and give you time to work on them.
Unschedule: Schedule all your fun activities and personal life stuff (the stuff you want to do) first. Fill in whatever time’s left over with uninterrupted blocks of work. Write those into your schedule after you’ve completed them. Reward yourself after every block of quality, focused work.
Purge: Regularly go through your existing commitments and get rid of anything that is either not helping you advance your own goals or is a regular “sink” of time or energy.
One Bucket: Minimize the places you collect new inputs in your life, your “buckets”. Ideally have one “bucket” where everything goes. Lots of people experience an incredible sense of relief when everything they need to think about is collected in one place in front of them, no matter how big the pile.
50-30-20: Spend 50% of your working day on tasks that advance your long-term, life goals, spend 30% on tasks that advance your middle-term (2-years or so) goals, and the remaining 20% on things that affect only the next 90 days or so.
Timer: Tell yourself you will work on a project or task, and only that project or task, for a set amount of time. Set a timer (use a kitchen timer, or use a countdown timer on your computer), and plug away at your work. When the timer goes off, you’re done — move on to the next project or task.
Do Your Worst: Give yourself permission to suck. Relieve the pressure of needing to achieve perfection in every task on the first run. Promise yourself you’ll go back and fix any problems later, but for now, just run wild.
Make an Appointment with Yourself: Schedule time every week or so just for you. Consider the state of your life: what’s working? What isn’t working? what mistakes are you making? what could you change? Give yourself a chance to get to know you.
[This space left intentionally blank]: This is a big list, sure, but it’s not an exhaustive one. The last space is left for you to fill in. What works for you? What would you like to share with the rest of the lifehack.org community? Let us know in the comments — or write your own list and link back to us!

What is Beauty? Is it really the most "average?"

2008-01-23T22:32:00.000-08:00

I just ran into (was directed to, from World Science) a fascinating experiment trying to determine what beauty consists of. One theory is that an average of faces is going to be considered most beautiful, based on the brain being most comfortable with the most average.

Here's a link to go play with this idea yourself, I found it quite intriguing.

http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average

From Zen Habits: 7 Powerful Steps to Overcoming Resistance and Actually Getting Stuff Done

2008-01-22T13:06:00.000-08:00

Over at Zen Habits http://zenhabits.net/ Leo has written a simple and rather brilliant analysis of what he calls "resistance" meaning, procrastinating on going to work on what you should be going to work on. Many psychologists (and other mental health workers) use the concept of resistance to suggest clients are unconsciously gratified by their problems, and they deliberately resist the therapists efforts to help them. They remain blind to reality and ignorant about their lack of motivation because they want to. I don't agree at all with this perspective. It suggests that cure is in the hands of the therapist, that clients are not motivated to resolve their problems. This is simply untrue. Clients are highly motivated to recover from whatever harms them. If clients appear to resist the help of therapists, it is either because therapists are frightening them, or on the wrong track, or because clients are inhibited in doing what they really want to do, for one or another reason. Something gets in their way, it is not that they resist deliberately, or don't want to get better.

Taken into the world of how to get things done, the Zen Habits post is certainly not unfriendly like the traditional psychologist's concept of resistance. But it too leaves out the underlying reason for stopping oneself from moving forward. I think as in the case of psychological problems, the s0-called resistance represents an internal inhibition, often some form of survivor guilt, or fearing that if you become highly active, efficient and successful, you risk making someone close to you feel inadequate simply by comparison. So you stop yourself from moving ahead effectively, the way you really want to. The source of inhibition may lie elsewhere, but whatever it is, it might be worth while to think about your resistance to getting things done as a kind of inhibition.

This said, here's the post, its well worth reading (I still don't exactly know the etiquette here, about putting someone else's blog inside mine. I think as long as I put the link, it may be ok. If not, forgive the breach of good behavior). In any case, getting into Zen Habits http://zenhabits.net/ on a regular basis is well worth while.

http://zenhabits.net/2008/01/7-powerful-steps-to-overcoming-resistance-and-actually-getting-stuff-done/#more-620

Photo courtesy of Pikaluk

7 Powerful Steps to Overcoming Resistance and Actually Getting Stuff Done

There are a slew of popular books and systems, from favorites of mine such as Getting Things Done to the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to the Now Habit and more, all designed to get us more productive and effective.

But getting things done is really about one thing, and one thing only: overcoming the resistance to doing what we need to do.

OK, I would add a couple more steps to that, to ensure that we’re managing our tasks correctly:

1. Have all our projects and tasks stored in an external system (out of our heads), such as a to-do list or lists.

2. Pick the tasks and projects that are most important to work on.

3. Overcome the resistance to actually doing those important tasks.

And I would submit it’s the last step that’s the most important (although I wouldn’t ignore the other two). Unfortunately, because we’re not very good at overcoming resistance, we procrastinate on this third step by fiddling with the external system — the tools we use to organize our tasks, coming up with new and better systems, tweaking them until they’re near perfect, and so on.

That’s Resistance.

As Stephen Pressfield writes in his excellent book on this topic, The War of Art:

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

What’s keeping us from sitting down is Resistance.”

The War of Art is all about Resistance, not only for writers and other artists, but for anyone trying to pursue their dreams or become what they’re meant to be. I highly recommend it. This, of course, is also a topic that is central to Zen Habits: overcoming Resistance to create new and better habits, to find happiness and simplicity, to do what you need to do and love to do.

I fight Resistance every single day, and I thought you might be interested in some of the ways I fight and beat Resistance, daily.

1. Become aware. The problem usually is that we don’t think about Resistance. We don’t understand it or even realize it’s there most of the time. We just think, “Oh, I better straighten out my desk … or get my to-do lists in order” or we get distracted by something on the web, or we feel that we have to check our email, or we’re just going to watch this one TV show, or any of a limitless amount of distractions.

Combat this by realizing that you are facing Resistance. Once you become aware of it, you can fight it, and beat it. It can be difficult to become more aware, but the key is to focus on it for a couple of days. Print out the words “Defeat Resistance” and put it somewhere visible as you work. That will help remind you to be aware of Resistance. Every time you do something that isn’t the most important thing you could be doing right now, be aware of what you’re doing.

2. Become a pro. This is the main technique that Pressfield outlines in The War of Art: combating Resistance by turning pro. The professional, unlike the amateur, comes to work ready to work. He’s doing it for a living (and loves what he does) and knows that as long as he shows up and starts working, the rest will come. Approach the work like a pro, and you’ll get the work done.

3. Be very clear, and focus. Before you start the day, be very clear about what you want to accomplish. You won’t be able to finish 10 major projects, but maybe you can finish one important project, or at least move it along to a certain point. Set three Most Important Tasks you want to accomplish today. Once you have those things defined, you’ve got to focus on them to the exclusion of all else (at least, during your prime work time). Do them first. Focus, finish, then move on to the smaller tasks you need to complete today. If you find yourself being lured to do something that’s not on that short list of three things, bring yourself back and focus.

4. Clear away distractions. Don’t spend a lot of time on this, because eliminating distractions can be a distraction itself. Instead, take one minute: close your email program and IM program and turn off all notifications. Shut down the Internet if at all possible. Close all programs except the one you need to do the important task in front of you. Clear your desk quickly (stuff everything in a drawer or something — you can organize it later) and turn off the phones if possible. Put on headphones or alert your coworkers (or family, if you’re at home) that you’re not to be disturbed for the next hour (or however long you plan to work on this task). Then get to work.

5. Have a set time and place. Make your first important task a daily appointment. For me, that’s writing. I always start the day with a writing task (such as writing this post, for example). For you, that might be different. Have a set start time, and possibly a set ending time — you’ll have to see what works for you, but the important thing is the set starting time. And when that time comes, you have to start. No exceptions.

6. Know your motivation. Why are you doing this? Why is this task important? What is it working towards? And how important is that end goal to you? Why is it important? You need to know these things to build up the motivation to overcome Resistance.

7. Just start. In the end, all the tips in the world won’t make as much a difference as this simple (and timeless) instruction. Just sit down and start. Feel Resistance to doing that? There’s no way to overcome it than to just start. Reading more about Resistance won’t help. Going to an online Procrastinator’s Forum won’t help. Working on your to-do lists won’t help. Only doing actually helps. And the only way to do something is to just start.

So how do you start, when you feel resistance? You just start. Feeling the need to do something else? Stop yourself from getting distracted. Remind yourself what you need to be doing, and why. Sit down and the set time and place. And just start.

For me, that means opening up a blank text file and writing the title of whatever I’m writing. Then I start brainstorming and outlining ideas. This gets me over the initial Resistance. And once I’ve started on that, I can usually get into the flow. But the important thing is to get started.

So stop reading this. And just start!

Update: See another great article on this topic just published over at LifeDev.net: Keeping Focus While Beating Back Distractions.

It's All in the Eyes

2008-01-17T13:10:00.000-08:00

Its been a month and a half since I posted here. There's no better way to drive people away, but that was not my intention, although I continue to keep this forum rather private for now and sporadic writing may be the way I make sure of that.

That said, a few days ago I read about a study so compelling that I feel I have to post it here. In a study involving rating the intensity of emotion expression on faces, the subjects --people who were to be the "raters"-- were shown photographs of faces and asked to rate the intensity of the emotion shown on the face. The emotions were common ones (at least for experiments), like happiness, anger and sadness. Then the experimenters manipulated nothing but the pupil of the eye, that was visible in the photograph. Now how big or how small one's pupils are are NOT under our conscious control. Meaning no matter how much I want to fake this or that emotion, I couldn't use the size of my pupils to do it. I might be able to fake a smile, but not pupil size.

Three photographs of the same face were shown. Each of the three faces differed, only by pupil size. In one it was big, in one medium, and in one small. Then the raters were asked to estimate the emotion and intensity of the emotion. In sadness (and only in sadness) the raters significantly rated the photo with the face with smaller pupils as more intensly sad.

Additionally the experimenters got a general empathy score for each rather, using a standard empathy measure. They found that those who were more empathic in general, were more often rating the smaller pupil as sadder, meaning they were more tuned in to this signal of intensity than other raters.

This study got my head spinning. For many years, whenever questioned, Paul Ekman, a leading emotion researcher, had insisted that guilt was not a pure emotion, because there was no, clear and cross cultural muscular display of guilt, that would be systematically identified by raters. This he took to mean that guilt was a composite of different emotions. This didn't make sense to me, but who was I to argue with a major authority. Lets face it, I argued anyway, but had no evidence for my own conclusion, that guilt is indeed a pure and universal emotion. Upon reading this article this week, the light dawned --guilt might be conveyed in the eyes, by pupil size or some other special feature of which we are entirely unaware, as experiencers, or as raters, those responding to the gestures of emotions. And what else is communicated by our pupils, over which we have no control. We know that people make instantaneous snap decisions about people they meet for the first time. How does that happen? We can read book after book telling us how to make a good first impression, but something is always missing. Of course it is. Our pupils change without conscious awareness, and we read faces, also without conscious awareness.

It's all in the eyes.

Harrison, N.A., Wilson, C. E., & Critchely, H.D. (2007). Processing of Observed Pupil Size Modulates Perception of Sadness and Predicts Empathy. Emotion, vol 7, #4, 724-729.

How to do Research III: The Literature Review, Part B.

2007-12-03T21:37:00.000-08:00

How do you "review" the literature?

I've served as Chair on over 25 dissertations, and I've written many articles for "scholarly" publications, so I think I know how to review literature. A review of literature doesn't necessarily mean a "critical" review, that is it doesn't mean you have to criticize the studies you are describing. If a study has serious flaws, you would mention that, but many if not most articles in journals are reporting on studies that are basically sound, if they weren't they wouldn't have been accepted for publication. When I write a literature review, what is expected is that I report on the studies that came before the one I'm presenting or that led me to want to do the study I've done. "The literature" means in essence, the published results of studies in a given area. To review the literature means to write a readable summary of published research reports related to my study. Its that simple.

Please, don't write detail after detail and after detail

Students often begin the literature review, thinking they are supposed to write details about the studies they're describing, and they start listing the number of subjects in the study, all the measures used, the demographics of the study, one right after the other --almost like they are summarizing methods sections of prior research reports. This is not what I want to read, nor what I write, when I'm summarizing a body of studies, that is "the literature." Instead, what is more appropriate, is to write about the essence of a study, to report on the main findings, and only include details as much as is needed to provide the story of the study. Think about a body of research on a topic that has been "hot" for a decade, and I am doing research on some different aspect of the topic. Perhaps there are fifty studies that are relevant to the current study being presented in the dissertation or journal article. No one wants to read details about fifty studies. What we want to know is the basic findings of these studies, and we want to read this material after it has been organized coherently, so it is relatively easy to read. We want the author to figure out and present the conclusions from the mass of data presented in numerous research reports. If the findings of the studies on the topic are contradictory, that is more important than findings from any one study. We want to know right off that the literature presents contradictory findings. This tells us that the data found in all these studies suggests different conclusions, and therefore there is not yet a consistent and coherent understanding of whatever it is that is being studied. Perhaps our study will provide some new slant that will clear up areas of confusion, perhaps it will just add more to the mix. The point here is that we want to know the conclusions we can come to, even if it is only to say we don't yet have a clear conclusion. This all forms the background for presenting our own current study. Thus the literature review presents the story of a body of research.

Learning how to read studies is not the same as writing the literature review

In trying to teach students how to read literature, professors often come up with a fairly complex structure that they hope will help students focus on the details of an article, thereby be able to understand the study being described. This is useful for learning to read research articles, however it is not a model for describing prior research in a literature review. To use the model of the 50 studies done around a given topic --in preparing to write the literature review, it is fine to tear each study apart into this complex structure. This might ensure that you know what a study is about, what was done, and what was found. But in writing about the study, you only need to summarize what was found, what was concluded by the study. On occasion you might provide a detail, for example if a study was unusually large, you might refer to that .."In a large multisite study of treatment for unipolar depression" provides the picture of a very large, or substantial study and suggests that one should probably pay attention to the conclusions. This is obviously different from writing "in a study of 98 subjects diagnosed with unipolar depression..." although you could get away with this phrasing, provided you don't repeat that level of detail for one study after the other.

The literature review is the story of a body of research

When you write the literature review, you are transmitting the story of the relevant research. You are saving readers a whole lot of time and trouble by summarizing prior studies and then presenting some conclusions. If you keep the concept of a story or a series of stories in mind, you are more likely to write something that is lively and readable. There are limits of course because academic writing is by nature, likely to be, at least, slightly, boring. However, as you have found a topic interesting enough to conduct a study of your own about it, you have a good chance of presenting an interesting background story in your presentation of the literature. An essential feature of an outstanding literature is that it is interesting -- the author has managed to report on many sources of data, in and of itself rather dry, and has woven it all together with important conclusions, thereby lifting it out of the realm of tedium and into something that is almost light and interesting. That is the kind of lit review I want to read, and the kind I hope I know how to write.

I love New York (I do)

2007-12-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

I don't know how I've survived this long without an introduction to reality TV, probably because I never watch TV, that is until I discovered I could download pilot shows from ITunes, and scan it in the middle of the night so it didn't inconvenience me --and the next thing I knew I was hooked on "Gossip Girl" and then "Grey's Anatomy" and finally disaster hit, I fell into something called "At Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" and I was gone. Well that was nothing. Last week a client, upon hearing of my affection for Tila Tequila, said "You've seen nothing yet, you're really going to love "I love New York."

Stop.

36 hours later:
I have watched Year One and Year Two (up to now) non-stop, no breaks except for 40 minutes of Kundalini yoga and food intermittently.

I am so irritated, none of these second season guys are in any way good enough for New York. She doesn't like any of them, she feels the pressure of the time limit of the show, and the lousy characters they selected for the second season. She's still hot for Chance and who can blame her, Chance and his brother are intelligent, smart, come close to her high intelligence unlike the rest of the choices. New York is rather brilliant. Why did the producers pick out idiots to pair her up with? What's with her mother? Her mother can't stand Chance. He has fits of hysterics all the time. But he's not violent like "Buddha," he's just prone to hysterics. He would freak out if anyone got really violent. He poses. She's as hysterical as Chance, so what's the big deal. Why should she have to pretend to get into these second season losers? She can't stand them, and she's right. She's trying to get into the best of them, but in no way are they good enough. And as for last season's "winner" -what a turkey he turned out to be, upset because of New York's comments about his mom. OK so New York is not always the most political woman, so what. What did he expect anyway?

So what are the writers/producers going to do? I know nothing about reality TV, and it would have been better if I had remained in the dark. I have however, formed a strong opinion, namely that if the characters selected to be on the show this year suck, she should not have to settle on any of them. Surely the producers are not morons and will not force her to carry on with this charade.

I have been kidnapped by reality TV, and will continue posting on this heady topics. Whomever was reading for academic edification, read no more. My brain has been highjacked.

If you have ANY spare time, I recommend "I love New York." I have no spare time and I wouldn't miss a minute of New York. Finally a woman we can identify with. Just imagine if she turned her attention to real politics, psychology, academia.

How to Do Research III: The Literature Review, Part A.

2007-12-02T17:31:00.000-08:00

The Background: Reading, thinking and writing
Writing a literature review for a dissertation or publication is difficult, only because it involves long stints of careful and sometime tedious reading and then shorter stints of consistent writing. From my perspective, preparing for, and producing a literature review is the only "difficult" part of doing research. It is an essential component of the dissertation and/or a scholarly or academic publication and at various moments, its not a whole lot of fun. It means in essence, knowing what is in the academic literature about your topic, knowing what studies have been done prior to your own, thoroughly reading the literature related to your own research, and then finding a way to write an organized report on "the literature" for others to read. Covering the literature can be deadly boring because scientific writing has traditionally been so archain, obtuse, and obfuscating, and therefore difficult to read. Writing it up coherently may at times be mind-bending but once you are solidly into it, its never as bad as feared. I may sweat over the literature review part of a paper, (and there's a chance that you will too), but only because I am easily bored, prone to restlessness, and the amount of reading required is not great for the restless. However in the end, its just a job like any other job, with an orderly series of steps to completion. Once you make up your mind to do it, you just dive in and do it. For some reason it brings out the most serious procrastination. We stall, we hesitate, put it off, find a million other things to do. But as I said, once you decide to do it, its just like any other job.

Overcoming inertia: How to deal with procrastination
There is a simple, across-task method of overcoming procrastination called the "ten-minute dash" (for me this originated with Merlin Mann although I don't know if he was the first anti-procrastination dasher http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/procrastination-hack-1025). The secret here is acknowledging that you can do anything for ten minutes, no matter how boring or difficult it might be. Get a timer, set it for ten minutes, and GO. Take whatever part of the job you're doing, and work as hard as possible until the timer goes off at ten minutes. Stop, do whatever you want to do (surf the web, look at TV, get something to eat) for 2 minutes, and then set the timer for another ten minute dash. If you're like many people, once you get over that initial inertia, you'll keep on task and want to keep going. At worst, make yourself do another ten minute dashes in a half hour, or sometime relatively soon. If you do this on and off all day, through the weekend, you'll get quite a bit done, and you'll have overcome the inertia. Another method, perhaps a precursor to the ten minute dash, is "time boxing" described by Steve Pavlina http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/10/timeboxing/. Here, when you have something that you're procrastinating, it seems to stretch endlessly in front of you, you block out a period of time in which you can make a dent in it. For example you block out 30 or 40 minutes during which you'll begin some part of the work of the literature review, without planning to finish any specific piece of it. Like the ten minute dash, it gets you over that inertia. Personally, I like the speed of the ten minute dash, it works for me. The time box is usually a bit longer and if I am seriously procrastinating, it seems like too much.

What is a literature review?
Before we get to the "how to do it," its a good idea to have a clear picture of what the literature review is. To put it simply, its an organized written review of all the studies, articles, summaries, that came before your study. The lit review is your presentation to your readers of everything that you know about the studies, the articles, the theories, the history, of the constructs that were done earlier, before you got interested in your topic. Its a summary of all the work done before your work. Its literally, a review of the literature preceding whatever you are going to do to add to the literature. Keep this in mind as you proceed. You have readers. They don't know much about your topic. Pretend you are talking to your readers, and tell them everything that you know, that you have gained from reading the literature. They don't want to read all that stuff that you are being forced to read, you are doing it for them. This is definitely not magic, or particularly difficult in concept. Think of someone who might be interested in your topic and start writing after you have done the reading or while you're reading. If you have trouble writing when you think it is something "formal" write it as if you're writing an email. Talk to you audience.

How to gather the literature
I recommend starting with whatever seems to be easiest to tackle. If I am approaching a relatively new topic, I like to begin with popular books if there are any out there. A well written popular book on a scientific topic is relatively painless to read, and has within it, either in a reference section or within the text itself, leads to the most important studies already conducted, that you will need to refer to in your literature review. So start with popular books. While you're reading, make lists of all the experiments, studies, articles, other books, mentioned. Don't skip by references without listing them, thinking you'll remember to go back to them without reminders. You won't, and you'll be missing some of the best leads you can find. If you don't want to write everything down, xerox the reference pages and then mark with colored marker all the references that you know you should have in your literature review. You'll go back to these shortly.

Heading into Google Scholar
Then head to Google Scholar, or if you prefer, PsychInfo or another professional data base. Personally, I prefer Google Scholar because it draws from data bases across disciplines. I'm a psychologist and any phenomena I'm investigating has, in one way or another, been approached by biologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists as well as psychologists. Using Google Scholar I'm likely to find references across a wide range of fields and data bases, which serves me well. I suggest starting with an obvious combination of words that describes in some way, the topic you are studying. I study self-conscious emotions, and specifically, I'm an expert in empathy-based guilt. So I begin with "guilt" and "empathy" and then "empathy and guilt." This connects to "altruism" so that gets thrown in both by itself and in combination with the other words. Very quickly I have found numerous articles that look interesting. Many are immediately available on line, and if not, at least the abstracts are available instantly. I print out page after page of abstracts, lists of articles, and more abstracts. I put in more words, and go at it again. I may leave Google Scholar and go into PsychInfo, or the APA wider data bases, and go at the whole thing again. I end up with a huge pile of pages of references, and abstracts.

How to start reading: Skim abstracts like you read gossip in the Enquirer
This part is fun. I hole up and skim abstracts. For me this part feels some like reading the Enquirer, which I happen to enjoy. There are these brief summaries of a study, like bits of gossip. I read rapidly and get completely absorbed in whatever I'm reading. Abstracts are usually succinct and to the point. I always have colored highlighters with me as I do this, and mark clearly the articles/abstracts that may be related to my topic. Through this process, I discover at least a reasonable number of articles that are connected to my topic. I then go back into a data base that I have access to (meaning that I will have access to the PDF of whole articles), and I begin to go after the articles that have grabbed my attention when I read the abstract. I gather large piles of articles in this way.

The next step is to return to the lists of references that I located in popular books, and I search for the the abstracts or whole articles in the same manner. If an article looks relevant from the abstract, go for the gold, the PDF of the whole article. Add these to the piles of article you obtained from your search in Google Scholar or whatever data base you have been using. Your pile of articles is by now, growing. Make no effort to organize at this point, go back and forth between data bases, when you get bored working in one format, move to another. The goal here is to get as much as you can. Its rather like the brainstorming state of a project. You don't need to be critical or highly selective, you are aiming for quantity; quality comes later.

Beginning to read:
At this point (there may have been many ten minute dashes, many blocks of time, and days or weeks gone by) I try to select out what seem to be summary-type articles that include rather extensive literature reviews themselves. Now the more difficult task begins, and stalling or procrastinating is again a problem. Pull in the ten minute dash to get yourself to start reading one of those thick and often difficult articles, that review all the work that has already been done. Read slowly and carefully, sometimes it is helpful to outline as you read, as it forces you to pay attention by being an active reader. This will pay off in the end, as it begins to make you an "expert" in your field of study. Mark all the studies noted that have high relevance to your topic. At the end of an article, pour over the references at the end. There you will find numerous articles that you somehow missed when you did your initial search in Google Scholar or Psych Info etc. Go back to your search engine, and go after those articles, they belong in your growing piles that may by now, be taking over your desk, your couch, the whole floor. Read another one of those thick summary articles that are in themselves extensive lit reviews, in the same rather tedious but conscientious manner. Again, pour through the references and grab anything that you missed earlier. Find the references, get them in PDF format, print them out, and add them to the piles. By the time you've done this three or four times, without knowing exactly when it happened, you're beginning to become an "expert."

Organize the piles: Getting ready to write
The next phase may be the most mentally challenging, as it involves figuring out how to organize the material you're going to review so its comprehensive and coherent. Sometimes its by topic, sometimes it may be historically sequential. Meaning, in what order were the studies done, where did the field begin, what were the first studies conducted relevant to the one you're going to do. I have also organized lit reviews by method of study --theoretical papers go in one pile and are approached together, empirical studies in another. Finding the links between sections of your review is difficult but again none of it is magic, no one has ownership of "the right way" and you may as well be confident that however you decide to organize the material is the best. Intellectual confidence goes a long way here. If you lack confidence, fall back on the old "fake it till you make it" and pretend you have it. If you are in the position of having to write a literature review, you are already at the top of your area. In fact, by the time you have the job of writing a literature review, you are in the top of your field in education and experience. Most people never dream of writing a lit review, so if its a task in front of you, you have every reason to feel confident and competent. You had to do something academically impressive in order to get to that position in the first place, so slide into feeling like you belong there. Take over and be your own boss.

Give yourself permission to be the expert you already are
Taking the reins here may be the ultimate secret to writing the literature review. At some point, as you keep gathering and reading more and more articles, you begin to note the same references cited over and over. This is a sign that you have really covered the terrain, you know a whole lot about the field, and you have become an expert. Expertise in activities like building a house, putting in and fixing plumbing, sewing a suit, filling cavities, repairing a heart valve, conducting an exposure and response prevention therapy, all require carrying out a process numerous times until the necessary actions become automatic. Writing a literature review requires a set of sequential steps over and over; searching for literature, printing it out (or xeroxing it in a library), reading it and noting whatever is important in your head or somewhere on paper, organizing numerous articles you've read in some coherent manner, and finally telling the story in written form. By the time you have to write a lit review you've already mastered most of the specific steps involved, they're already automatic. You know how to look for articles, you know how to read, you know how to take notes (maybe) or at least you know how to make lists, you know how to think about an outline or how to organize thoughts. Its easier than mastering other tasks that consist of things you don't already know how to do. If you give yourself permission to be the expert you already are and just dive into extensive reading and a little thinking, you're already there.

Kundalini Yoga and the Kumbh Mela

2007-11-22T06:23:00.000-08:00

For the past month or so I've been watching movies about Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism, and yoga. Perhaps its because I challenged myself late in October to run a fitness/yoga experiment, by practicing kundalini yoga every day. I've been successful thus far and it feels good, not earthshaking, but good. For those of you who don't know what kundalini yoga is, its considered the most "ancient" form of yoga that was entirely secret until an Indian named Yogi Bjahan brought it to the US in the 1970s with a plan to train teachers of kundalini yoga. Kundalini yoga focuses on the breath (which can be slow, or can be fast panting known as "breath of fire), chanting mantras, and positions that I at least find easier than the positions in many other types of yoga. This kind of yoga had never been seen except by the masters themselves, and the students of master practitioners. The first time I saw it was on a DVD by "Anna and Ravi" two famous kudalini yoga teachers/masters. I fell in love with it immediately which was a surprise because I had never liked all the other schools of yoga. I called this my "rock and roll yoga." I was however, sporadic in my practice until now, when I have successfully doing it for a half an hour or 45 minutes every day.

Last night I watched two movies about a huge event that take place in India every 12 years, a Hindu the Allahabad Kumbh Mela. In 2001, it was particularly important. Not only was it 12 years after the one before, but it was the last Kumbh Mela in a 12 year cycle, an event that occurs every 144 years. About 70 million people came to worship, many taking long pilgramages on foot from every corner of India and beyond. The Dalai Lama was there, Andy Weil was there, captured on the movies I watched. I have never seen anything quite like the Kumbh mela. At some point, a day marked to be the day everyone gets in the Ganges River, all 70 million head towards the Ganges to immerse themselves in the water. There is an overwhelming feeling of joy, conveyed by the participants as they splash in the river, some seeming to be engaged in an almost child-like water play. One group of well over 100 were yogis who have taken a vow to live out their lives completely naked; they ran en mass into the River.

Watching 70 million people --even on a DVD-- was a strange experience. I had never seen anything quite like it. The noise made by so many was like a background roar and almost deafening. When looking at the shots from higher up (I don't know if the filmmakers got these by helicopters, or there there were a few tall enough buildings) it appeared as if there were a massive ant colony swarming below. I had seen scenes of crowds in India, and it was that scene magnified by a million.

Everyone stayed in one or another encampment, all of which ran into each other, so from above it looked as if it were one long encampment centered in tents. Scenes of cooking included food being prepared in gargantuan pots, whatever it took to feed 70 million worshipers. Although the festival is a Hindu tradition, there were obviously Buddhist monks attending, along with tourists from various nationalities and ethnicities. Announcements were made by loudspeaker, though with the loud roar of 70 million people it was hard to imagine how anyone ever heard it. Clearly it did because one announcement called out to the people about a lost child, and then showed the mother and child being reunited. I would be surprised if there weren't many lost children, it was so vast and it seemed like people were literally body to body, like the subway in New York City at the worst rush hours. As I watched I thought if I ever attended the Kumbh Mela with my husband I would have us somehow tied together. To get out of there took a whole day of walking, or so someone who was followed through her experience there, reported to us, the viewers.

Both films did a remarkable job of capturing the Kumbh Mela, and I recommend them to everyone, to catch a glimpse of this extraordinary human experience. I wouldn't recommend one over the other; I think by watching both of them back to back, I got more of a picture of the Kumbh Mela. So try to rent #1) Kumbh Mela: The Songs of the River and 2) A Day in the Light. I don't know if they were particularly attractive to me, in the midst of this study of Tibetan Buddhism that I seem to be doing while getting myself to practice kundalini yoga every day, or if they would just be inherently fascinating to anyone, but you can always just give them a try.

Supply and Demand: What Happens When We Can't Afford Oil?

2007-11-18T17:19:00.000-08:00

A friend just forwarded an article from the New York Times, November 9th, "This time it's supply and demand." The rise of the price of oil is attributed to the rise in demand, initiated by the rapid growth of China and India. I think the anxiety behind this and other articles is that we have probably capped in our world wide supply of oil, not just the current growth in demand for oil by developing nations. While I have not heard that announced officially, I have heard that we will have reached the cap on oil potential within the next two years, however I suspect that has happened already. Meaning, we --the global we, everyone-- will never again be able to produce as much oil as we do currently, and this is taking into account world wide capacity. Demand for oil will grow exponentially, but the world's supply is on a downward march, there will be less and less oil available for consumption. This then is a real crisis, perhaps the first real crisis we have experienced in our lifetime, and here "our" refers to the "us" in the United States. Other countries have experienced real crisis before, but we haven't. I have wondered for years what it would be like to live here in my house in Noe Valley, San Francisco, when we have to grow as much as possible of our vegetables in our backyards and when we have to turn off the heat, and the air conditioning as well. We are lucky here in the Bay Area, we have a mild climate year round, we can survive easily without such fine climate control. I have already begun "practicing" water conservation, when I take a shower I only keep the water running briefly. I turn it off as I soap up my hair and turn it back on to rinse myself off. I find myself day dreaming, planning, my vegetable garden that will take over the yard. I want to talk about my fantasy with my husband and adult child who share he house with me. Most of the things I daydream about turn out take place. I should make clear that this is not a horror show I'm running in my head, its quite alright. Its rather the same as now, only some of our activities have changed. We're all somewhat stronger and healthier and could hardly consider the changes to be "hardships."

Ridiculous as this sounds, it seems likely that we are going to all be facing changes in our basic economic organization, although how soon or how abrupt these changes will come is unknown. How will we be able to commute long distances when the price of gas will drive us out of our cars, and public transportation is limited? What will my obsession with organization mean in a new form of social and economic organization? What happens to the perfect GTD lifestyle without a car? I daydream more about getting some kind of generator to use when supply of electricity becomes less reliable. I worry more about access to my keyboard than I do about food.

I promised many months ago to put up my "after" GTD picture, guess I need to get the camera out after I finish my weekly review, still a weak point in my GTD program. At least kundalini yoga requires nothing but internal energy. But I sure like to do it accompanied by that music with Sanskrit mantras, electricity dependent. Is everyone else quietly thinking about what things will be like when...

Schizophrenia: Genetics and...

2007-11-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

For those who have read my prior posts, you already know that I am quite certain that serious mental disorders are biological in origin, with some of the bio components resting in genetics, and some in other environmental physical factors (i.e., not really "psychological" or psychological alone). A study presented in Nature this week (Nature Oct 26, 2007, pp. 576-577) discusses the impact of the maternal placental environment. It appears that when monozygotic twins share a placenta, the concordance rate is quite a bit higher than when they each have their own placenta. Furthermore, there is an impact of maternal infection, with a significantly higher rate of schizophrenia and other severe mental disorders in adult offspring, when pregnancy occurred in the midst of a flu epidemic. This has been confirmed with animal models. The article concludes with "..Although a genetic element clearly contributes to schizophrenia and other mental disorders, the maternal-fetal environment must also be taken into account. Environment can alter genetic outcome, and vice versa..." p 577.

Bullied by Diversity

2007-10-21T11:21:00.001-07:00

For almost a month now I've not been posting because I've been actively censoring myself. Now I'm getting restless, the end of inhibition is at hand. I am tired of being bullied by "diversity."

I'm a psychologist who practices from what is called a "bio-psycho-social" perspective. That means exactly what it says, namely, when I think about anything psychological, be it a patient who has a problem, a construct I'm studying (for example survivor guilt), a review of some type of psychopathology, I first think "bio." What does biology have to do with this problem/person/disease entity? Biological factors are operating in everything, and I have to have them in mind, in order to move on to other levels of organization. If one of my clients tells me she's gotten depressed recently, I have to consider physical illness such as a thyroid malfunctioning, and I think about whether or not her depression might lift more quickly and effectively if she started a regime of anti-depressants, while also being engaged in a cognitive behavioral treatment of depression, in addition to some general supportive therapy. This then, is the "biological" part of the picture. It more elaborate than that, if someone has many depressed people in the family, they are likely to inherit genes that are vulnerable to depression.

Somewhere in the equation, as important as the biology of her mood state, I question her social situation and standing in her community. If someone is being put down by a boss, a close friend or family member, their likely to experience that awful sensation "my heart crashed." Then, the person gets depressed and forgets when and under what circumstances, the depression started. By tracing back their mood to the precipitating event, well its helpful. Often the dark mood passes. We need one another for limbic regulation --meaning in order to have well regulated comfortable state of being, we need other people being nice to us. If a person has been treated badly for much of his or her life, she might be used to being dysregulated, and might do little or nothing to surround herself with more supportive "regulating" people. She might engage in "self-sabotaging
behavior. If someone feels guilty about being better off than siblings or parents, she might feel she doesn't deserve to be happy, and if she is happy she will be making a loved one feel inadequate, simply by comparison. While there is of course a biological component to this, it falls more into the realm of what I call "psychological."

Finally, if someone is being put down because of group membership, namely gender, class, race, ethnicity, this too leads to a state of dysregulation, and I consider this to be the "social" component to the problem. Or should I say more accurately, the "socio-economic-political.' Here is where we can authentically take into account what people are calling diversity. Diversity may be a central issue, but no more so than is the bio or psycho component to a person's problems or sense of well being.

The diversity Nazis are being Nazis, rather like what happened in Germany. Only they are not promoting the "arian" race, but "minority" races, or really, some minority races. They are suggesting that the issue of diversity should be the most important issue over all other factors. Everyone is afraid to offer a different opinion, at risk of being called a racist or sexist. Everywhere I turn, there are people along with big organizations with a great deal of clout, pushing diversity, giving credence to a frightening trend in our culture. I am seeing people who deserve to be treated with respect, being ground down and harmed by the diversity police. Is the issue really about diversity, or is diversity becoming a bullying tactic, used in ugly political fights? Everyone is afraid of the diversity police, people are being silenced. Reverse racism is everywhere. The problem of male supremacy goes unmentioned. Diversity is not really about diversity, its about some kind of "payback" and therefore, its about oppressing yet another group of people.

Portrait of David Allen & GTD from Wired Magazine

2007-09-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

I just read a fascinating article about David Allen, author and founder of the organization movement, Getting Things Done (GTD) that appeared this week in the geek-oriented magazine, Wired.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/ff_allen?currentPage=all#
I can't say I was surprised to read of Allen's difficult past, or early years of adulthood, and nor was I surprised that there is some kind of "spiritual" underpinnings to Allen's yearnings. Allen and his methods appeal to me for some reason, and although I can't exactly put words to it, I feel I'm half-way there in implementing GTD. When family teases me about my new "cult" membership, I shrug and acknowledge there is some truth to the accusation. But I don't care. I'm sitting in my office and its almost the orderly environment I'm aiming for. I was looking for a chapter of the book I'm writing the other day, and didn't find it right away in a small stack of papers waiting to be processed. I knew it would take no more than two minutes to find the right place to hold the chapters awaiting editing, or input from someone who specializes in a chapter's content. I knew where the glitch in my system occurred, why I couldn't locate the item in 60 seconds or less. This is so far ahead of where I was six months ago, there's no comparison.

What is the spiritual element in GTD? I think the quest for order as a knowledge worker is undeniable. So much of what I do in a day is internally motivated and driven. No one is insisting that I conduct a study, or write up an article reporting on a study I've conducted. I have no CEO driving the ship. I think many knowledge workers are in the same situation, even if they're functioning within a company. I remember reading something that Drucker wrote about the new work environment, where everyone is an entrepreneur. If we are all steering our own ship, that leaves us without the natural mode of organization offered by social hierarchies. Accepting Allen's GTD gives us a "road map" as he calls it, and what person, floating around, working in a socially unstructured environment, wouldn't grasp onto an overarching plan by which to make decisions? I really don't care if I've fallen into a cult-like movement, in fact I'm ready for a refresher course and I wish Allen would plan another stop in the Bay Area.

I recommend to anyone who is interested in GTD, read this article from Wired.

How to do Research II: What is a Dissertation, what are the pieces of it?

2007-09-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

A dissertation is: 1) a long paper, focused on a topic of interest; 2) a review of "the literature" or studies that have been done on this topic in the past; 3) a project or something you actively do, to give you "data" about some aspect of your topic; 4) a write up of what you have done, written so carefully that anyone can read your dissertation and replicate your study 5) a written analysis of what your data tells you, or your "results" 6) a final essay on what your results mean, in the big picture of your topic. If you think of your dissertation as a long paper that includes these six concrete sections, you'll have an overview of the project.
The dissertation project: The "doing" part of the dissertation
Students tend to get frightened by #3, that is by the very idea of actually doing something, that will give them data. In fact this is the easiest part of the dissertation, its just doing research. We all do research all the time. If we're planning to go out for dinner with some friends we make a list in our minds of possible restaurants to go to. We might look up on the Internet one or two that we haven't heard much about. We might ask the friends we're going out with what they feel like eating. In this way we collect some different types of data, and then, based on time, energy, interest, preferences, mood, we make a decision. To decide on the restaurant we've done some research. We do the same thing when we're figuring out what movie to go to, or where to go on vacation, or what classes to take in a semester in school. Doing research for the dissertation is no harder. It might involve more steps, it might take longer, but the process is basically the same.

Doing your project
This part of the dissertation is the easiest and often the most fun. To help you on your way in terms of figuring out what you are going to do, what question you are going to pose and what methods you are going to use to find answers to your questions, it is wise to have a group that you meet with regularly. This is what happens in research groups, and is called the "lab meeting." Everyone fills everyone else in on what they've done that week, what ideas they've had, what they've read, who they talked to, where they're at in the research process. Lab meetings are fun. There is no "right" or "wrong" in a brainstorming session. There is certainly nothing to be afraid of in this part of the dissertation process. What you are going to do doesn't need to be remarkably creative. It often is just another tiny step in finding something out about a topic. Students tend to think they have to do something that is earth shaking, when all they have to do is study one small piece of a big problem. The smaller the objective of the dissertation, the more doable it tends to be. In figuring out what you are going to do, make it small, make it concrete, something you can visualize, imagine in detail.

Think of Outcomes (What is the desired outcome?) Think of Next Action (What is the next action?)
Early in the dissertation its time to start thinking in terms of "Desired Outcome" and "Next Action." What is the desired outcome of your project: Its a completed dissertation (as the large outcome), and at each step of the way, you have many desired outcomes. If you consider the desired outcome at each step of the way, you are then able to break what you need to do down into very concrete and doable "next actions." Learning to think of desired outcomes and next actions will make the whole process move smoothly and continuously. Instead of freaking out about the enormity of the whole dissertation, you will begin to think in a much more concrete and doable framework. Each week you can ask yourself 'what is the desired outcome" for the week. From there you consider "what is the next action" to lead you to your desired outcome. Your brain is a great information processing and planning machine. Whether or not you deliberately try to consider the next actions, once you establish a desired outcome for a piece of the project, or for a period of time, you will automatically begin to consider what might be your next actions.

From Lifehack: How to read like a scholar

2007-09-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

Lifehack has a great blog today, for students about how to read like a scholar. Its one of those blogs that is good enough to repeat here, given that my students are struggling with this right now, as they begin to work on their dissertations.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/advice-for-students-how-to-read-like-a-scholar.html
So here it is:
Reading as an academic exercise involves not just gleaning the content form a book or essay but engaging with it. We read not just to learn some new set of facts but also to learn how facts are put together to form an argument, to learn what kinds of arguments are acceptable in our chosen disciplines, and to prompt us towards further research. Reading of this sort raises as many questions as it answers, or more.

While reading, students should keep the following questions in mind:

What is the author trying to say? This seems obvious, but it seems to be a stumbling block for many students. I’m convinced that the failure to ask this simple question is what leads students to avoid reading, to feel that reading is a chore or, worse, busy-work. Remember, authors — academic or otherwise — aren’t in the business of writing just to bore students; there’s something important they want to communicate. Granted, not all writing communicates well, but regardless of the writer’s skill, if a professor assigned a reading, it’s because there’s something there worth knowing about.
How does the author say what they’re trying to say? What evidence do they use? What style of argument are they making? How are they positioning themselves? You’d be surprised how many people read an essay about, say, infanticide (the killing of newborn children) and assume the author is advocating this practice instead of simply describing it. These readers totally misread the author’s position.
Why is the author’s point important? If you can figure out why the author felt he or she needed to write the article or book in your hands, you’re a good way towards figuring out what they’re trying to say. What contribution does the work make to the author’s discipline, to our understanding of society or the world? What problems are they trying to solve?
Do you agree or disagree with the author? Why? Just because something’s in print doesn’t make it right. As a student, it is essential that you read critically, with an eye towards inconsistencies in an author’s argument or evidence. Are there other explanations for the data they present? Is the author’s interpretation colored by his or her religion, professional background, political orientation, or social position? Note: far too many students seem to think that criticizing style is a good substitute for critiquing substance. It’s not. A lot of academic writing is stilted, difficult (sometimes deliberately so), or just plain bad; this does not mean that the ideas are not good.
How does this work connect with other works? What’s new about it (or, if it’s an older work, what was new when it was published)? What disciplinary debates is the author engaging? How does this work build on, or refute, earlier works by other authors? How does it fit with the author’s other work? What other work is the one you’re reading like?
What is the social context of the work? Always consider the historical moment in which a work was created. What kind of person wrote it, and for what kind of audience? What historical events shaped the author’s perceptions and ideas? How was their world different from yours, and how was it similar?

These questions should be on your mind even if you can’t read the whole book. It’s a sad fact of college life that not everything that is assigned can be given the same level of attention. In grad school, for instance, I was regularly charged with reading three (or more) hefty books a week, plus supporting essays and commentaries — while carrying out my own research at the same time. This is not humanly possible. You have to learn to prioritize reading, and to approach it systematically to make sure you get as much as possible out of whatever amount of reading you can manage.

Here’s how you do it:

Skim the book. Examine the table of contents to get a feeling for the structure and main points of the book. Flip through the chapters, skimming the first few paragraphs of each, and then the section headings. Check the index for any topics you feel are especially important. Then, if you have time;
Read the Introduction and conclusion. Most of the author’s theoretical position will be laid out in the introduction, along with at least a summary of the chapters and sections within. The conclusion revisits much of these points, and usually gives a good overview of the data or other evidence. Sometimes the conclusion is not marked as such; in this case, read the last chapter. Then, if you have time;
Dip in. Read the chapters that seem most relevant or interesting. Get a sense for what the author is trying to accomplish. Flip through the rest of the book and look more closely at anything that catches your eye. Then, if you have time;
Finish the book. Read the whole thing. If you know you’ll have time, skip 1 - 3 and just read, cover to cover.

Obviously it’s best to read the whole book; you’ll miss a lot reading anything less. But given the choice between not reading at all and skimming to at least get a taste of what you’re missing, I say, go for skimming. And try to keep yourself better organized in the future so that you don’t shortchange your entire education.

How to do Research: Part I

2007-09-21T06:07:00.000-07:00

The mystique of research
This is the first of a series on how to do research. Research carries with it a mystique, a vague reputation that it is very hard to do and that you have to be super smart to do it. Reality check here: Research is easier than most things that psychologists do, if you make a mistake its only some numbers and no one gets hurt, you can apologize and correct it. In clinical work if you make a mistake a client might get hurt, there are human lives involved in the endeavor. Research has no such hidden disasters, consequences are small and something anyone can deal with.

Finding a topic: Gathering data about interests
Research begins with ideas about topics, or research begins with topic. How do you find your research topic? You find your topic by being honest with yourself. One of the many myths about research is that you shouldn't’t do anything that is “too close to home” or of great personal interest. This is dead wrong. Most of the great scientists in our field have began with something of personal interest. Seligman began studying depression because his father lapsed into a terrible depression after he had a stroke. Sternberg from Yale had been studying intelligence. Then his marriage broke up and he fell in love with someone. Suddenly his research focus shifted to love. You need to choose a topic of great personal interest. Choosing a topic because you think it will be easy or convenient will never work. Choosing a topic because it is someone else’s interest will never work. I recommend that you walk around for a few months with a small notebook in your pocket. Whenever you find yourself thinking about something of interest, or worrying about something of interest, write it down in your notebook. When you go to a bookstore and you think no one is looking, where do you go? When you go to Amazon and you’re browsing, where do you go, what books are you looking at? When you’re browsing on the interest and time flies by without a trace, where are you anyway, what topic or ideas are you researching? Write these all down in your notebook, and you’re well on your way to coming up with a research topic.

Making a list
Read and re-read the topics you’ve identified. Type them all up on a giant list. If you dare, bring them up in a group and see what discussion ensues. A topic that starts a big conversation is likely to be one you’re interested in. The conversation follows from the excitement you have generated. If you bring up a topic and there is no response, chances are you aren’t really excited by it yourself, and doing research on it will be like pulling teeth.

Go back to your list of topics, and select the ones that most excite you. Remember not to worry about methods, or convenience. Methods will follow after you have studied your topic for a while, and will be derived from you research question, but that is still a way off.

A list of what excites you
Make a smaller list of topics that most excite you. Then go to Google Scholar and put in one of your favorites, use several combinations of words and see what comes up. Print it out. Get the articles that are easily available online. Go through your school’s library/Internet system to get access to the full text of those not readily available. Skim the abstracts of the articles you have. Pay attention to your heart as you skim them –are you instantly bored, or do you want to go back to Google Scholar to search for more articles?

Move on to the next topic on your “most exciting” list, and repeat this process. Do this a few more times, and pay attention to how your experience with each topic feels. Through this process you will discover the topic you want to study.

Early to Rise..Its become a habit

2007-09-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 4AM this morning, without an alarm clock or wake up call. I've been doing this for about 30 days. Finally I think its becoming a habit. When I awake now I go right into my office. I leave my computer in my office in the evening, so that I have to go to my office (out of bed) when I awaken in the morning. I used to take my computer to bed, which meant that I stayed in bed with it in the morning. Now I am forced to go to my office. My first action is to check my email to see if anything important has come in. I respond to any emails I have to answer. Then I write. Sometimes my writing is focused on the book I'm writing "How to help almost anyone: A psychotherapy Primer" and sometimes on something else; an article, this blog, a letter, notes for my wiki, etc. The point is that I am using the early morning hours for writing. I have been writing every day since 1970, this is a very old and well-established habit. Writing early in the morning is a brand new habit. It far surpasses writing in the evening. Checking my email and writing early in the morning have become my morning scaffold.

I have once again followed David Seah and joined a gym. Its luxurious, and includes a "junior Olympic swimming pool." I am swimming, and suddenly remembering how much I love swimming. As a child I fell in a pool at age 3, and began to swim naturally. Swimming was my favorite activity as a child. I am swimming again, it feels wonderful. However it takes too long to get to the club, work out, and drive home to go every day. I am alternating days in the gym with Kundalini Yoga so I do some physical activity every day. This is the habit I am working on now, for the rest of September and the first half of October. I am doing the Seinfeld trick of marking each day I do my new habit on a calendar, hung up on the bulletin board behind my bed. Tracking progress on a new habit makes it concrete, tangible. Making things tangible is how to make things work. Be concrete about everything you do, and you will make progress.

MCEP (Mandatory Continuing Education for Psychologists): Rereading a Great Book

2007-09-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

What You Can Change...And What You Can't
It's license renewal time, and to renew I had to take courses to make sure I'm keeping up with my field. I admit, I love continuing education. It gives me an excuse to read some psychology and to attend meetings/workshops/classes that I want to go to but wouldn't allow myself the luxury if I didn't have it as "mandatory." Those who have followed my ongoing story might remember I attended a great three day conference on "learning and the brain" which allotted me 19.5 units of my 36 mandated units. The past month I've done "online" courses, and I loved most of them. Most recently I took a course in Marty Seligman's book, What you can change...And what you can't. I read this years ago and loved it, and reading it again was even better. Seligman may have his weaknesses, like being a salesman at moments. But the story he's selling is spectacular, music to my ears. He's the daddy of "positive psychology," and before that new school in my field, he was the scientist and then popularizer of "learned helplessness" and "Learned Optimism." Seligman's basic message is that how we explain things that happen to us, or our "attributional style" defines how we feel about ourselves and the world. If we explain negative events and experiences as our own fault, likely to effect everything in our lives, and likely to go on forever (or for a long time anyway we're pessimistic and likely to be prone to depression. If we explain positive events as due to something outside of ourselves (someone else, luck, chance), unlikely to have much of an effect on our lives, and likely to be short lived, we're pessimists. If however, we take credit for good things that happen, if we think the good thing will have a powerful effect and that it will go on for a long time or even forever, we're optimists. Seligman focused primarily on how we explain negative events and the link these explanations have to depression. In research carried out in my lab we found out that how we explain positive events is equally important to depression proneness. If I can't take credit for some terrific event or experience, I'm in trouble, I'm at high risk for depression. Seligman's theory of attributional (or explanatory) style is, bottom line, a gem of a psychological theory and one that has been of use to me in understanding our psychology.

In this short and easy-read book, Seligman talks to us about the problems we can fix, and those we are stuck with. He chases after major myths in psychology (and in the whole culture) and lays them out starkly --there is no way to miss his message.
Experiences in childhood do not cause psychological problems
Weight is based on genetics, not psychology
Dieting backfires, if you diet, you'll gain it all back more easily each time
No treatment for alcoholism/addiction is better than a natural course of recovery
Childhood experiences are not correlated with proneness to problems with alcohol or other drugs
Obsessive compulsive disorder can't be effectively treated by talk therapy alone
Sex abuse is not necessarily the source of psychological problems
Sexual identification and orientation are not up for change
Sexual preferences show up in first adolescent experiences and rarely change later
Seligman holds on to the fundamental significance of a person's biology, while promoting psychotherapies that help change those pathogenic beliefs that are changeable. There's hardly a line in the book that misses the mark, and that isn't grounded in psychological science. He first published it in 1993, and its still right on almost all accounts, 14 years later. How many books can claim that?

The beauty of continuing education is that we are able to get credit for sitting around reading something like "What you can change...and what you can't..." It reminds me of how much I love to read in my chosen field, and that I have a passion for psychology. We get so ground down with the tasks we have to do, the nitty gritty of our daily lives. I thought "oh no, I have to get my MCEP units this month, my license has to be renewed by September 30th" forgetting that this was a chance to have some fun. I think I might extend this and take "just one more" online course...

Fascinating Interview: "Green Guilt"

2007-09-09T06:27:00.000-07:00

Linkedin
I received an E-mail last week, "Someone in Linkedin wants to contact you." For those of you who don't know what "linked in" is --its some kind of connection service that I joined a while ago. I read that a blogger, Matt Cornell, had put out to the universe a question about "How do you start a consulting service"? Having developed my thoughts about how to start a private practice (in my case, a psychotherapy practice) I felt like writing a response to the question, and this meant joining Linkedin. It was an investment, something like $2oo, more than I should spend, but I was too curious too just forget it. I joined, having no idea of what it was. It turned out to be a service that connects people. Linked in went through my address book, and told me every person who was there who was also a member of Linkedin. I then was given the option of being able to invite anyone on that list to become one of my Linkedin connections. I invited everyone I felt comfortable inviting. From there it showed me everyone who my connection was also connected to, and of course it turned out to include many many people. It is built on the idea of degrees of connection, or whatever that is called. It is based on the theory that everyone is only six degrees away from connecting to what should be very distant other people. So if I know 50 people (for example) and each one of them knows 50 other people, I can get to those other people relatively other easily. And of course those 2nd degree of connection also know 50 other people, and this is then a rapidly growing chain of connections --its an exponentially growing list of connections. I was instantly intrigued by the possibilities of Linkedin, and I was glad I had moved on my impulse to join the Linkedin fraternity (or sorority), although what use it would ever be for me remained unknown.

Then, on the first day of my large class last spring, a young man who was a student in the class came over to me at the break and said "I saw you on Linkedin and invited you to become one of my connections." I then remembered getting an invitation from someone I didn't know. I had accepted the invitation, still having no idea of who the person was. Mystery solved. I have continued to get invitations to be people's connection in Linkedin, and the list of spiraling connections continues to grow. However how this might be useful to me had not shown itself until this past week when this E-mail arrived in my in-box, saying that someone wanted to get in touch with me.

A USA Reporter on "Green Guilt"
I responded and this took me to a message from a reporter at USA Today, Janet Kornblum. She was writing an article about "Green Guilt" or the guilt that many of us are experiencing when we feel that we are failing to be "green" enough. As a member of Linkedin, she had done a search there, using the term "psychologist" and "guilt." I don't often write about my life as a scientist here, but in my professional life I have been conducting research on guilt for over a decade. So Janet's search brought her right to my doorstep. She wanted to interview me on the topic, and I accepted her invitation. People often complain about what the press does to them, but I have generally had good experiences with the press, and so I didn't hesitate in accepting Janet's invitation, I thought it would be fun. It was.

How to change public attitude
We had a great conversation about the guilt many of us feel about our various environmentally wasteful habits. We branched out to discuss how one changes public opinion about social issues. I discussed the change we have all seen in attitudes about smoking (for example); it used to be considered cool and "adult" to smoke. Today smokers feel like junkies, sneaking their cigarettes in back alleys so to to speak. It used to be considered cool to beat your wife if she "misbehaved." When police officers were called out to deal with a domestic violence situation, they would take the guy out to walk around the block and express their sympathy for them, living with such a difficult woman. Today batterers get arrested. Public attitudes have changed, domestic violence is a punishable crime. Women who are being beaten don't always keep it such a secret, and this all is the result of the women's movement and a massive national campaign put on by the Family Violence Prevention Fund, centered in San Francisco. Public attitudes have changed dramatically, much as attitudes about smoking have changed. And so it goes with environmental issues; a focus on the environment used to be the baby of a fringe group in our society. Today it is increasingly everyone's baby. The result thus far is a growing massive public movement and awareness of global warming and the tenuous state of our planet. Some months ago I wrote a blog about global warming, while feeling guilty about my own horrendous overuse of paper. I have plenty of green guilt and I had fun talking to Janet about the issue.

Guilt-induction is not an effective vehicle of social change
Making people feel guilty about a social issue is not an effective strategy for promoting change. Those so-called trainings based on making European Americans feel guilty about "white privilege" in order to decrease racism are doomed to failure. When people are made to feel guilty, the effect is to raise their defenses. Defensive people can't hear about other's experiences. Raising defensiveness is a terrible strategy for anything. This has to be as true about environmental issues, as it is for overcoming racism or sexism.

How guilty are we feeling as a nation about polluting the environment and using up natural resources? I used to think there were no private solutions to public problems. I still believe this, but with less conviction. It may be that if enough of us were environmentally conscious and were willing to act on our belief, there might be a small dent in the massive damage we are doing to the environment. But how great would that be, if nothing bigger happens? Probably very limited. Most people have no disretionary income. They don't have the personal resources to buy the part-electric car which is so expensive. Most of us don't have the money to buy or rent a home in the city, so instead we have to live in the suburbs where housing is cheaper, and commute to work in the city, adding to the environmental burden. How much good is it for us to recycle? What does it mean to the environment for large numbers of people to recycle? How is our garbage adding to global warming? What effect is our recyling our household garbage having on the larger environment? I don't have an answer to these questions. I suspect that things we are able to do as private individuals are relatively ineffective in saving our planet from the bigger effects of a basically non-sustainable economic organization. How many of us are feeling guilty for the fact that the United States uses more energy than any other nation?

A Mind Experiment about Guilt: What are the benefits and what are the shadows?
What is the benefit of feeling guilty about how we live? Does feeling guilty really change behavior? There are various types and degrees of guilt. Some kinds of guilt allow us to live in social groups peacefully. Here's a mind experiment. Imagine that someone has harmed you. Then imagine that the person who harmed you feels guilty about it. Next imagine that someone has harmed you and feels no guilt about it. Now imagine in what condition you could or would forgive the person. In the first condition, when the person feels guilt about harming you, there's a good chance you would be forgiving. But in the second condition, when the person who harmed you feels no guilt about it, you'd be far less likely to forgive them. Guilt is an essential ingredient in the process of forgiving. This is the positive function of guilt. But ruminative guilt, or guilt for imaginary crimes, is connected with depression. Too much guilt is inhibiting and life destroying. What about the environment? Does it make sense for me to feel guilty about my use of paper? I don't have the answer to this one, but if someone reading this has some ideas about it, please leave a comment.

Labor Day Evening

2007-09-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

The Sopranos
I've been watching the Sopranos with family for weeks now. The last few days we moved on to Year 5 (and yes we've gone all the way from week 1, year one) and today I decided I'm out of the playing. In year 4 an edge of gratuitous violence crept in, and I wasn't just sickened, I got bored. That means, I suppose, it made me too anxious and I couldn't stand it any more. Year 5 is even worse. So I bow out. I think my household made a decision to move with me, and in the name of togetherness, we're moving on to watching House (which I have never seen). The oddest thing is that I never watch TV, but for a month or two over the past 15 years. I had an Ex-File summer the way this has been the Soprano season. I ordered Bones to take a look at it while I'm at it, I think it might be related to the X-Files in style. Or maybe its time I get back to work. Being a knowledge worker feels like an expressed aversion to labor. It's difficult to remember that teaching writing, continual reading of the scientific press are their own form of labor.

Labor Day: The Weekly Review

2007-09-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Weekly Review
Yesterday I finally did my first complete weekly review. The "Weekly Review" as its called by the GTD people, is a time set aside to empty inboxes, gather in one place and enter into a data base all those index cards, circa notebook items, Molskine notebook items, and misc data from my computer (that's yet another data "collection" point.) Then, I print out my calendars from last week and the two weeks ahead of me, print out my "next action" list that I keep on Vitalist (www.vitalist.com) , print out my "tickler list," the "waiting for list," topping this off with a complete list of projects. I keep my list of "maybe/someday" in Vitalist, as I like to review it weekly to see if there is anything I want to get too soon, or even now. With everything now in hard copy, I read through it all. This way I keep abreast of what I am supposed to be doing, what I am in fact doing, and what I don't want to be doing yet. I also followed Allen's 2 minute rule. When I ran into anything in my in-boxes that I could deal with (meaning actually do) in 2 minutes or less, I did it right then and there, as soon as I ran into it. By mid-day my office was about as organized and efficient as I have ever seen it. Its time for another picture, the "After" picture of my work space.

Now that I've done the weekly review thoroughly I think I can keep it up weekly. What stopped me until yesterday was the amount of "stuff" that had gathered in my two wooden "in-baskets." I was afraid of the "stuff." I started the review at 6AM which left me plenty of time, no matter how long it took. I followed David Allen's recommendation to deal with only 1 piece of paper at a time, and deal with it then and there (throw out, file in references, file in ticker file for dealing with later (whatever day I file it in, in the tickler file). As I went, I added next action items to lists on Vitalist so I wouldn't forget any piece of paper representing an activity that I put into the tickler, references, "to read" folder, etc. I am almost there, I almost have a mind like water, the promised outcome of following the GTD method of life organization.

The difference GTD has made in my life is astounding. After planning things for years, I am finally getting them done, even while spending much more time on the "defining" of work phase of my work process. I never thought I would enjoy organizing so much. Allen suggests keeping your inbox and next action lists attractive, and I have done this. When my to do list on Vitalist begins to look stale, with ambiguous items, or otherwise overwhelming, I freshen items up, delete them, throw them into the Maybe/Someday category. As those of you who read this blog know, it has taken from March 1st to now to really get into this process as thoroughly as I have --six months to carry out a thorough weekly review, in fact six months to really understand the week review, what it means, and that I can do it.

How can I take this into my clinical work and my teaching?
I am thinking about how I can bring this method into my clinical work, with clients or into my teaching when students don't ask for it? I have many clients who are upset about their lack of organization. I quietly mutter about GTD, but if they don't immediately pick up on it, I drop it. Most of my students in most of my classes and seminars over the years have struggled with poor organization skills. Last year I tried to bring GTD into my seminar and failed. The students simply weren't interested. School begins next week, maybe I'll give it another try. I think that implementing GTD, if only for the dissertation process, might yield terrific results. Since my seminar is for third year doctoral students who are beginning to work on their dissertations, I wish they'd give me a chance to teach them GTD. Its only by teaching does one really get to know anything, any skill, any area of knowledge. If I can be "doing GTD" anyone can and I'm ready to begin passing it on.

The Dalai Lama, Tibet and the APA

2007-08-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Dalai Lama
Yesterday I watched a run of movies about the life of the Dalai Lama and his escape from Tibet to India where he remains as Tibet continues to be destroyed by the Chinese. I had heard from Paul Ekman, a famous emotion researcher, about his remarkable experience when he was in the presence of the Dalai Lama. He felt peace for the first time in his life. His proneness to anger dissippated, and when he returned to the United States, he continued to be an altered person. It was three months before his temper returned, and I think he then went into some type of Buddhist training, although I am not certain about that. I heard about a man who was cooking for the Dalai Lama when he was in San Francisco, and he too reported that being in the presence of the Dalai Lama was a remarkable, life enhancing experience. There is something in this story that brings a lesson to all of us, as the tales of global warming become more realistic every day, and we see that the effects are already upon us. I do Kundalini Yoga, but I keep lapsing in my program. The mind training involved in this simple practice is something I need, and the question I pose to myself is: Why do I turn my back on my practice for weeks at a time? When should I be doing my practice, what time of the day? Will it make a difference if I build that into my "scaffold" that a wrote about a few weeks ago? I am still constructing it, I've made great progress, but a Yoga practice is not yet in it. I think I could take some hints from Steve Pavlina who said something about getting on your running shoes as the way to get yourself running. Pulling out my yoga mat at the same time every day, then putting on my yoga pants might be the simple answer to my dilemma. There is something in the practice of monks and yogis that effects the brain as studied by fMRI. What are we all waiting for?

The American Psychological Association and Atrocities

Last week the APA convention was held in San Francisco, so it was easy for me to attend. I only went for two half days, one to present a poster describing some of my research, and the second to register and attend a few meetings. I went to hear Phil Zimbardo and as usual his session was worth discussion. Zimbardo has been campaigning for some years now, in defense of our soldiers involved in torture in Iraq and Guantanamo. Zimbardo was the scientist who carried out the famous Stanford Prison study. The study selected normal healthy, well adjusted Stanford students for participation. Some were to be "prisoners" and some were to be "prison guards." Zimbardo had thought that dispositional differences between the prisoners and guards would determine their behavior in the course of the study. What happened instead was that the prison guards got carried away, thaqnks to the conditions of the study, and began to exert such cruelty upon the prisoners that the study had to be stopped after only five days. Zimbardo and the research team concluded from this study that normal healthy, non sociopathic people will turn into perpetrators of absolute evil given the right conditions. He said "You think you know yourself, and you think you know the people near to you, but you don't. You have no way to know what you will do under certain conditions." He spoke of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo conditions, the orders from the authorities, everyone going along with it, secrecy, all producing a situation in which ordinarily kind people became evil. Could this happen in a community in which everyone engaged in a Buddhist practice? I think not. As a country became Buddhist over the past thousand years, all prior tribal warring stopped and a blanket of peace came over the land we know as Tibet. It was the migration of hundreds of thousands of Chinese that turned Tibet into a blood bath. The pictures from the news showing the atrocities committed against the monks remind me of Abu Ghraib.

I used to think "there are no private solutions" and perhaps its true, there aren't. However, why ignore a private solution when one becomes obvious, just for some old political principle. A daily yoga practice belongs on my morning scaffold. I can do a 30 day experiment. I wake up at 5:30 every morning now, automatically, what started as a 30 day experiment became a wonderful new habit. I'll report back on how it goes.

A quiet Sunday morning

2007-08-12T08:17:00.000-07:00

This will be a short one. I've been experimenting with rising early again, as part of the bigger experiment, creating a scaffold for my day. I set my alarm for 4:30 each morning, get up when it goes off, and first deal with email. I'm going through it as fast as possible. If something requires action I'm following the GTD 2 minute rule. Meaning if I can deal with it in 2 minutes, I do. If not but I have to do something with it, it goes into the "action" folder on my desk top and I enter it into the next action list in Vitalist (www.vitalist.com). This means I am clearing out my inbox very quickly, and nothing is forgotten. When my email inbox is dealt with, and this takes about 40 minutes to an hour, I start writing. I have several projects going on, and I get to choose what I'm writing according to how I'm feeling. This goes on until 10 or 11, when I begin making phone calls on my next action list. So I think I might be developing the morning routine or scaffolding. I have my fingers crossed that I can keep this up. There's not question about it, having those early morning hours for writing is precious.

8/2/07 Wanted: Morning & Evening Scaffold on Which to Construct the Day

2007-08-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

The scaffold might be emerging..
Last week I wrote about plans to build a "scaffold" to help structure my life as a home-office information worker. Zen Habits just wrote a rather inspiring post about the same, speaking of a morning and evening routine http://zenhabits.net/2007/08/tips-to-establish-a-morning-evening-routine-with-an-august-challenge/.

I’ve written before about how morning and evening routines can create some sense of sanity and calm in your life.These are two habits that you can start today that will make a big improvement in your day.

Now, because of different things that have come up in my life, I’ve fallen a bit out of my routines. I’ve also been changing them over the last few months as my needs have changed.

So, this month, my August Challenge (read more about the Challenge below) will be to focus on re-establishing my daily routines, refined and simplified.

This week has been unusual in that I have a family member sick in the hospital and I'm one of the family responsible for frequent visits etc., so my days are scheduled somewhat differently. Nevertheless it has seemed to me to be the perfect time to build my scaffold, meaning, to build a scaffold that I do every day and that will help me get oriented to the day of work, and then the orientation to winding down, whatever that will be. So here is what I've come to so far: I've only been developing a routine in the evening, the mornings are still full of random email checks, reading my favorite bloggers, and other disorienting activities.

Building my routine...
I have to work on the mornings, and that is my commitment to myself in August. I'll put it up here when I've figured it out. My evenings however, are taking shape. Around 9PM I do Kundalini Yoga, at least 20 minutes and often more like 40 or 50 minutes. Then I shower, or take a bubble bath. This is something I hadn't done in years, and I don't know if I'll keep it up, but it seemed like a good idea this week. In fact last night I even lit candles in the bathroom and meditated while lounging in the tub. Next comes a cold shower, and drying off, getting into sleep clothes. Finally I talk to my husband, sometimes watch a movie (the movie part is entirely out of character, just thought I would try it right now, catch up on the culture a bit since I'm on break from teaching). The biggest change is what follows, I don't fall into 4 or 5 hours of web searching, crawling. Instead I only allow myself only an hour on the computer, and then I review my next action list, my project list, loosely plan the next day. Finally I read, no more computer. I am falling asleep earlier this way, and I am quite relaxed by the time I fall asleep. This seems to me, to be the scaffold for the evening, if only I keep it up for the whole month. And now, its time to build the morning scaffold which thus far seems more difficult. Maybe writing this here will inspire me to get moving, and next week I'll be able to write about the morning routine.

July 20, 2007: Creating a Scaffold

2007-07-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

Steve Pavlina wrote a terrific post for someone like me, working at home and wasting far too much time reading email and surfing the web. http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/07/how-to-create-a-personal-productivity-scaffold/
The whole day can go by with little accomplished when I end up reading favorite blogs all day, in between hits of "catching up" with my email. Sure I've kept my inbox to 0 but that can't be the whole of my day. I want to get over this bad habit, replace it with better habits. Steven is the big "30 days to form a habit" man (I don't know where he really got that data, that 30 days in a row is what it takes to form a habit). But he maintains that in order to form a new habit, first it is wise to have what he calls a day's "scaffold" in place. This, he says, will help me stop the nonproductive use of my time. Steve reports that the way he has managed the email-surfing-email problem was to create a scaffold, a structure or edifice to hold the beginning and the end of his work day. With a highly structured beginning, he is able to the proceed to be productive in the ways he wants all through the day. His beginning includes a simple review of the day, a short period of journaling, meditating and a few other activities that he does somewhat by a checklist. His whole "morning scaffold" takes an hour, from 8 to 9. Now I know from other Pavlini posts that he has already gone out and run or lifted weights or whatever else his current exercise programs consists of, and that he does this every day. He failed to include that in his description of his "scaffold" or morning routine, and this is an important emission. If I were getting up at 5 everyday, running for 45 minutes, eating breakfast, I would be ready for a sold scaffold by 8, and it would be a whole new me. I tried getting up early for a few weeks, and it fell apart, I couldn't keep it up, I simply got too tired. Right now I am trying to establish a daily Kundalini yoga habit.

I like the idea of establishing a "scaffold" for my day in my at home office. I'll let you know how I progress; I'll work on it over the weekend when things are varied (family demands) from my usual patterns.

"15 Ways to Use a Wiki:" And --How I use my own Wiki..

2007-07-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

A great post on Web Worker Daily: (http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/07/13/15-productive-uses-for-a-wiki/ ) by Leo Babauta, provides a detailed list of ideas for how to use a personal wiki.

"A few of the things that are emerging about web workers is that 1) we do just about everything online; 2) we want to be able to access it from any computer, anywhere; and 3) it’s hard to organize all the stuff we use and do, in our work and personal lives.

But online organization dozen’t have to be complicated. There are many tools for organizing all our stuff, of course, but one of the simplest is the wiki.

We’re all familiar with wikis, of course — Wikipedia being the most famous example, but many other useful wikis abound on the Internet. But one of the most productive forms of wikis is the personal wiki, which you can create at any number of sites."

"Once you’ve got your personal wiki set up.. this post lists "15 ways to use a wiki productively, web worker style, beginning with a to-do list."

I still can't say what exactly a "wiki" is except it is a place where I do some heavy personal planning, complaining, whining, and writing up my goal statements and I do it fast. So a wiki is fast. I have mine on the zoho site http://wiki.zoho.com/HomePage.html/ meaning I didn't have to know anything to get it going, and I still don't know anything to keep it there, always available when I log in to my Zoho Wiki . Zoho (http://www.zoho.com/) is a very cool service offering online documents that take and provide ms compatible files, a project planning program, a personal wiki service, and many other options. I like it. I've been using my wiki there for a few months. I also use BackPack (www.Backpackit.com) for some of my listmaking which I could do entirely on my zoho wiki, but I love the aesthetics of Backpack, its ajaxy feel. I like the big fonts, the way the lists look. So I use that for lists that I return to, but I use my wiki for sudden jerky planning that I'm not likely to use again. I date the entries, so lets say its a planning diary that maybe I won't ever look at again. I write down a sudden commitment to FOCUS because I've been unfocused for hours at a time, or I write down an evening's plan, that doesn't belong on my Vitalist "to do list" because its too spur of the moment, its intended to get me up off my ass, to begin a day or evening of ten minute dashes. My wiki is a tool, part of the process that I sometimes need in my working, its only for process for that matter. I don't use it for storing for the future but for motivating me, organizing my spinning around mind, to get going right now.

I love my wiki
I recommend a wiki for everyone. It can be shared, or very private. If you want to get started, go to http://www.zoho.com/ and start your own wiki, free, fast and effective. There are many other sites providing free wiki service, this happens to be the only one I've tried, so I don't know about recommending anything else. I love my wiki, its the way I get inspired when my enthusiasm and spirit is drifting downward. And I have a record of my process, not that I look at it again. This one is for me, not history.

7/13/07: Movie Review: Politics, Suburbia, and Sicko

2007-07-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

I've been doing something lately highly out of character. I've been watching movies and documentaries almost nightly, some on the TV screen and some projected onto a wall in our living room, where I feel like I'm in a theater with all the comforts of home. I fell into Michael Moore's new masterpiece (and I mean that by way of the Internet. I don't know if its illegal, but someone sent it to me, and voila, I had it. I heard that he heard it has been released over the Internet and he said that was fine by him. I figure the artist has to be the real owner. But if I'm going to get into legal trouble for this confession, I hope someone will warn me.

A disturbing moment that went on all evening
Watching Sicko turns out to be one of those riveting but deeply disturbing moments in modern life. I know we're bombing countries where we shouldn't even be, I know we're engaged in torture tactics which apparently (according to a group of psychologists who have studied the matter) were developed by psychologists working with the military. I our poor are getting poorer and our rich richer, I know highly educated people are out of work and facing destitution. I know people are wanting to believe the message of the movie and book "The Secret" --that what you think determines what happens to you, and if you can start thinking about good things, you will to attract good things, coming from the universe to you. What I didn't know was the main message of Sicko, namely that having health insurance is no protection from poor medical care when disaster strikes. You may carry fine insurance and then get cancer, to discover that your carrier considers the treatment being recommended is still in "research phase" and therefore you are ineligible to receive, unless you want to pay out of pocket. Moore brings it home, in enough cases and enough ways to make me very nervous. But that wasn't the only point of the movie. He went on to show health care in other countries and the comparison was almost more compelling than the rather gruesome case stories. He then points out that this is part of an overall situation of fear induction. If we are afraid of losing our health insurance (which may or may not protect us from disaster in a health crisis), that makes us more afraid of losing our jobs, which in turns makes us more afraid of being decisive and strong on our jobs as is. Ripped of our potential for a happy state of confidence, fear takes over and permeates everything. Moore really does it, he takes us on a path that describes the state of fear that perhaps most of us are living in.

The comparisons left us looking selfish and cruel: Is this how we are as a nation?
His comparisons bring home clearly how our system has become selfish and cruel, and a fear-ridden population is far too weakened to change things. In other countries he describes --Canada, England, France and Cuba-- the citizens expect to pay for nationalized health through their taxes. Now why don't we, that's obvious. We're spending all our collected taxes on something most of us don't approve of, a widespread military offensive in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't exactly spend what we spend on warfare (in the name of democracy and national defence) and have anything left over for health care for everyone. Moore doesn't make this specific connection, but we all know he knows better than anyone where our money is going. Its going to the oil empire living in Texas either in direct dollars or in insuring that the oil or what's left of it, is well protected and in the hands of the same ..umm. families.

That brings me to "The End of Suburbia"
I'm writing this before I've seen the whole documentary because my husband and son got so anxious watching this spectacle that they wouldn't let me finish it. These are two men who can spend endless hours watching men chasing men with every kind of horrific weapon, and blood, guts, and gore exuding from the screen for hours. But they could not handle Suburbia. They said it was monotonous and boring, which I interpret to mean anxious. In Suburbia finally someone is saying what has been clear and obvious for years, but is never or rarely spoken. We live an entirely unsupportable life, dependent on taking and more taking from the environment, without giving anything back. The suburban life style is dependent on the oil economy and oil production is peaking (or has peaked) and will now be dwindling from now to forever. We have had it with oil. We can't expand and we can't even expect to continue as is, at our current standard of living. There is not enough energy to be had to keep us going, even as is, let alone while expanding. The way we developed suburbs for living and then suburbs for working was only possible because of the excess of cheap oil. We could drive long distances to work and home again every evening, because of cheap oil, meaning cheap and available gas for our cars. This is about to come to a stark and frightening halt as availability of oil rapidly diminishes. The message of Suburbia is clear, we have to change our whole lifestyle and economic set up by necessity not by choice.

The two documenatries belong together
The Moore movie ends up depicting us as a very selfish and cruel nation, jibing well with the message of Suburbia where people have been thriving by ripping off the planet of all of its natural energy resources. We are going to be punished, or if we can get the hit of Sicko, we are being punished right now as our requests for medical care are "denied" and denied and denied. Our way of life in untenable. We need a self-sustaining lifestyle where we plant our food in our backyards and in our community gardens, we work and live in the same location, we make our own clothes locally, no longer depending on the delivery of goods to Walmart from China. Same goes for our dishes, and everything else that becomes junk (or to use the GTD slogan/word, our stuff) in our houses. We cut back and change absolutely everything about how we live and how we function on a day to day basis, simply because we have to. With the end of oil, we have to stop our military offenses because they are so dependent on the oil economy. We can't fly planes without oil. So maybe the change in our life style will free up some taxes to go to free national health care.

No wonder the guys got so anxious. Meanwhile I'd like to see the end of the documentary I guess I have to do it the guys aren't with me.

July 13 2007: GTD and the Weekly Review

2007-07-13T14:27:00.000-07:00

Having finally settled into a rhythm and pattern of organized productivity, I am finally ready to include the famous GTD "weekly review" on today's "to-do" list. By good luck Gina Trapani at Life Hacker has just written a piece about the weekly review http://lifehacker.com/software/getting-things-done/getting-into-the-weekly-review-habit-278118.php
"One of the most important aspects of David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system is the Weekly Review - a regular ritual of checking in and updating your task and project lists. When people discuss GTD, they usually focus on the "capture" part of the system, which is the first step: getting everything out of your head and into some holding pen that you trust (whether that's Microsoft Outlook, a paper notebook or a text file.) But having all your stuff out of your head isn't enough: you've got to review it regularly to make sure you're focusing on the right things in your work."

I confess I was relieved to read that Gina only recently implemented this piece of the GTD method, as I just began my own scheduling of the weekly review. The first scheduled review happens today, and I began a half hour ago, by going through my email and dealing with any that have gathered for a while, finally getting my inbox to. I have been hovering at 1 or 15 daily, and that's out of the 150 or so I receive daily. Of course it helped that I moved many of my listservs over to Gmail, where there are something like over 5500 unattended emails sitting there, waiting should I have any interest it attending to them. One Friday perhaps I'll over over and archive all of them, beginning again. Or perhaps they'll all be deleted. Meanwhile, before I return to my focus on the weekly review (and I will certainly report on this) I want to report that I am now into preparing the third research report for publication. Please understand that these are papers that have been waiting to happen for four years now, my productivity had gone so underground and come to a halt as I was weighed down by the mountain of "stuff" that had accumulated in my office/home. Freed of the burden of stuff, having thrown out what seemed like half of my house, I really was liberated to return to work. My grades for the trimester were all turned in early, other academic tasks were completed, and I am now onto a summer of research/writing/consultation/teaching --with the teaching being relatively light, as I work with a few dissertation students. My teaching load for the next year is also light, giving me plenty of time to write everything I've been saying I was going to write, for years to be honest.

On to the weekly review. It includes emptying my inbox, emptying a back up inbox that contains things that were put aside to file or toss, going through my notes from the past week, kept in a circa junior notebook and a moleskin carried with me, processing what ever I find, and finally, reviewing everything on my Vitalist "Next Actions" list including the "Someday/Maybe" list, and the list of projects (www.vitalist.com) I'm most afraid of what I'll find on the Someday/Maybe and Project lists. Maybe it won't be as overwhelming as I'm fearing. So far GTD method, since I made it through the collection phase which anyone following this knows took two whole months, has been a breeze and has made my life much much easier.

GTD made simple

2007-07-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

Minimalist GTD
I'm just finishing up the grading periods, meaning I have finished the trimester of teaching and am wrapping up the administration of a course. I had put put blogging on the back seat, while my job took precedent. I've also been busy finishing up 2 articles for publication --one about antecedents to psychopathology in chimpanzees. (Don't ask how I got quite so far ranging, suffice it to say I examined data from a personality study of 145 chimpanzees living in well-run zoos). The second is about a measure I've developed with colleagues, "Neurotransmitter Attributes Questionnaire (NAQ)." If anyone wants to check out this measure they can go to my lab at www.eparg.org and find the study under current studies, the one called "emotion and personality." If you want to participate you can, its completely anonymous.

My GTD efforts have continued, and I attribute this recent productivity to my GTD lifestyle. I'm working on a blog on my "killer GTD set up" responding to a blog calling on all of us out here, to add our piece. I'm going to publish it here as soon as its finished. Meanwhile I just ran into a great blog about a minimalist approach to GTD, it's worth reading. It's a guest appearance by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, http://zenhabits.net/, and a great summary of what you really need to know to get going on GTD.
http://lifedev.net/2007/07/time-management-simplified-how-to-be-productive-with-no-worries/

If you want to know something, teach it
I find in my teacher/psychotherapist role, people are asking how I got so organized, they want some of that too, so despite my still being in an implementation phase (that might go on for years I suspect), I am now forced to pass it on. Just as well, the only way to really know something is to teach it.

Remember that, its a hard and fast rule. If you want to know an area, any area, find a way to teach it. Before you turn around you'll have mastered the basics. If you want to get organized, start teaching people how to get organized.

6/06/07: When Psychotherapy becomes Executive Coaching

2007-06-06T00:35:00.000-07:00

I have not been writing much which is unusual for me. It might be that I am through the major first phase of GTD implementation, I'm down to the wire about what programs I am using for all of my lists. I've tried all of them that I read about as they come out. So far I'm sold on Vitalist, with only one downside. They don't yet have both an online and offline version. Remember the Milk (RTM) just announced that with Google, they now have it both ways, that is you can write your lists online or offline, and this is attractive to me, although Vitalist works better for me, I can print out all my lists on a few pages sequentially, and its overall a great program. Sometime I will write about all the programs I've tried out, but not now. The question for me this evening is: Why am I not writing?" I'm sneaking around all day reading productivity blogs, following leads from NetVibes, and generally spending many hours doing nothing I call "produective." I wrote one very long note to my academic community about some rewrite of the dissertation handbook for students, but that is not what I want to be writing now.

Empirically Supported Treatments: Psychotherapy turning into executive coaching

The topic I've been mulling over for weeks now is the simple and typical scenario in my practice, that makes the "empirically supported psychotherapies (EST)" coming up short. When I start to see someone they often have a diganosable mental disorder. At this point I try different techniques and see what the patient responds best too. Patients may arrive drug-addicted, depressed, anxious. I do two things in the beginning of a psychotherapy: 1) work on building a therapeutic alliance, without which regardless of what techniques I use, patients don't fare so well if they don't like me and/or I don't like them. The second thing I do is try out some specific types of therapeutic techniques, and integrate them if the patient seems to like them. This can mean doing some cognitive interventions, behavioral interventions, supportive therapy type interventions.

When my patients (clients) get better
Ordinarily (but not always) my patients Axis II (bonafide mental disorders) dissolve with treatment. Then I become an executive coach. Patients don't want to leave "therapy" even when I tell them there is nothing wrong with them. They like the coach arrangement, the career building or relationship support that I provide for them. This is where the EST is blown to the winds, because I am no longer treating mental disorders. At its best, I' become a cheering squad, an ally against guilt, and a psychologist who keeps her nose into the literature, so that I can bring any advances to my patients as we work as collaborators are their career blockages, or self-sabotage in relationships. These are not mental disorders. People want to hang out with me, and that is what I do. Coaching is fun, and not quite as nerve wrecking as regular psychotherapy.

What works when patients are cured of their mental disorders
From the beginning of a therapy, I try to let people know who I am and what I do; this relieves a great deal of anxiety in the patient and they feel less fearful. By the time they are "better" and ready for what I'm calling
"executive coaching" they know me very well, and trust that I will use many techniques, in accord with what works. I ask myself: What right do I have to see people who no longer have anything wrong with them?" Plenty is my response to myself. If someone wants to pay out of pocket for the coaching they receive from me, I would feel wrong to dismiss them. Instead, we discuss the situation with clear heads. There is no "EST" designed for this phase of "psychotherapy" that I engage in, or at least not one I know about. I don't feel in competition with all the zillions of coaches around. As I said before, I'm their own psychologist, bringing articles or ideas in that might help with any remaining "problems in living." As a psychologist and a coach, I can do anything that helps. I still hang on to many of the "rules" of psychotherapy, at least to some of them. I don't invite patients out to lunch, although I have eaten with them at graduations and weddings. But the ESTs are designed for people with mental disorders, not for the well who come to a psychotherapist to help solve job problems and to otherwise help regulate their limbic system. I often think that currently, the therapist is taking on the role of the small town misister, or the wise old person in a community, a tribe. Maybe the therapist is taking on a role and function that the hair dresser used to fill. In my mother's generation, people went to the hair dresser every week for a shampoo. In their time in the chair, they talk about their families and all of their problems. Thus the hair dresser was taking on the helper function, now served by the therapist.

We Have to Change Psychology in the Culture

2007-05-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

Its Memorial Day and I just finished reading Scott Lilienfeld's chilling article, Psychological Treatments that Cause Harm, in the March issue of Psychological Science. He writes about psychotherapies that have the potential to harm people, if not everyone treated, enough people to warrant our calling them "dangerous." Beginning with "Do no harm" Lilienfeld takes us through the dangerous waters of psychotherapies out there today. I am sorry to say that many contemporary therapies hover on the edge of those pointed out as dangerous. We have a day to respect our soldiers, many of whom have died in what they hoped or believed was for the sake of their country, their families and loved ones. We need a day to honor the patients and clients who have been victimized by the professionals from whom they sought help for psychological and physiological disturbances. It is bad enough to suffer from a disorder that causes adverse changes in our thinking, and to suffer from the stigma that comes upon anyone with a mental disorder.

I have seen students riddled with anxiety, after falling into the hands of psychotherapists..
We may have lost more than we realize. I have seen it. I have seen students fall into the hands of therapists who convinced them that their families were "toxic" when their parents were ordinary parents, with good and bad attributes, but nothing extraordinary. I have seen students lapse into unbearable anxiety, as they lost their ties to their major supporters, friends and parents. I hear students speak with enthusiasm of treatments they're learning at the feet of their professors, that come close to making it onto Lilienfeld's lists of potentially harmful therapies (PHT) and I am powerless to do anything about it.

The "Trauma Trap" and "Remembering Trauma
Some hours earlier, late last evening, I reread an older (2004) article by Frederick Crews, "The Trauma Trap" published in the New York Review of Books. He was reviewing a magnificent book by Richard McNally, "Remembering Trauma." McNally brought out all the science, and it all makes it clear that people don't forget traumatic experiences, in fact they remember it better than ordinary life events. Crews wrote a brilliant review of McNally's book, and made clear the pathetically weak position taken by our "professional" organizations, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. These two article together were chilling, and more so because I hear the echos of bad psychology in my students and I don't know what to do about it. It is impossible to tell students that most of what they are learning is simply wrong. Sometimes I actually say that, and I can see them almost rolling their eyes, thinking that I am a "fringe thinker" because I don't endorse the idea of repression, I don't endorse the theory of childhood trauma, I am sacrilegious. I want to fight for my discipline and at the moment I'm not sure how to do that. People don't repress trauma, they can't forget trauma. People don't get horrific mental disorders because of childhood trauma, but because of genetics and physical environmental insults, viral and bacterial infections, combinations of neurotoxins, and other environmental assaults as yet unknown to us.

It is not the fault of the students..its not the fault of the teachers
We are all the products of our teachers. We are wired to comply with our authorities, all the more so if they are kind to us. Babies imitate at 43 minutes out of the womb, and we all continue imitating. If our teachers tell us that the cure for psychological distress is "catharsis" or breaking through "repression" and remembering trauma, we try to believe it. There was a time earlier in my career, when I, in compliance with my mentor, wrote about repression. I think I didn't believe it even then. But I said and wrote the words. Lilienfeld names some treatments that have been shown in repeated empirical studies to cause harm to some people. He speaks of "recovered memory techniques." But isn't all psychodynamic psychotherapy one form or another of recovered memory treatment? Where is the psychodynamic psychotherapist who doesn't work to help patients "uncover" their long forgotten traumas? No matter that the memories uncovered are false. This remains the goal of psychodynamic therapy. Practitioners in our field believe in repression, and no mounting evidence makes a dent in their belief. Even Cognitive Behavior therapists have caved in to the myth of childhood trauma, and given it the name "core schema's" derived from experiences in childhood. Where is the therapist today who will stand up and say "I don't believe in repression and I don't believe psychopathology is connected to childhood trauma?"

It takes enormous courage
After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for many years of treatment, it takes great courage to stand up and say "I don't believe in the theory of childhood trauma, I don't believe in repression." It takes even more courage for the therapist who has been treating people for "ghosts in the nursery" to stand up and say "I misled all my patients, I led them into a dead end street and kept them there walking in circles." Lilienfeld and Crews have courage, but what about their colleagues. How many of them are ready to confess to years of misleading people who came to them for their expertise? This is not just a problem for therapists and patients in treatment, its a problem for all of us. This is a massive social problem that affects us behind our backs. The pop culture endorses repression and the myth of childhood trauma. Patients with serious mental illness have to endure the results of their illness, the ramifications of social stigma, and the attitudes of their treatment providers. People in therapy are told they are sick, when many of them are, as Adler said so long ago, simply discouraged. People are told they are in the grip of a maladaptive and antisocial unconscious, they can't trust their own perceptions and their own emotions. Therapists believe they know more about their patients' minds, than do the patients themselves.

We have to change psychology
This is a cruel system of treatment, and this is a cruel culture of pop psychology.

Do no harm seems like an oxymoron in our current psychotherapy culture. We have to change psychology in the culture and in the treatment room.

GTD Implementation: The third dumpster: The Etiology of Mental Disorders

2007-05-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

The third (?) or is it the fourth dumpster?
We are now filling up the third/fourth dumpster. I have gone through numerous piles of papers stuck on bookshelves, and for the next three days I'll be careening through file cabinets, trying to weed out all the "out of date" or "duplicates" files. Its a boring job and not one I'm likely to take seriously enough. I still have too much extra room, not yet filled in other words, in the newer cabinets. But the end point is in sight, I think June 1 might mark the end of our first serious "GTD Implementation" which began in earnest on March 1, 2007. I like having such an exact date from which to track everything that followed. I love doing work in the broad field known as "evaluation" and this marker has allowed me to keep a running evaluation component going on my own GTD process. I did a "review" yesterday, the first time I actually made it to the Sunday Review on time. I can't claim it was a complete review, but it was closer. Practice and more practice is how this is going for me, its all still in a phase I have to consider "practice." Three months and three dumpsters full of "stuff" from our house, while keeping up my regular work load, the heaviest of trimesters as this is the trimester with my large class, the period in which I will have had three presentations at conferences, the presentation to the self-help court (it went very well by the way) and still we are moving ahead with GTD implementation.

Dinner with my TAs led me back to "The etiology of mental disorders"
I know I have touched upon this before in prior blog entries, but it is such a serious topic and so misunderstood, that here I go again. Almost everyone connected to clinical psychology, particularly practitioners, holds on for dear life to the belief that mental illness is the result of childhood trauma. This is one of those beloved fantasies, rather like the old belief that the earth is flat, an error maintained for thousands of year. It is simply wrong, incorrect, a false belief that has clinicians and patients alike chasing after dragons from their past, in hot pursuit of an explanation for mental illness that makes little sense. Mental illnesses are not caused by childhood trauma. What is childhood trauma anyway? The myth of childhood has gained the status of king of the mountain in today's pop psych culture as well as in the hearts of clinicians. But getting realistic, we have to face the obvious. For centuries the going belief was "spare the rod and spoil the child." Children were routinely swatted, hit, the victims of what today we regard as child abuse and trauma. But those unspoiled children didn't grow up to suffer from major mental disorders. We have in our hearts a myth of the perfect childhood, and anything deviating from this ideal is considered detrimental to a child's developmental pathway.

The myth of the "good-enough childhood"
Lets get real. No one has a perfect childhood, never has and never will. We are barely out of an era in which it was considered not only appropriate to beat your children, but to beat your wife as well. Have to keep those women in line, while you are busy not spoiling your children. Our grandparents --or many of them anyway-- saw their moms beat up by their fathers, and got hit quite a bit themselves. And yet they did not arrive at adulthood suffering from serious mental illnesses. Our view of childhood is a fantasy. Our view of what causes mental illness is simply wrong. We don't have the answer, we don't know exactly what throws someone over the edge and into the terrifying world of mental illness. And we can't stand admitting we don't know. The unknown is simply unacceptable.

Bottom line, mental illnesses are genetic
Many severe mental illnesses are genetic, bottom line. Heritability rates are high, from 60 to 90%. But something more is needed, because not everyone with the genetic make up for a mental illness actually shows up with the illness. Or is that also just a fable? Is it not possible that its a matter of quantity, and not quality at all. Suppose there are polygenetic "causes" for bipolar disorder. Meaning, there are many genes contributing to the development of biopolar illnesses. Lets imagine there are 10 genes that, should you be unfortunate enough to have the "wrong" allele on any of the ten, you have an increased chance of coming out in the end, bipolar. Suppose you inherit an allele on each of these genes, from each parent. Suppose there are instructions about turning these genes on and off in the "junk DNA." Supposing each gene has a different "on and off" switch in the junk DNA. We're beginning to see lots of possible variations now. Bob can inherit maybe 5 of the 10 alleles that put him on the bipolar path. Then perhaps four of the ten junk DNA areas are instructing the DNA to go to "On" and six are pointing to "Off." Perhaps the precise conditions in uteri --not exactly the same even for identical twins-- lead to the "on and off" situation of the relevant junk DNA areas. We see even more variation possible. So Bob has 5 alleles that might contribute to frank bipolar disorder, and four areas that instruct these 5 alleles to the "On" position. So Bob appears in the world with a dark mood on most days, on and off suicidality, an occasional hypomanic period, never anything remotely like a true manic episode, and in the end Bob is a very unhappy adult with what is now known as Bipolar II. Just think of all the possible outcomes might have occurred from this myriad of possibilities. But none of them were due to childhood experiences, childhood trauma or the world's most perfect childhood.

Physical environmental contributions
Is it all up to chance? Yes and No . We know that children may appear with OCD post strep infection. The strep bacteria produce something that amounts to a brain toxin, that results in inflammation in some part of the brain that ends up screaming "OCD OCD" in the child. There may be many bacteria and viruses that effect the likelihood of Bob (our character above) demonstrating or not demonstrating his propensity to bipolar disorder. There may be neurotoxins in our ordinary contemporary drinking water. There may be other factors in the physical environment that instruct the DNA to go "ON" or "OFF." But how much does the "emotional" environment contribute? We get it confused. We see an erratic parent and we think "that behavior is pathogenic for the children." But what is really pathogenic is that the erratic parent has an untreated (because it is relatively mild and therefore not diagnosed) bipolar II condition, meaning the parent inherited perhaps four of the possible 10 bipolar alleles (two from each parent, such a small number that there were no visible signs in the parent) and perhaps three junk DNA areas yelling "ON," just enough to get some of that erratic, irritable parenting. Here we are, claiming that childhood trauma, present because of that irritable erratic parent, is responsible for the later development of bipolar II in the offspring. All wrong, the parental behavior doesn't cause the illness in the child or young adult. The parental genes and areas of instructions, in combination with the genes and areas of instruction from the other parent, are responsible for the development of the illness.

Its very simple, very simple math and very simple conceptually
Its simple really, very simple math, very simple concept. Major mental disorders are inherited and sometimes brought to life from some environmental (physical) factors. We always want to run away from physical causes because we (psychologists) think we have to think that way, we have to make other people think that way, in order to make a living. Wrong. Having a serious mental disorder causes numerous psychological problems, for which people need psychological treatment. We may know that addiction is an inherited illness, but the treatment is abstinence and psychosocial treatment modalities. Addiction leaves a mess in its wake. A person who has suffered from active addiction may get into recovery and wake up and find themselves in some of the nastiest messes possible, they've done horrible things, they've stolen from their families and friends, they've burned all their bridges. They need massive amounts of psychosocial help to regain their sense of personhood, and good personhood at that. There's plenty of work for psychologists who understand that major mental disorders are physical in nature and physical in origin. Psychologists who have their patients endlessly searching for childhood trauma miss the boat. People know their parents tried, tried and failed. It does not help to have them demonize their parents. It helps a lot to have an explanation for their parents adversive behaviors, to have sympathy for their parents as well as for themselves.

Mental disorders are physiological illnesses from beginning to end. People act like this simple statement is violating the most basic beliefs about life. Its time we all said the obvious. Mental illnesses are the same as any physical illnesses. The urge to rest on the psychology of childhood is an escape into devils inhabiting people. Lets stand up and say it like it is, so we can get some decent help and respect for people with mental illnesses, and for their families.

GTD: The next phase of implementation

2007-05-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

I'm so glad I'm here but not here..
Yesterday I lay around until 3PM, reading on the Internet, spending time with Netvibes, resting, and starting my own wiki. I finally found an online source for my wiki, and laid out a plan for the day in greater detail than I allow myself to do here in this medium. I might bring it over here, but I might not, its too detailed. Having constructed the plan, I lepta into action. I spent hours throwing out books that weren't classics, weren't loved, and had no place being here. Old diet books, old exercise books, old sociology books. I kept most of the anthropology because it was mainly ethnographies from the 40's, 50's, and 60's when there were still hunter-gatherer groups of people around the planet who had not been touched by global industrialization and culture. These are real classics and going through them I thought about how much I wanted to take a year off and study my "topic," that is survivor guilt broadly defined, in multiple cultures around the world. I would love to read all these ethnographies again with my aging brain, I know so much now that I didn't know when I read them. I would read with a different perspective and a different world view. I threw out lots of the economics books, the lefty analysis of this and that, though I held on to Lenin and Mao, it might be interesting to reread them at some point. I am not finished even with books in our bed room which has bookcases up to the ceiling on three of four walls. I'm throwing out piles of papers as I run into them, stacked and disordered on the shelves.

"Times they are a-changing..."
After almost three hours of this, I settled into preparing for my second review by clearing out my inbox. Things were acted upon immediately, filed with real brother's created labels (or at least sections of the files cabinets are formally labeled), thrown out, or put in a "deal with this when I speak to my husband" place. Things I have to take to my academic institution were put in the "To Office" folder in my brief case. I have one more place to collect pieces of papers, and two notebooks from which to gather and integrate information, and then I am ready for the thinking part of my Sunday morning review, or should I saw the "review." One thing I did differently yesterday was to put things that I was not going to do immediately into an appropriate list on Vitalist, the online GTD-driven listmaking program I'm using at the moment. http://www.vitalist.com/ I am also dallying with Nozbe www.nozbe.com/ but for the moment, Vitalist feeds into Google Calendar easily and seems the most efficient. It also prints out everything by context sequentially, and not one context per page, so it is easier to carry around with me. The way this was so different for me. In pre-GTD days, I would throw things I wasn't going to immediately process (either by filing or do at some later time) into a pile, or just back into the inbox so to speak, and forget about it as the piles grew larger and larger. My piles began to show up everywhere, on every surface and then on the floor, taking over rooms I was working in.

Its a good thing, because I discovered a talk I'm going to be giving
This new procedure I'm learning means that the undone items are not in my inbox but in another "to be processed" place, and the activity itself is on the appropriate list, which I look at thoroughly at least once a day. Its a good thing too because yesterday I noticed that I was going to be speaking to a group of lawyers and judges who work in the self-help courts this coming week. The obvious conclusion: I have to spend much of this weekend preparing my talk, in accord with the kinds of questions the audience has, and the reason they have asked me to come and speak to them and with them.

The Self-Help Court: How to work with clients with mental disorders
I did this last year, went to speak at the conference for lawyers and judges working in the self-help courts around California. I have rarely had such a receptive audience; this group were not out to be critical, to be judgemental, they wanted help with the serious problems they face on a daily basis, working with people who suffer from serious mental disorders and who come to them for help, in being their own lawyers so to speak, in court situations. What is an attorney to do when a client comes in to the self-help legal clinic and wants to file a restraining order against someone who she says is coming through the walls of her apartment and raping her every night? Or what is an attorney to do when someone says her neighbors are systematically spying on her, and slipping poison into her food? Or what are they to do in the self-help clinics when some clients come in every day, even when they have no legal business to tend to, and won't leave until an attorney has spent an hour with them, treating the meetings like psychotherapy sessions. I have the power point talk I gave last year, but now I know the kinds of questions they are asking better, so I will revise the outline accordingly.

The beginning of a trusted system turning into action and practice
Seeing this in my Vitalist "Urgent" list section reminded me this is coming right up and I need to spend a lot of time thinking about it now, so I won't be worked up on Tuesday night, right before the conference. Moments like this, when I see all the clutter being dismantled, and I see I'm beginning to have a "trusted system" of everything I have to tend to or think about now, and what I can think about "later" (or "someday/maybe") lends credence to the idea of a "mind like water." I had no idea that the clutter and disorganized work style were creating enormous tension in my life. I think "how could I have missed that, its so obvious?" But then much of GTD is breaking things down into obvious units of organization, rather like I do when I 'm designing or working on a research project. Somehow I think I believed my life didn't deserve that kind of careful attention.

The way to learn a new skill is to engage in a tremendous amount of practice
Or I thought there were people who were born "organized" and people who weren't, and I was one who was by nature, disorganized. This makes little sense because I have always liked devising systems, and creating things dependent on systematizing and creating order out of chaos. Now I know from complexity science that the world is in fact always moving to order, that agents will work to collaborate, or coordinate, that is move to create a system in an orderly manner. So why I thought I wasn't organized may be simply that I was not trained to believe I could pay close attention to my life and organize it accordingly. A little thought goes a long way. People tend to laugh at those of us who have gone overboard with GTD, trying all the new programs and tools with which to carry out GTD principles. I am one of those people, I read the productivity blogs now with some passion, and try out ever new program, spending inordinate amounts of time on the tools. But in truth, every time I yet again make a list on a new program (and I plan to write my own review of the many tools I've tried one of these weeks), I give more detailed thought to exactly how I organize my life, what I have to do, what category all my "next actions" really belong in. So what looks like a "productivity addiction" is really just "practice" and the way to learn a new skill is to engage in a tremendous amount of practice.

So in accord with my plan for the day, I'm off to continue emptying the shelves in the bed room of papers and books that I don't need or want any longer, and after a few hours of that (I have a limit to how much time I can do this in a stretch), to tackling those very difficult questions as I prepare for the talk I'm giving on Wednesday.

I'm supposed to be somewhere else but I'm here

2007-05-11T12:13:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but instead I am peacefully at home. I slept nonstop for 12 hours, all I can think is that I must have seriously needed it. Its unlike me to sleep for long periods. This morning I've been "relaxing" and feeding my netvibes habit. After hours of "relaxing" I began to do a literature search for one of the two articles that I'm now ready to write. This is a study of a new measure, "Neurotransmitter Attributes Questionnaire (NAQ)" that indicates whether a person tends to be low in dopamine (and therefore might feel better with a dopamine enhancer) or low in serotonin (and therefore might feel better with a serotonin enhancer). I hate to sound like an advertisement working for big pharma, but better living through chemistry is still just about all we have to effect those kinds of changes. If you're depressed, get help. If you're irritable all the time, get help. This has turned out to be a great measure, I created it almost four years ago with a psychiatrist who is a colleague, and my closest collaborator, a statistician and methods specialist. I've presented it at scientific meetings, but held off publishing it until I had over 900 subjects, and now I do. If anyone is interested in trying out the measure, they can do so anonymously at www.eparg.org which is our lab's web site. Once there go to the study "Emotions and Personality" and voila, there is the study with the NAQ. We don't have any responses for people who complete the study, we don't know who participates, and we don't have any indicators of when someone is "normal" or "above normal" on these subscales. We only have indicators of groups of people. That makes it safe to participate in the study, but less rewarding since there's no feedback. Nevertheless we are now over 900, and I'm getting ready to write it up for publication, only three years later than I should be.

All I need now, to finish the article, is the literature review, the hardest part of research and possibly the most fun, once I really get into it. I think I should create some "special" forms for psychologists and psychology students, using Seah's PCEO forms, or the ones that make it possible to revise them for specific activities. If you haven't yet checked out Seah and his brilliant beat procrastination forms, go right to: http://davidseah.com/archives/2005/11/12/the-printable-ceo-series/
and then pick and choose the forms that you think will be most useful. I think I'll schedule creating some industry-specific forms this weekend, when I'm not supposed to be here but I'm here. So this will go into my plan, the one I am writing up today, and maybe it will be helpful to others. Before I do anything else however, I'm finishing up a major phase of my GTD implementation, and emptying out yet one more room of "stuff" that I can throw away permanently, into the dumpster that is still in front of our house. Three weeks of a dumpster should make it clear exactly how much stuff there is overloading us. If we were really finished I'd be putting the "after" picture up on this blog site.

GTD: Still implementing and procrastination

2007-05-04T17:52:00.000-07:00

Answering a comment:

Cindy wrote to me "It sounds like you live my dream, and are functioning about the same way I do. I am a Psych student in clnical Psyc ... I have so much to do I can't get moving. I browse so much about GTD, but can't seem to implement it. I would like to hear about your online class."

I started to answer this as a comment, then thought its been so long since I've written here, I might get started by writing my response as a new entry. I remember my days as a graduate student with fondness, I could actually read then, in fact I was supposed to be reading. Now I feel as if I steal time from work in order to read, although reading is presumably a part of my work as a professor and a researcher. But I remember when as a student, I thought I had too much to do and often felt stuck and had trouble deciding what of the numerous things I had to do, would I actually do. My advice is to use a "time-blocking" method to get started. What this means is deciding to do some piece of assigned work for ten or fifteen minutes, and tell yourself you can stop after the alloted time you've assigned. Usually after the ten or fifteen minutes, I'm ready to go on. Another way to do this which I read about on 43 folders, is to plan to work for ten minutes, then break and do something else for two minutes, then back to the job at hand for ten minutes, and so it goes. Before you know it you will have the job done. Merlin Mann has some variations on time-blocking, the Procratination Dask:
http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/08/kick-procrastinations-ass-run-a-dash/ Steve Pavlina writes about overcoming procrastination http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/overcoming-procrastination.htm
and time boxing http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/10/timeboxing/

David Seah's productivity forms, the Printable CEO, are great additions to a time-blocking, time-boxing methods because every time you complete a fifteen minute session doing something you've had trouble getting started with, you fil in the "bubble" he's created for these briefs spells of productivity. http://davidseah.com/archives/2007/01/01/concrete-goals-tracker-2007-updates/

I have been on overload ever since this trimester began, with my huge class on "Cognition, Emotion and Personality" taking a lot of my time and energy --to say nothing of the second dumpster sitting outside of my house, as we slowly go through one room after the other, throwing things out. On top of this, I have been preparing for a poster presentation at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Vancouver, which is where I am right now. This morning, hiding away in a hotel room, I actually slept in until 11AM, ate breakfast with my husband, had an hour appointment with a patient (on the phone) and finally registered for the meetings at 2PM. I stopped in to a few meetings and since none of the presentations during the afternoon grabbed my attention, I returned to our room where I've been ever since, screwing around with my computer and doing more or less nothing ever since.

I wasted at least an hour trying out some new GTD list keeper, something I regard as my major "vege out" activity these days. I'm waiting for one of my students to show up with an older computer that can run SPSS (my main statistical package) since my Mac Intel won't run it. Now SPSS is a huge statistical software company, most psychologists use it. So I can't understand why they arn't planning to release a new Mac program that works on the Intel until the fall, 2007. Meanwhile I heard from a graduated student of mine who is here presenting her research and I'm meeting up with her in less than an hour. This may end up a day in which I do nothing, i.e. make no progress on my next action lists. When I have the SPSS running computer this evening I have to prepare for another presentation, the social neuroscience meetings in Austin next weekend. The moral of this story is don't do what I do, waste a whole lot of time trying to make technology work instead of working.

I finally did a review this past week, really it was my first review and I didn't get through all of it. At least it forced me to do the work definition piece of things in that I had to get my inbox to empty. I did the same (almost) for my email inbox in the S.F. airport, and I read through emails I had saved on the airplane. I think I have to go back to Dave Seah's time tracking form in order to revisit where my time is going. http://davidseah.com/archives/2006/12/29/emergent-task-timer-2007-form-updates/ Wednesday I spent three hours at Apple, trying to figure out why I was being disconnected from the Internet constantly. The net result of all of this is to make clear I spend most of my time dealing with technical problems around things that aren't working. After I meet with my student, and have my hands on the computer that will work with SPSS, I'm returning to my hotel room to analyze data and prepare for next weekend. None of this is focusing on what I should be doing, to move my bigger projects forward although all of it relates to my projects. Are my projects the right projects for me to be doing? Is it time for a complete review of everything, from the higher levels that Allen describes. Maybe I need to reread parts of "Getting things done" to be clear on what the higher levels are in the first place. On the plane here, along with going through saved email, I also began a thorough brain dump which I haven't done since I went to Allen's seminar in February.

Writing the brain-dump felt like my mind had moved to empty, somewhere between the seminar, the initiation of the full implementation, the arrival of the dumpsters, and now. I got distracted by dirt on molding in the house, dust on the top of the cabinets, housewife kinds of things that I never pay attention to. I think, in full honesty, that all of it is running away from the big project I have in my mind, writing a book about survivor guilt, the kind of guilt we feel when we are successful but our friend is failing at work, or when we see a beggar on the street and think "There but the grace of God go I." I've been planning this as a "Someday/Maybe" for months, for over a year even, and I suspect my full GTD implementation has been part of preparing for serious, structured writing. I have on the backburner --also ready to spring to the front-- two articles as well. I have two articles based on data that's been sitting around for 4 years, ready to be written.

The presentations I'm doing right now and next weekend, were set up to force me to get everything ready to go on the articles. The emptying our house of many years of piles of papers was designed to create a wonderful work space instead of a crowded scene of disorganized books and papers weighing more and more on me as the years went by. I needed a new canvas on which to develop ideas, on which to draw out the picture described by the data I've been collecting for years. And by data I mean data in the classic sense of the word, numbers representing people's responses to questions, first collected in huge Psych 1 classes, and later from the Internet although that too depends on people, one at a time, being willing to take 20 to 40 minutes, filling out questionnaires or responding to narratives and questions. All these people and all these studies end up a zillion numbers that fall into fabulous patterns. The buck stops with me, and I have been slow moving, weighted down by a mess of my own making.

Writing this here, making public what has been probably two, three, or even four years of procrastination, may reflect me coming out from under. I want to make this process public, maybe psych students can benefit from watching someone quite like themselves, trying to implement GTD to the academic/researcher/clinician life style. What is most useful, what doesn't apply, what is absolutely crucial to fire that inner combustible fuel needed for scientific creativity, turning the numbers of long ago designed studies into publishable text? What is the source of procrastination in the first place?

I study survivor guilt so of course I think it lies at the heart of everything. Or is it that survivor guilt is in fact the source of so many problems that made me want to study it in the first place? But I think it really has been a contributor to my procrastination. My mentor who was with me as a coach and supporter for 37 years, died in November, 2004 after a long and horrible illness. Despite being aware of survivor guilt, since I had been studying it for a decade, before his illness, it hit me and as usual with survivor guilt, it was silent, hidden, not quite outside of conscious awareness, but not obvious either. Watching a parent or mentor get old, fragile, is awful. I knew I felt guilty but I still didn't exactly know it. Suffice it to say, it was very difficult and painful to flex my muscles as his were withering. It is still difficult to think about, let alone write about. The only reason to mention it is that I am trying to deal with forces that is any way block my productivity. If I didn't love my work I wouldn't worry about it, but whenever I am working hard at "creating" I feel truely happy and therefore its necessary to talk about it. Tomorrw I'm heading out early to meetings that should be interesting, knowing that whenever I have a "break" in the interesting sessions, I know what to do with my time and this should be helpful.

Cindy, the courses are on BackPack, and I made some of them "public." You can find the first one at: http://lynnoc.backpackit.com/pub/927514

GTD Implementation: A Quick Review/Beat Procratination

2007-04-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

Getting involved in teaching my large spring class distracted me from GTD implementation, despite the fact that on my insistance, our second dumpster is sitting in front of the house, over half empty, screaming for attention. All eyes around here rest on me. I am the hold up. I should be bouncing up in the morning, eager to clear out files, clear out my papers, clear out my clothes, clear out every back corner hiding place around my house, of which there are many. Instead I am in bed, its close to 10AM, reviewing my day and the people I'll be seeing shortly. I've already essentially wasted the morning. I need another system to get myself going. The dumpster is here for five more days. Maybe its time to start another Pavlina run on a new habit. None of my resolutions have stuck too well. I'm still in bed at this hour of the morning instead of up at 6AM and right into exercise. I'm waiting until the last possible moment to get up and get ready for people. I'm complaining to myself about my shoulder hurting, arthritic aching. Is this a function of age, or a down mood that is hovering over me? I think its time to take action, this is no doubt the remedy. Maybe I need to make more public resolutions about what I'm doing and not doing. I have let the center of my life, the control system, slide away from me, time to recenter and take over again. Into action. Yesterday I worked on a new online course I'm developing, on "Current Issues and Debates in Psychopathology" and I have still another online course that needs to be developed. Today I will complete a series of actions (only to be determined after I overcome the inertia and get up and into the day).

Effects of the Environment, Social Isolation, & the Development of Cancer

2007-04-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

From Christopher Ryan, the Evolutionary Psychology Listserv 4/22/07

Stanislaw Tanchou "....gave the first formula for predicting cancer risk. It was based on grain consumption and was found to accurately calculate cancer rates in major European cities. The more grain consumed, the greater the rate of cancer." Tanchou's paper was delivered to the Paris Medical Society in 1843. He also postulated that cancer would likewise never be found in hunter-gatherer populations. This began a search among the populations of hunter-gatherers known to missionary doctors and explorers. This search continued until WWII when the last wild humans were "civilized" in the Arctic and Australia. No cases of cancer were ever found within these populations, although after they adopted the diet of civilization, it became common."

Simple but incredibly complex
This appeared on the evolutionary listserv this morning, and it struck me as something so simple, so obvious, and probably, so right. It certainly supports my changing my diet, I've tried to eliminate grains before, but failed. Perhaps my failure is because I don't known all the alternative complex carbohydrates to add into a diet eliminating grains, or perhaps adding new complex carbs is too time consuming. Right before reading this, I had been talking to someone on the phone about "urban sprawl" and the environmentally damaging effects of massive numbers of people moving into the suburbs. And right before that phone call, I had been reading a student's dissertation proposal, in which she cites Putman, Bowling Alone. For every ten minutes spent in a car driving to and from work, people experience an increase in the sense of isolation and a decrease in time spent in community activities, with friends or family, all things that contribute to our overall sense of well-being, our "limbic regulation" so to speak. Limbic regulation, that is the positive regulation of our emotion system, can not be achieved by individuals alone. It requires contact between individuals, "regulating" connection with others. We are, throughout our lives, interdependent primates who can't successfully live in isolation.

What connects alone-ness, limbic regulation, diet and cancer?
So what does this have to do with diet and the possibility that consumption of grain products may contribute to our high cancer rates? The connection for me is the way these disparate news items, whether they are true or not, speak to our life-style. We live in our cars, flying over highways, grabbing grain-based snacks on the run, isolated, depressed, dysregulated simply by our degree of isolation. I speak as a psychologist of course, and what I hear everyday from patients along with what I might get from reading--in journals, books and on the Internet-- as well as from research in our lab. My current conclusion is that we are, as a nation of individuals and families, very isolated, and suffering from a sense of loneliness on all fronts. I suspect that this state of isolation affects our brain chemistry in such as way as to set up craving for grains, and whatever shorter term effects they might have on our brain chemistry.

It may come down to serotonin
It may come down to serotonin, although I suspect its more complicated than a single neurotransmitter problem. Over 20 years ago, Raleigh and McGuire conducted experiments demonstrating that when a monkey fails to obtain expected social support, serotonin levels drop dramatically.

Serotonin rises, so I read in another less scientific source I suspect, when one consumes grain products or other complex carbohydrates. People are often warned not to eat a carbohydrate-heavy meal at lunch time, lest they become too sleepy in the afternoon, negatively affecting productivity at work. Eating grains often seems to temporarily reduce anxiety, and to elicit a feeling of relaxation or sleepiness, badly needed by people living without the limbic regulation that can only be provided by another living person. So it may be that serotonin is a major player in our craving grains, and our craving may relate back to failure at systems of social support. Our loneliness then may be a big contributor to the cancer rates in industrialized nations. Loneliness lowers serotonin, putting into motion craving for grains, and consumption of grains, in order to relieve the chemical discomfort resulting from alone-ness, may be associated with the development of cancer.

There are no private solutions
I have always believed "there are no private solutions" to our many social problems; by this I mean, we can't make needed changes by ourselves, they have to be made by everyone in our social group, in our extended social group, in our cities and nations. Without buy in by major corporations and then, by governments, it is simply too difficult to make significant life changes as isolated individuals. We eat what is easily available, and the food product that is always there for snacks, or dinner if we want to call it, is grain products. We suffer from the lack of limbic regulation, because we have to spend long hours at work, and then almost equally long hours transporting ourselves to and from work. Our brain chemistry goes awry and we demand grain products to calm down the nervous system. The corporations manufacturing our food see the demand for grains, and with profit motivation, they produce what we demand, and then they make sure we keep demanding it by way of enticing advertisements that work. The ads grab us, get us emotionally involved in the story being told and ultimately shape what we will demand in the future. Its a vicious cycle when viewed from this perspective.

Are there really no "private solutions?"
I have been questioning my position on "there are no private solutions" dramatically, coming to believe there may be nothing but private solutions and the collective power of private solutions altogether might change our demands, which in turn might change what is produced for consumption. Is the problem really economic and social, we're alone too much because of the organization of work, calling for long hours in the car getting back and forth to work, and long hours at computers in isolated work stations? If we changed the amount we are alone, will we see a rise in serotonin as individuals, followed by a decrease in craving for grains, and ultimately a drop in the cancer rate?

A challenge to myself, following Pavlina's model, the 30 day experiment
Following Steve Pavlina's method of the 30 day experiment, http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/ I'm going to try it out on grains. Pavlina's well-read, well-sited blog suggests that one can make desired changes in our habits and our lives if we make the change consciously and consistently for 30 days. Starting today I will go without grain products for 30 days and see what happens. If I bomb out I will try to write about what happened, what triggered a slip into grains If anyone is interested in following this experiment, check back here and perhaps try it with me, just drop a note here and we can commiserate if something happens that might represent our serotonin is dropping too low.

GTD On Hold: Preparing for a large class

2007-04-19T18:41:00.000-07:00

Distracted by Work
The GTD implementation has had a set back as I settled into a focus on preparing for my 55-60 student class in Cognition, Emotion and Personality. Our whole first year class has to take this course, and for many students this is their introduction to psychological science. In prior years I tried to make the course absolutely painless, with a minimum of requirements. I decided this year to change the tone of the course from "Its easy" to "Its challenging," and see what happens. I had observed over the years that students tended to be less serious in the class, pay less attention to the speakers. Every week except for this first week, there is a visiting professor who comes and introduces the students to the constructs in his or her field, then describes his or her own research, and finally discusses clinical implications to his or her work. One would think it should be easy to teach this class, that is from my perspective, because I only have to lecture in the first class. However how the students receive each visiting professor has been an ongoing problem. I think by turning the overall tone of the course to "this is a challenge" might help in encouraging students to pay better attention to all the speakers. The most obvious thing I'm doing differently is I have announced on the syllabus that there may be several "pop quizzes" during the trimester. Translated into "You have to do the reading and pay attention to the speakers; we (myself and the TAs) will find out if you are not keeping up with the reading."

The minute papers method
Another new thing I am bringing to the class is what are usually described as "minute papers," to be collected weekly at the end of each class. What is a minute paper? A minute paper is a very short statement collected from each student at the end of each class. Students are asked to write on a 4 X 6 card, a response to two questions: 1) What was the main point you learned from this class? and 2) What is the biggest question you have remaining, at the end of this class? The students will be told to sign their cards, and turn them in when they are signing out and leaving. (I have students signing in and signing out, as that is how attendance is ordinarly noted in the courses we are mandated to take, Post-licensure, called "Mandatory Continuing Eduction for Psychologists (MCEP). My students may as well learn about this now, before they finish up the three years in residence, required for the doctoral degree in psychology.

Upping the Ante
Introducing a higher level of difficulty in this class is an experiment. I think that the prior atmosphere, in which I tried to convey that there was no way, short of failing to attend classes, that one could do "poorly," ended up making the class feel too sloppy, or too disorganized, an entity without hard edges around it. Students would wander in and wander out, come late, leave early. Because there was no real consequence to signing in late, or to missing content in the lectures, those who thought they would not like, or understand psychological science, did as little as possible, and failed to take the experience seriously. This was a loss to them. The visiting professors in the course are not only well-known for their work as scientists; they are also well-known for their skill in teaching. They take on the task presented by the course, treating it as a challenge. The challenge is to make their area of specialty attractive to students who are clinically focused and who are for the most part, afraid of science. Many of the students suffer from what Claude Steele named "stereotype threat."

Stereotype Threat
In stereotype threat, students who had in the past, wanted to be or tried to be ambitious in a given area, were discriminated against both subtly and overtly, because of their group membership, i.e. their sex, race, ethnicity, class background. In an ingenious series of empirical studies, Steele found that he could set up a situation in which students perform more or less poorly in a given academic area when reminded by some cue, of their membership of that group (sex, race, ethnicity, class, etc.).

In one of Steele and Aronson's early studies they presented a group of students at a high status university with a test. In the first condition they told the students it was a "test of intellectual ability" and in the second condition they told the students that it was a "test of problem solving ability." Results demonstrated the African American students responded to the first condition by doing poorly on the exam, with scores significantly lower than what would be predicted on the basis of their college entrance exam scores. In contrast, those students who were presented with the alternative condition, that is the students who were told it was a test of problem solving skill, did significantly better with socres that were in line with what would be expected based on their college entrance exam scores. The students were responding to the stereotype of African Americans, doing poorly when they thought the test was an IQ test, and doing significantly better when told that the test was measuring problem solving skill.

Stereotype threat and women in science and mathematics
These experiments were repeated with women's performance in math as the central topic. Women are expected to do poorly in mathematics. This is still so accepted by our culture, that Summer, then president of Harvard University, in a talk to a group of female academics, suggested that women were not cut out for science. Imagine what would have happened if he had said he same thing about a particular race or ethnicity. In fact he would not have dared to say something like that about another group, but the opinion of women is still so low culturally, that he had no problem coming out with his sexist and discriminatory statement. In the women and math experiments, there were two conditions. In the first the women were informed that men usually surpassed women in this particular test, and in the second condition the women were told that women ordinarily did as well as men in this test. As might be expected (on the basis of Steele and Aronson's first study), women who were told men suprassed women did not do well on test. However when women were told that women did as well as men on the test, their scores were significantly higher than women tested with the first condition.

Challenge not remediation
Graduate students in clinical psychology are predominantly female and thus are vulnerable to discrimination in areas of math and science. It should be no surprise therefore, to have students of clinical psychology fearful about any class or seminar associated with math and science. They often begin the class with the expectation of failure. In prior years, I presented this large lecture series with that in mind, therefore making it as easy and undemanding as possible. The net effect was to reduce the challenge, but in doing so, I inhibited effort, ambition, aspirations and in the end, I inadvertantly, inhibited performance. Steele's recommendation in situations of stereotype threat, is to increase challenge instead of "remediaion." That is, make a course or seminar more challenging than is the norm, and have the expectation that students will rise to the occassion and get the message that they can do it. I think in my earlier editions of this course in psychological science I was taking the "remediation" approach, which in and of itself, conveyed the message "You can't do it." Thus my effort to make the situation anxiety-free, in the end conveyed a kind of discouragement for the students. Now I am experimenting with raising the challege (challenge instead of remediation) and perhaps this will be inspiring to the students, as it carries the implication that they can do it, they can face the challenge and be successful.

I expect some students will test me immediately, complaining about the lengthy readings, complaining about the final paper, and then more quietly, complaining about the "pop quizzes" mentioned on the syllabus. I have to keep calm, rather cool, poised, and holding my ground steady. I have to convey absolute conviction that they can do the course and do exceptionally well, with effort. I have to be ready to reward those who go the extra mile, grapple seriously with the material, and get into the spirit of the science based lecture series.

I am going to track the progress of this class here on my blog. Please comment here, or privately, I want to hear everyone's opinion on this experiment.

GTD Day 44: Getting Things Done and War on Procrastination

2007-04-09T18:02:00.000-07:00

GTD Report
I am happy to report that we spent many hours at the Container Store. We are redoing our closet as I've mentioned, and this a very big deal. The 'inbox" from the closet has been covering the living room, dining room, and entrance hall way. One couldn't say we were inefficient in our use of space; having seen it all outside of the closet, we can't understand how we ever managed to get it into the closet. Of course this great traditional use of space meant I could never find anything. One goal here, on top of having a "mind like water" is to be able to locate anything in 1 to 2 minutes, max.

I am only now realizing how much the clutter was effecting me. After the shopping trip, I spent the afternoon reading books about how to give a top notch presentation on PowerPoint, bypassing the old bullets method. I also analyzed data that had just come in, and discovered we have "significant results." I am using a statistical word when I say "significant." To put it simply, it means one wouldn't be likely to find these results in a crap shoot. Ultimately it means the study is publishable and this makes me happy. Its a real drag to spend months working on a study only to have it turn out to have no significant results. I have to say that rarely happens to me, I have a great capacity to know ahead of time what is going to work, and I generally avoid studies that my sixth sense tells me "Don't waste your time." Nevertheless every time a study turns out to have significant results I get excited and almost jump up and down with pleasure.

Loose ends, filing, and the mail
But I have been procrastinating on several big jobs. For example, I need to carry through on all that filing and finish the job by putting the labeled files in file cabinets. I need to deal with the mail. I have yet to do a really thorough review every Sunday, gathering all the "loose ends" of the week. By now the loose ends are a full month of loose ends, all dropped into a growing inbox that is a real inbox, instead of the living room floor. Until I do a thorough review, I don't think I can say I'm doing GTD. Half measures will get me no where. Earlier in the week I re-read Steve Pavlina and Merlin Mann of 43 Folders discussing procrastination, then procrastinated another six days.

Finally last night while lying in bed, working on my upcoming presentation, I decided to follow the 2 minute rule. Out came the Brother's labeler and right there, it must have been 1AM and everyone was fast asleep, I labeled and filed some loose papers. It took five minutes all together. This morning I marched down to my living room, went right to the mail table, grabbed a pile and began sorting and mainly tossing. When I attended the Allen seminar, Allen asked the audience if we had any chronic problems that needed some effort put to them, and I raised my hand and confessed what I do with the mail. Nothing. It can sit there piling up for months, and I don't look at it, I don't see it. I said I seemed to be afraid to open my mail. After this big confession I continued to do absolutely nothing about it, until this morning. I think the fear around the mail is that I will have to make a decision and I don't think I can do it, decide what to keep and what to toss. Its simple and yet I have never done it routinely. I hope I am going to make a real change, implemented for the first time this morning

Backtracking.. four days earlier
I have to give myself credit, cut myself some slack here. This week a dumpster came and was filled up within 24 hours. It will probably take us two more dumpsters before we have any semblance of order in the house. But we are one dumpster closer. Carpets were put in this week, on our stairs and and in one hallway. The closet was built with Elfa materials and some of the chaos that happened when everything came out of the closet has returned to normal as clothes went back into the space designed for them. The carpets on the stairs make me feel like I'm living in a "grown up" house and I don't know how I stood that painted soft wood for all of these years. GTD is creeping up on me and maybe I'll do a real Sunday review this week.

I am not happy with my lecture
I am trying out a new way to develop a lecture for my large class that begins next Thursday. I'm using a book "Beyond Bullet Points" written by Atkinson, on the recommendation of Matt Cornell in his blog some time recently. Its an interesting experiment, but still feels very awkward to me. The idea is to imitate the way Hollywood writers construct a screen play or TV show script. I'm going to be lecturing on something I've lectured on many times in the past, so trying this method might be foolish, but I love experiments. So far I don't like what I've written; it seems jumbled and instead of achieving greater clarity, I feel I'm heading into the opposite, confusion. Today I have a few more appointments, and then I am focusing on this project intensely. If I don't have something more coherent to show by Sunday, I'm going back to my old method.

Moving into transition
A few more weeks and I think I will cross over the line to real GTD heaven, and a mind like water will replace a mind like mud.I think I am approaching the period of serious transition, as I feel more confident that I am not forgetting important things and that I have a good chunk of my life moving in the right direction. I am beginning to plan, a serious weakness in the past. What I don't get done in a day moves onto the list for the next day. My lists are fairly up to date, despite having to move to another system for the umpteenth time --but more about that later. I am optimistic about the growing sense of order at home and in my home office. Making the decision to throw everything out was long overdue; that moment of decisiveness marked the move to a real transition in my life. Its the oddest thing but I feel like I am taking over my own life, and I can't figure out why it took me so long to do this. I ask myself "Does implementing GTD have this effect on everyone?"

GTD Implementation: Day 39

2007-04-08T17:02:00.000-07:00

Just one small decision yields a giant step forward
Here it is day 39 after beginning my GTD full implementation. Its Easter Sunday, late afternoon, and I'm still reading and writing in bed. I think I've figured out a big problem that has been hanging me up for weeks now. As I wrote well over a week ago, figuring out my filing system and where files were supposed to go, in which of the 38 (or is it 48?) file drawers I either already had in place --or which I had delivered to the house in preparation for this undertaking-- helped and permitted a week or so of progress on various fronts. However I found myself slowing down again, and frankly stuck, paralyzed in the middle of the implementation. After the last three or four days of walking around the house, finding more and more banker boxes hidden in every corner, every "back room" and every closet, it hit me, I "got it." I couldn't possibly go through all of the boxes to see what to keep and what to throw out, papers were coming into the house while the clock was ticking away, waiting for me to make trivial decisions about trivial pieces of paper, and more pieces of paper. I had no other possible conclusion but what was in front of me. I have to THROW IT ALL OUT. Duhh. This should have been patently obvious by week three, instead of waiting until week five and six. I had to clear out the "inbox" of my living room, and see that there were literally ROOMS more of boxes. I got sick of wasting time worrying about how to deal with all of it, its perfectly clear. I feel a huge sense of relief on this easy Easter Sunday, the dumpster is ordered and should be in front of the house by Tuesday. My grandson who is 22 and strong is lined up, and a few of his friends are invited to join him, for the job of lifting and hauling the boxes right into the dumpster. Goodbye problem. I can say with absolute certainty that I welcome a mind like water, and this will escape me until every last box is tossed, until all the clothes unworn for two years or longer are delivered to the Goodwill sure can't claim a "mind like water." The clutter in the house had finally become clutter in my mind, and it has all been a product of GTD and GTD implementation.

This last significant insight only occurred after I had decided to tackle the downstairs closet, shared by me and my husband. The vast quantity of stuff that came rolling out of that sizable walk in closet-room was mind jumbling and mind numbing. The stuff has been a weight on my mind, on my productivity, probably for years now, only I didn't even see it until I began GTD implementation. I had known that this was going to happen, without exactly knowing it; this is no doubt, why I had been into GTD for almost two years before I made the decision to really do GTD, and not just some small piece of it. I knew when I embraced GTD and showed up at an Allen seminar that my whole life, the life of my home, my office, my lab, my colleagues, co-workers, was about to go through a huge change. The proportions of that change are just sweeping over me, filling me with a mood of excitation and freedom. Its hard to explain the effect of perhaps 80 boxes of files, papers, and more papers. Suffice it to say that it has been a break upon my creativity, a haze preventing clarity and a wall erected between me and a sense of well-being.

Last night, having made the decision to throw everything out, I went to the drawing board to plan out my life for the next year. I have been convinced for months that I was incapable of planning, and I have been. My energy and inherent sense of organization has all been directed to a monumental amount of paper that didn't belong in my life any longer. I have all the files I need for the current research I'm doing, for the articles and presentations I'm currently working on, and I don't need all the rest of it now, or ever. I am so relieved. A small two minute decision, expressed in an even smaller phrase "Just throw it all out" and everything becomes do-able, comfortable, almost easy. The dumpster will be here tomorrow night, or Tuesday. The young post adolescent energy is lined up, and I think I am regaining my capacity to plan, organize and do.

Checking in on GTD: One Month Later

2007-04-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

Time to Confess...
Its time to confess exactly where I am in my major GTD overhaul. MANY things have been put in the right place, new file cabinets are set up, new files created, old files re-organized, many files are vaguely color coded (there are so many categories it gets confusing now and again, does this go under "social psychology" or "evolution?", a 4 drawer file system right next to my main "work station" (a great chair in a great office, two lap-tops fired up and always ready), a well-used labeler (yes I followed instructions and bought a good Brother's labeler), and many many decisions later..

OK I confess, not all the files are put away. I found my husband had hidden a large number of already filed items in file-boxes, in a back back room that I can't even get into, and there are still some file-boxes full of filed articles and old papers in the living room in-box. You can rest assured that the minute all is completed, I will be posting another picture, so you get the full "before" and "after" scene. But I'm not ready for that kind of documentation, and its been 31 days since I began the project. Progress not perfection is the slogan I tell myself every day.

Distracted
I got seriously distracted by the preparations required for my upcoming class of 55+ students. As part of my GTD transformation I decided that being seriously over-prepared for my class this year was the way to go. I spent weeks on the syllabus, collecting the articles assigned by me and all the visiting professors who speak to the class, all in a well-labeled (thank you D.A. and Brothers) reader, made duplicate readers, and to top it off I developed a class listserv ("Cognition 2007") to which I sent off everything yesterday (the end of the past trimester), including the syllabus and all the articles. I hope that all this material appearing in the students e-mail in-boxes will inspired them to do the reading, get a head start on the class. And I am also reading each article (most of them are new) in great detail, taking notes, so I can be the over prepared master of the ship. I will be surprised if I hear any complaints about being disorganized or unclear, although one never knows. I am now preparing the first lecture on my own research, and I think I'll then show Kindness of Strangers, a documentary made about people who came to Sri Lanka to help in the relief efforts, and in which I am one of the "talking heads." Since survivor guilt (broadly defined) is my primary area of empirical research, the documentary written and directed by a brilliant Australian filmmaker Rhian Skirving is bottom line, about altruism and international survivor guilt, and the course is "Cognition, Emotion and Personality" (survivor guilt is an emotion involving specific cognitions), it seems appropriate to present the film along with the research lecture. I hope it is well received and the students find the first class both informative and entertaining.

This then, has interfered a bit with single minded focus on my GTD implementation project. The reading alone is time consuming, but it will allow me to orient the students to each article with a degree of expertise I usually don't have but I should have always had. Its GTD in action I figure, so if the implementation (aka filing) is not going as fast as I had hoped, it is what it is.

Reading scientific articles is both fascinating and hard

I can understand my students' difficulties in tackling the literature of psychological science, however I find it do-able and exciting, particularly as I cover the "methods" sections of the articles. I am reminded of how important it is for me, as an active scientist, to read and read more, in order to get novel ideas and methods of investigating a topic, or even re-investigating old data sets I have collected. I find myself going slowly as I take notes on methods, that is exactly how a study was conducted, down to the smallest details. Scientific articles are remarkable in that they are like recipes from a good cook book (when they're good research reports). I can read, take notes, and have a template for replicating the study, or for making small changes in the plan, to accommodate what I'm aiming to study. This morning I read a report of how a group "coded" some data, and discovered the first author did some of the coding herself, and that was acceptable as long as she was blind to where exactly in the data collection the sample of behavior came from, and she didn't know what the particular samples she was coding correlated with, in another part of the study. I hope this doesn't sound technical because its a simple research protocol, and probably is replicated in many parts of life.

Survivor guilt: Life in the Office

Our current research: Life in the office when lay offs are happening
In a recent experimental Internet-based (online) study which is now moving into the final stage of data analysis, we had a story, which varied in one way, providing four different conditions. The story is about a woman, Sara, who works in a high tech firm. She is a manager in one department. The second character, Andrea, is also a manager in the same company but in a different department. Sara and Andrea both work extremely hard, have been with the company for over ten years, rarely missing work, and both are exemplary workers. In one condition Andrea is Sara's sister. In the second condition Susan is Sara's best friend. In the third condition she is Sara's acquaintance at work, who Sara is unlikely to ever see outside of the company, and in the forth condition Andrea is a rival who has traditionally behaved unethically towards Sara. Then, the technology crash happens, and lay offs are pending in all the tech firms. In the midst of this, Sara finds out she is being promoted to a higher level of management. Meanwhile Andrea is informed that she is being laid off. Sara hears from her boss of the lay offs and finds out that Susan is among those being dismissed.

Participants are ordinary people from the Internet, on CraigsList
The participants of the study (they were invited to participate on CraigsList, an online community advertisement service that is located in many US cities) are asked to pick a condition according to the month in which they were born, with the months for each spanning the year --so for example, condition one is for birthdays in January, May, September, etc. This provides a random assignment of the conditions. Participants, after having read the story for their condition, are asked "When Sara learns of Andrea's dismissal from the firm, what do you think Sara would feel, what do your think she would think, and what do you think she would do?" Participants are asked to write a narrative with as much detail as possible, answering these questions.

Is survivor guilt experienced beyond the family? What about acts of altruism?
We are trying to find out if everyone, across conditions, feels guilty about Andrea's dismissal, (survivor guilt broadly defined, since obviously Sara is surpassing Andrea), even in the rival condition. We question as to whether Sara would feel more guilt if Andrea were a sister (kin in other words), than if she were a friend, an acquaintance, or a rival. We are in part testing out the common evolutionary theory that altruism is more often extended to blood kin, than to others, with the hypothesis that in our culture, friends and perhaps even acquaintances, are the recipients of acts of altruism. We are trying to test out the evolutionary theory that altruism is a form of selfishness, when it is primarily extended to kin, as helping kin may often serve to help one's own genes.

From GTD in the classroom to problem solutions in research methods
In reading an article this morning I realized that I can be a rater of the narratives written, as long as I am blind to which group the narrative comes from (sister, best friend, acquaintance or rival). The narratives are randomized for the raters, so that there is no way to tell automatically to which group a narrative belongs. Realizing that I could be one of the raters simplified my life, I don't need to locate as many other raters familiar with the construct of survivor guilt. The raters will be asked to rate how guilty Sara feels, how much personal responsibility she seems to take for Andrea's dismissal. Surprising though it may seem, and illogical as it is, on glancing through responses I saw that many people felt that Sara would somehow feel responsible for Andrea's fate, even though she had nothing to do with it and she is not even in the same department in the firm.

Thank you, thank you universe for having me read the research articles assigned to my class so closely.

Are details from my work generalizable to other fields and work areas?
I don't know how generalizable this description of my current project is, or how it might apply to work people in other fields are doing.

GTD in the lab: A project needs immediate attention
The project has to be completed immediately, --I'm presenting this at a conference at the end of April, I have to get a move on. I have preliminary data already analyzed and that was included in the proposal to the conference, but I need to have this detailed analysis done and done right away. All by way of excusing myself for putting the hardcore GTD implementation --putting all the files away-- on the back burner.

In the background: GTD crawling into the closets
Coming attractions include the fact that I have been throwing catalogues from the Container Company all over the house, and asked my husband to measure all of our closets. He says "Well we can make do with a renovation of your part of the closet." We share a closet, a large walk-in absolute heap of "stuff" with clothes falling off open drawers, huge piles on top of unused dressers, jumbles of wrinkled clothes on the floor, piles of disorganized towels over on one side, yet more file-boxes way in the back. I look at him, my eyes narrowing, "That is not what I had in mind." He argues back: "Well I'm fine with what I have." I look at his seemingly "agreeable" countenance indicating he has no idea of what I've been talking about when requesting measurements. I counter, "Apparently you don't get it, I am not walking into a well organized closet on one side, and a completely disorganized mess on the other side, that would not encourage my new GTD lifestyle." He makes his point again, trying to exhibit neutrality, "Well I was just suggesting options." Half a closet is not a GTD option. I look fierce I hope, "Every closet in this house is being redone." OK, I made my point. He muttered about arranging for space in a public storage company for the even larger number of file boxes and old files in the basement. Finally, he's getting the picture. GTD implementation may go on for another six months, and I hope I make it by then.

Why is philosophy included in discussions of morality?

2007-03-29T08:48:00.000-07:00

Philosophy and morality in homo sapiens? Why?
I am always puzzled by the inclusion of philosophy within discussions of morality. We are wired with an empathy system, unless suffering from a "broken brain" of one sort or another. Newly born infants will cry harder when hearing a recording of other babies crying, than they will at hearing a recording of their own crying. Toddlers will move to help someone who has dropped something that they didn't mean or want to drop, yet ignore it when a person drops something they mean to drop and don't care about.

Empathy in rhesus monkeys
In the 60's Mirsky and Miller conducted studies with rhesus monkeys demonstrating empathy between two monkeys. In these studies they trained monkeys to associate a sound with a shock. After the onset of the sound, the shock could be avoided by the monkey pressing a lever. The monkey were then paired, and one monkey was exposed to the pre-shock tone, while the second monkey was simply watching the first on a television screen. When the first monkey heard the pre-shock sound, the observing monkey saw the fear in the first monkey's face, and pushed the lever to spare the first monkey from the shock. This demonstrated the capacity to communicate affect in rhesus monkeys, and also the presence of strong empathy. In a small detail of this study, they narrowed the range of what was seen by the observing monkey, to determine how the affect was being communicated. Showing a narrower and narrower view of the observed monkey, they found that the affect was communicated by the eyes alone, so that if the observing monkey had nothing to go on but observing the eyes of the observed monkey, the observing monkey would press the shock-relieving lever when needed, saving his or her conspecific from being shocked. There is something to be said about "is" equalling "ought." The effort to prevent shock in a conspecific is automatic, a split second reaction to fear in the eyes of the conspecific. Empathy in mammals is a biological fact of life. Rats will suffer "personally" in an effort to help a conspecific in distress.

Survivor guilt in chimpanzees: Discomfort in reaction to begging, why is there begging?
As for fairness, in 1936 Yerkes reported on a study of two chimpanzees caged side by side. If one of the pair and not the other was given food, the chimpanzee not receiving food began begging. The provisioned chimpanzee at first ignore the begging, but over time became uncomfortable and share some food with the chimpanzee without. This happens not always, but often enough to demonstrate that the reaction to begging is to share. Why would animals beg, if not to induce feelings of discomfort (survivor guilt broadly defined) in the animal who is the recipient of begging, with the intention of getting the animal with food (or with some other desired object) to share the product of his or her good fortune. Babies beg in order to get fed, and adults also beg in order to receive. Our domestic animals beg in order to get us to share. Begging demonstrates the presence of a drive to share, to be shared with, equity, or "guilt" (survivor guilt or whatever we want to name it) --that s some internal state of discomfort in the absence of equity, that is resolved by sharing.

A drive for equity and the fungus in the forest
Sharing, or the drive for equity, has at its base, an adaptive purpose, and extends far beyond primate or mammalian behavior. In a forest trees of the same species may compete for resources, and trees of different species may do the same. But under the floor of the forest, hidden underground, is a network of fungi, connecting all the trees. If one tree or one species is getting more of needed resources than other trees or other species, the fungi will absorb nutrients from the overly endowed tree or species of trees, and will redistribute the resources to those less fortunate. Therefore even in the forest there is a system that enforces a kind of equity and cooperation between trees of the same species, and between different species. Cooperation is the name of the game, and sharing and "morality" are mechanisms working in the interest of cooperation. Bacteria that live in our mouth live in cooperative clumps, and to survive the bacteria have to maintain their "group" structure. If the group is disturbed as it is in flossing our teeth, the group is dismantled, and individual bacteria can't make it and are killed off. Here, this smallest of units, is dependent on group living and cooperation, and we make use of that in efforts to protect our gums and teeth, enabling us to have dental health far past our 40s.

Our place in the animal world...we are not unique and why should or would we be?
The only way I can see philosophy at work in this picture is found in how we explain our history of narrowly focusing on self-interest, individuality, and gene-centrism, at the expense of focusing on cooperation as a very old and fundamental adaptation, in response to evolutionary pressures. What is it about our thinking that has led to such errors in attention and explanation of natural phenomena? I have been very happy to see the return of group selection, or multilevel selection theory, as finally we seem to be on the right track in our efforts to understand the world. Philosophy or world view, in the face of evolutionary data, seems narrow and "besides the point" and can only be considered, in my own opinion, as factors that contributed to our errors in attribution. In the end, it always seems to me that taking a philosophical stance in discussions of morality, goes hand in hand with denial of our place in evolution, and by necessity ends up once again proclaiming that man (and woman) is qualitatively "different" from other animals, and thus is at heart, an anti-evolutionist perspective.

WordPress, My Technological Ignorance & Teaching

2007-03-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

As usual I'm reading and following Seah, and he is talking about "WordPress" so I went right to them and started a blog called "Lynn O'Connor's Process Notes: Second Edition." I have no idea if I'll switch or not, but their format feels very cool. I wrote them a note saying I needed some instruction and maybe they could get in touch with me. They are located here in San Francisco, I could have their whole team over for dinner, which I offered. I am so behind and backwards. I never read computer manuals, and I certainly didn't read anything that Blogger puts out, nor the few books I picked up about Blogger and how to use it. Following the culture while wagging a tail far being is almost becoming a quasi obsession. Its time for some self-analysis.

Coming attraction: A huge and somewhat frightened class lies right ahead of me
I have a class of 60 first year doctoral students at our program starting up in the third week of April, so I might have to put my new interest on hold, but I doubt that I'll do that. I care about the class and plan to be very over prepared this year to see if it goes better than it has in some years past. Its a very large (for our program and our style of classes) and its difficult for students to settle into in and not feel overwhelmed. We have for the most part clinically focused students and this course is all about psychological science which is where I put my brain most of the time. So its not only overwhelming, but it actually frightens some students though it shouldn't because they aren't expected to understand anything they don't understand. I shift between thinking I should perhaps make it more demanding --not more confusing, just more of a challenge, and perhaps I should design it to have fewer demands, though I can't image how.

Class design as it stands
As it stands, I have a series of professors of various areas of psychological science come and introduce the students to their areas of expertise (in cognition, emotion, or personality), talk about their own research, and consider possible clinical implications of their work. The students just have to read articles assigned before each lecture, write thoughtful questions about the readings each week, and write a 12 page final paper. No exams, no quizzes, though I am rethinking that one. Despite this basic simplicity in course design, there often is an air of "confusion" around the course that I can't figure out, and that I'm hoping some big time over-preparation on my part might somehow rub off on them and extinguish even a hint of confusion. I thought about starting a blog for the course, but too many of our students absolutely freak out at anything having to do with technology. They signed up for clinical psychology because they are shy of technological innovations, or so it seems.

Behind in technological innovations
The school is way behind in technology and I think --though I don't know-- I'm probably the only faculty member deep into chasing after the Internet and in love with what I guess is called "web 2." I try to explain the visual and tactile experience of writing on Ajax, how things just visually slide into place, and people look at me blankly. I don't know enough to make myself clear, or to make the technological innovations I'm speaking of clear, I just know what is aesthetically pleasing so me, and the Ajax thing for sure is. So of course I would like to bring that into this class, but since students already seem confused, and I'm confused about what it is I'm trying to describe, I guess that has to wait for another year.

I need hands on instruction
I hope I hear back from someone from WordPress and get some clarification about the whole web world and how to use it. I'm not about to read a how to do it text book, I need some hands on instruction. It puts me into the position my students must find themselves in, when put right into the center of some of the most active psychological scientists in the country. I heard from a friend that it is not possible to respond to my blog right now, and I have no idea of what to do about it, other than go out to Apple and beg my own Apple Genius, John, to help if he can. He is very brilliant in my estimation, so its right to call him an Apple Genius, and I'm sure if he has the time, he could figure out the problem and teach me much more than I know, helping me gain some mastery over the technology I'm using in absolute sheer ignorance. I apologize to anyone who wants to write comments here, for the glitch in my very simple set up. People could write comments a few weeks ago, so I have no idea why they can't now. But my heart felt apology for the error in set up here, and I am going to try to correct is as soon as I can.

Being in the position of learner helps me to take a more sympathetic stance
Writing this has made me feel greater sympathy for my students, as the teacher here is in the position of learner, and confusion is the name of the game. I think confusion always comes first when learning anything new, so I hope I'm not expecting too much in the way of calm and organized clarity from students in terms of their moods and their efforts to get into my science-based upcoming class. I sure would like to start a blog for "Cognition, Emotion and Personality, 2007" that the more technically sophisticated students could enjoy and contribute to, you know a "psychological science page" on the web, for clinical graduate students.

There is still a big role for psychosocial treatment:

2007-03-22T18:45:00.000-07:00

That which makes us clever, makes us mad:

From The Times OnLine, by Mark Henderson, Science Editor
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1355884.ece
" One of the most devastating types of mental illness could be a by-product of the evolution of human beings’ uniquely sophisticated intelligence, a new genetic study has suggested.
Scientists have discovered that a common version of a particular gene appears both to enhance a key thinking circuit in the brain, and to be linked to a raised risk of schizophrenia."

Major mental disorders appear more clearly to be biological in origin
The genetic basis of major mental disorders is increasingly clarified, although no one study can be assumed to have a final word. I have personally seen reports of many differing studies, with different areas on the genome found to underlie bipolar disorder which is among the most heritable mental disorders, more than schizophrenia, and up there with ADHD. Same goes with unipolar depression although that has been found to have a lower concordance rate. Still, major mental disorders all seem to be biological in etiology, and when people speak of the environmental piece, they often neglect to mention that the most important environmental factors also seem to be what we might consider "physical" or "biological' in origin. For example, OCD, a highly heritable disorder, is not infrequently set off in children following a strep infection. The strep bacteria apparently releases a neurotoxin, which in vulnerable children, leads to brain inflammation and whatever other local trauma which then leads to OCD. Neurotoxins are also found increasingly to be associated with severe mental disorders. So it is important that we make it clear when we speak of environmental factors that we include exposure to pathogens and to neurotoxic agents. It is almost impossible today, from my reading anyway, to determine what neurotoxin is contributing to what, because neurotoxins don't come in "single neurotoxic" packages. In heavily polluted areas, the neurotoxins are multiple, and no one has really studied the effects of multiple interacting neurotoxins on the brain, to say nothing of the embryonic brain, or the young developing brain.

Some psychologists are worried, "are we out of work?"
I think some psychologists worry as things become more clearly biological, thinking we will be out of work. Nothing could be further from the truth. I doesn't matter what the etiology of a serious mental disorder is, psychological treatment is often essential for a good prognosis, along with psychopharmacological treatment in some cases, and other types of psychosocial treatments as well. Consider the problems that confront a child with ADHD. They are disliked by their peers, they have difficulty in school, all of which amounts to serious failure for the child. Thus ADHD may be entirely biological in etiology, but the person with ADHD has dealt with so many difficulties as the result of their illness, they need and deserve psychological help.

What about addiction?
Consider addiction. A person with addiction disease may have been prone to addiction because of heritable factors, and may have been environmentally triggered by neurotoxins, or multiple neurotoxins. But the treatment is abstinence from mind altering drugs, and often this is only possible with the support of a psychologist or other mental health professional. People with this disease need and deserve a great deal of psychosocial support as they find in programs like AA, and the individual kind of support they get in psychotherapy.

Along with illness comes a whole package of psychosocial insults
People with all "biological" illnesses whether they are "mental illnesses" or "other physical illnesses" often suffer from numerous psychological insults, stigma, increased daily life stressors as they monitor their illnesses, the need to take multiple medications, the list goes on and on. It doesn't matter if the etiology is all biological, the treatment often has to include a psychosocial component for the best prognosis and outcome. So for those who worry that the growing knowledge of the biological nature of mental disorders means we are out of work, worry no more. We just have to be ready to help people as they struggle to recognize, deal with, get treatment for their biologically based disorders. There is a great deal of work for us, perhaps more than ever as the importance of solid psychological support is recognized as an essential component of treatment for all illnesses.

Some Notes on Writing

2007-03-20T21:48:00.000-07:00

Responding to a lament about writing on a GTD Listserv:

On a GTD listserv, someone was speaking to the trouble they were having in getting themselves to write, and there was some commentary about why it was so hard to write. I have another experience, and posted it there, then realized, hey I can post it on my own blog!! So here's my personal story about writing.

I'm a writer and I write every day or almost every day for the last --almost 40 years. I am also a psychologist and professor, so I do other things as well, but writing is probably my first love in terms of something that puts me in a "flow" state. Analyzing data from my research also leads me to a flow state, but not with the same ease and fluidity. I don't write fiction, I write research reports, articles, personal and political commentary, reviews, notes to students, notes to colleagues, case studies, just about anything I can think about. In fact, anything I think about at all, I think about in writing. I have an @writing category in contexts, and I also schedule in 7 to 10 or 11 AM as prime time writing time. That doesn't mean I always use it for writing, I may be needing to deal with emails that came in, possibly having to do with my research, or teaching, or this or that. So I have to skip writing that morning. Sometimes when I'm into my sleeping in in the morning and staying up late at night, I write in the evening as a way to come down from the day. Writing puts me in a flow, maybe an alpha state, so I hate not writing.

How it Started
I don't know how it got to be this way but I think it started with daily reports to a very close friend and mentor. I was trying to write my way out of some mess I had gotten myself in, a really terrible relationship. Everytime I thought I was going to call some guy who I knew I should stay away from, instead of making the phone call, I went to the typewriter (in those days I didn't have a computer) and said whatever was happening, and it worked, I didn't make the phone call. I always say I wrote my way out of trouble and that is not an exaggeration. As time went on I expanded, but I always need to have an immediate "audience" or what I call a "reader" or "readers." I still do, the reader changes, the circumstance varies throughout the day, but the writing is steady and the source of enormous pleasure. I think it really does put me in a meditative state, my blood pressure goes down, heart rate goes down, and it just works that way. I recommend to anyone who feels stuck about writing that they have at least one reader. If I'm sending something out for publication in a journal I edit and re-edit at least five or even seven or eight times, and it always improves. Towards the end I edit every single line outloud, and play with the sentences.

Always writing in the back of my mind..
Someone who I was talking to once about writing, on hearing how I could sit down and write ten pages and not know where the time went, said "you must be writing nonconsciously all the time, for it to just come out like that, as if it were already written." I started paying attention to the underground thinking we all do, and sure enough, I found myself working on sentences while day dreaming and doing who knows what other things. So that is how that happens, and he was right, I had something already written under the surface before I sat down and started writing. My best advice is to write every day, write endless emails or letters to a friend or two who is willing to be a reader. Write about your daily life, the mundane, the things that give you trouble and the things that are easy. It becomes a habit and something you can't do without. I say sometimes that I think with my fingers, and this is how it feels to me. If I am having trouble explaining something to someone, I know that if I sit down at the keyboard it will be easy. I tend to be too wordy (witness this post) but I don't let that stop me. I long ago discovered that if I was having trouble getting something down, I just had to think to myself "who is looking over my shoulder?" and figure out who was I worrying about, who might disapprove of me. Having located the problem, I could make sure that the person was not able to look over my shoulder, and on I could go free from criticism. I would love to be able to write fiction, but so far that has alluded me. Maybe in the future I'll figure that one out.

Write Daily and Make it Real
Write daily, have a reader, make it real --about your real life-- make time for it and avoid feeling self-indulgant (this is easy to say and hard to do), and just write your heart out, it gets so easy you can't do without it. I guess its like runners feel about running, or basket ball players feel about playing, or violinists feel about the their playing music... its got its own reward that is intrinsic, needs no other success to keep me going. Eventually if you become a really active writer there are many ways you can use it in career ambitions, depending on your field and interests. But even without extrinsic rewards, it remains a source of pleasure and perhaps a way to put a foot print somewhere and feel like one is contributing to life on our planet.

Learning and the Brain: Part III, Kenneth Wesson

2007-03-15T18:55:00.000-07:00

The Brain-Considerate Classroom of the Future

Introduction
Wesson was a lively and somewhat colloquial speaker, speaking passionately to a full audience of well over 1000 people, 75% of whom were teachers. Transforming his talk into a note summarizing his point of view, is difficult because he had a rhythm and an obvious passion for his material that can't be summarized in notes. So instead I have reproduced his talk, transcribing as much as I could from notes and listening to a CD of his talk. Therefore, what follows here is in Wesson's voice, and is marked by blue text. I’ll make some comments after this near-transcription of his inspiring lecture.

Teaching Our Kids How To Think
We need to teach our kids how to think. More than any other skill or knowledge, teaching children how to think and how to solve problems, this is important because jobs are constantly changes, and what is big in the job market today didn't exist 20 years ago, and jobs are going to continue to change in this way. Therefore the skills and knowledge we give to our children have to be what they need to be able to retool their skills as needed. We are failing in this task.. In the US only 18% who graduate from kindergarten go on to finish college. In Japan 82% complete college. This suggests we are not doing so well in inspiring and educating our children. In the 1960s we got obsessed with standardized testing. We asked our kids to read a paragraph and they go through the process but it had no meaning for them. (Wesson then did an experiential exercise with us, having us read something consisting of half made up of meaningless words/sounds. We got his point.)

No Child Left Behind?
"No child left behind" ends up meaning we only do repetition and practice for a specific test. No "child left behind" means no thought of children. Tests are not what we should be doing in our schools; you can modify your statistics so they support your point of view, or so they make the school look better than it is. Our educational system takes in healthy kids with nothing wrong with them, and they get problems while they are going through our system. We fixate on the wrong things. In the classroom the teacher throws out a question, someone, or a group of someone’s, answers and then we hear the answer and comment on it, and everyone has stopped thinking.

Teaching our Kids to Learn How to Learn

Things We Can Do
But there are things we can do so our kids learn how to think, we can help them. They can learn how to learn. They can learn how to make connections in a brain-considerate classroom. We are constantly changing the "facts" so the facts are not what are important, it’s how to think and learn so we can always learn new facts, that's important. Our brains are remarkable, always functioning in numerous ways. And we do our best when we're working with another person. A teacher should be a guide on the side, an academic mentor, facilitating learning. Learning should not be competitive. Look for ways that your students can collaborate.

Put Our Teachers Under a Microscope
Instead of putting our students under a microscope, we should put our teachers under the microscope. Instead of walking around the room to see if they're learning anything we should walk around "to see if I was clear." We should encourage boys and girls to work together, to solve problems. If they think differently, that is great, together they'll be great problem solvers. We should all be following Problem-Based Learning. We need a student-centered not content-centered learning environment. We are always looking for patterns, connections, and we go from the concrete to the abstract. We need to move from a passive to an active model of learning. An ideal situation would be a brain-considerate classroom, with both teachers and researchers involved in the kids' learning.

Every Kid is Successful
Education should be designed s that every kid is successful. Instead, we have a model where the goal is to weed out kids. All of us have trouble with change and making brain-considerate classroom involves very dramatic changes. We have to change, complacency is fatal. We have to wake up, we can't continue to fall behind. We expect our kids to be good at multitasking, but multitasking is impossible. (He gave us an experiential exercise here, having us move our hand in a circle going clockwise then he told us: "Now make a six with your foot." Go ahead and try it, the audience got the point, you will too).

Growing New Neurons in the Brain-Considerate Classroom
We recently learned that there is the possibility of growing new nerve cells, and we have to learn how to teach so that we are sponsoring the growth of new brain cells. We have to work at developing ways that teaching can mirror learning, to have learning in sync with how we teach. In the brain-considerate classroom emotions drive everything. Touch does wonders for the whole brain system. We need touch every day. We need 16 hugs a day for a normal emotional state. They used to think that we shouldn't touch babies, we'd give them "germs." They kept infants in their own rooms, saying "Don't touch the baby." Kids need touch, hugs and words, they need us to tell them how great they're going to do this year. Recent experiments demonstrated that when the mother is taken away from baby rats the babies simply stop growing. When the mother comes back, the babies start growing again. They found out that what mattered was the mother's licking the pups. They can't grow without the mother's licking. Touch is essential, the same thing happens with people who don’t get touched, they stop growing.

Safety, Acceptance, Involvement, Inclusion
Our kids should feel acknowledged, wanted. We have dropouts because no one even noticed that they never dropped in. They feel they're not part of the class because they were never made part of the class, they were never invited in. We have to communicate the message: "I really like you." Emotions drive all intelligence and you only remember what you care about. Our goal is to get students engaged, we have to get to know the students, not get them to know the curriculum. Our kids need safety, acceptance, involvement, inclusion. Instead we scare our kids, not realizing what we're doing. If a person is frightened, all their blood rushes from their head, and it goes right to their large muscle groups, to their limbs, preparing for fleeing or fighting. When people are frightened they can't think very well, the brain shuts down.

A Safe Environment
We have to make the environment for learning as safe as possible, then we'll see our kids do their best work. The illiterates of the future are not those who can't read or write but those who can't learn and relearn. We have to relearn things all the time, as things change. (He called on those in the audience who had been teaching more than 20 years and said "you are our national treasures"). He said "For many no one ever turned on that light." Our students look like a lot of work, but we should be thinking "You made a difference, I'm sure glad I had you in my class." Every student has to be acknowledged, accepted, and that presents a challenge. Our goal is to teach them to connect and to do this we need a classroom environment that is risk-free. Students need a lot of feedback from their teachers. They need our positive emotional responses.

Students May Forget What You Said, but They’ll Never Forget How You Made Them Feel
We need to use drawing and singing in our classrooms. You can't draw without thinking, and that is what we need to be teaching. We have to allow for downtime, our students need it, and given downtime they will do better. The biggest thing you can do in the classroom is offer hope, the kids often have no hope from anywhere else. In the end students may forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. Margaret Mead said "Never think that a small group of citizens can't change the world, that is the only thing that can change the world." Teachers are the group that can change the world, if we teach with the brain in mind.

Day 14, GTD Implementation

2007-03-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

David Allen reports in GTD, that between collecting and processing, plan for at least a few days, best done over a weekend or holiday. I suppose if I hadn't procrastinated over where to put my various categories of files, I might have been finished in 8 days, but I can't see how I could go much faster. It is very tedious, time consuming, but I see a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s a bright light indeed. I am gaining a sense of control over my "stuff" that I don't think I've ever felt before. Its really being master of my own ship, and I can tell there is smooth sailing ahead. Having solved the problem of why I was procrastinating yesterday while writing here, last night I was able to make a detailed plan of action and attack, and today I've been implementing the plan. It looks so haphazard while its in process, files all over the place, hanging folder, manila folders, labels as my labeling machine (Brothers as recommended) is putting out labels --not for every file, but for every main category. The way I figured out the plan last night was to assign a number to each file cabinet drawer (over 45 of them at last count). Then I made a massive list of all the categories the files would fold into. Then I sat and stared at the room plans I made specifically for this project on a wonderful Internet service called "Gliffy" http://www.gliffy.com/and tried to figure out what I need near me at all times, and what could be housed a greater distance from my main work space. Finally I began assigning categories to specific numbers (file drawers). It was a simple process, and it was indeed the hurdle that had held me up for almost a week.. I wonder if anyone else has had this particular problem. I have so many things I do --teach, research, write, see patients (or clients), supervise, work as a consultant and my research interests are widely distributed drawing on social, cognitive, personality and evolutionary psychology. My lab is called the Emotion, Personality & Altruism Research Group, www.eparg.org and that covers a lot of territory. So I have a whole lot of files. To cap the whole thing, I've been somewhat obsessed for almost two years now I guess it is, with the whole field of productivity. It’s that new interest that got me here, feeling like I'm finally going to be moving in exactly the way I want to be moving. However the downside, there are now almost as many files (articles, how to pieces, computer manuals) about productivity as there are about my scientific interests. Although I consider this GTD process to be highly scientific, and based on years of empirical observations. Maybe if I keep power whacking away at everything, filing, labeling, throwing away, then more filing, maybe I can finish by Thursday night or Friday. Maybe.

Day 13: GTD, Procrastination, Commitments, and Moving Ahead

2007-03-13T18:06:00.000-07:00

Falling Behind

Its day 13 of this major GTD implementation and I am falling behind on my commitment to myself to get everything sorted, filed, and put away in a "timely" manner, meaning do it at least before our spring break when I ostensibly don't have to teach for a week. I wanted to have a real "break" during spring break, or at least nothing on my mind but analyzing data, writing, and preparing a poster presentation for a scientific meeting coming up the first weekend in May, in Vancouver. At least we found my lost passport in the first round of sorting, after piling everything in our living room. I filed that quickly before I had time to lose it again. But I regret to admit that there are still many boxes --I might know what is in them, or sort of, but the contents should have been tossed or filed by now, as I move up to the end of the second week of GTD implementation, full-scale, head-on style. I have to make myself resume sorting, trashing, filing. The big stumbling block, I have to confess, is what files go where, I vaguely realized that insight as I was sitting around ruminating this afternoon, about other things I haven't gotten done. I really got it while sitting here writing about this process.

Color Coding and What's Stopping Me: Making a Decision
So now I know what has stopped me from a rapid powering through of everything, for well over a week, since March 3rd to be exact. The problem started then, but I didn't realize until this afternoon what the problem was. I can't seem to make a decision about where to house different sections of my files. I have many categories of files, and I even have a color-coding system, using those round brightly colored sales circles that you can put on anything and peel it off as easily as it goes on. I have a mind map up of my color coding system, i.e. I LOOK very organized, but that is deceptive. Since I can't decide what files go where, it doesn't matter if all of my files were already color coded which they aren't; color-coded or not, they are still piled in various parts of the house (not all still in the living room). Yes, they are sitting there and I feel foolish admitting what the hang up has been, that has apparently led me to a bout of procrastination. The thing I am really procrastinating is making that decision.

A Crisis in Wooden File Cabinets
Now let me explain further. I already had many (and I do mean many) file cabinets in the house before this project began. However I knew there weren't enough to hold all the papers I have that I (no doubt erroneously) think I should hold on to. On Saturday, March 3rd, two four drawer and one three drawer wooden cabinets came into the house, which when added to my other file cabinets, is surely enough to house even my excessive amount of papers, articles and more articles, my own endless stream of letters, emails, articles, and finally old data print outs, and old questionnaires from old studies (well I have to keep those at least seven years, after a study is published). Naturally not all my file cabinets fit in one room. I have the equivalent of 5 files drawers in my office, 7 file drawers in our living room, 3 file drawers separating the dining room and the living room, 8 file drawers in the entering hall way, 15 file drawers in our "back room, " and finally, another 8 file drawers in our bedroom. This comes to a grand total of 38 file drawers. Now some of them are smaller than others, the two drawer file cabinets are not quite as deep as the 3 and 4 drawers, and hold less than the lateral file (Its huge, and hard to open and close). Also the 6 drawers in hall (two cabinets, three drawers a piece) are so packed with old files, much of it possibly needed, that I can't open them easily, it takes all of my weight pulling on them. This is an untenable situation. So now I really see the problem, having reviewed in public this problem which is in some way, awfully personal. Look I sleep with 4 files drawers right beside me, with just enough space between them and our bed for me to open them and use them.

This then is the problem. I have 38 file drawers to choose from, and I can't decide which category should go where, or even which category should be on which floor of our house. By category I mean things like 1) articles about evolutionary psychology 2)articles about animal behavior, 3) articles about psychotherapy, 4) personal medical records for everyone in the family, 5) correspondence 6) social psychology articles, 7) Files related to teaching (either about teaching, or the products of teaching). That's enough, there's lots more, but you get the idea.

A New Plan of Action: Strategizing & Coming Up with a New Tactic
Putting it this way, I think some things are going to clear and that I will make a decision right now as I sit here writing, I'll let my brain be creative and logical all at the same time. Hopefully this will break my spell of procrastination. Knowing however, how difficult this job is for me, I am not going to plan on finishing anything, but instead do the time blocking method again. I'll begin by pulling out Seah's Task-Order-Up form.

http://davidseah.com/archives/2007/01/15/the-task-order-up-2007-editions/

This form includes three separate progress trackers on one page. Its the perfect form for what's ahead of me, zeroing in on the different piles and "gone through once banker boxes." Seah modeled the task-order-up after the hanging waitresses use to communicate multiple orders with the short order cook in old style restaurant. I'll use one progress tracker for each "area" to be attacked in my war against chaos.

Next I'll go around the house and note each pile to be sorted, organized and filed, and have a column be for each area or pile of concern. It might take 3 or even 4 or 5 task-order-up forms (meaning possibly having 12 or more 1/3 page forms. It sounds elaborate but it isn't. Having organized the work, then I'll go to it, in 15 minute intervals. Otherwise I'll never be able to even begin the task. But before I do that I need to make a decision about what categories of files go where, write it down, and stick to it. Hey I wonder if this is just another example of my problem with planning, doing almost everything on the fly? I have to plan this however, or I won't be making a decision about where to file what, and I'll remain in a state of procrastination. That could conceivably go on until next Thanksgiving if I'm not careful. Right now I am saved by a call from a client that just came in.

Learning & the Brain Part II: Gabrieli

2007-03-12T13:47:00.002-07:00

John Gabrieli: Educating the Brain: Implications of Neuroscience for Learning and Learning Disorders

John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist from MIT and Harvard spoke on "Educating the Brain: Implications of Neuroscience for Learning and Learning Disorders." He began with comments about how natural is for neuroscientists to be gathering with teachers as both groups are often focused on learning and memory. He then posed a question around which he built his lecture: "What do we need to know from brain science about learning and memory to be prepared for the future?"

How Do We Study Brain Functioning
From this beginning, addressing an audience that was 75% teachers and 25% neuroscientists, he went on to give a brief description of how they study brain functioning today. "We give a task which is followed by neural activity, marked by increased blood flow or oxygenation to the most active parts of the brain for that task which show up in bold contrast to less active parts of the brain for that task. This is all measured and recorded by fMRI. From this basic method, along with single case examples, they have discovered that the hippocampus, inside the temporal lobes, with one section on the left and one on the right, is in part (though not alone) the seat of memory. He discussed the case of H.M., an epileptic with an entirely normal memory, who had his first seizure at age 16. At age 27, in an effort to control his seizures, H.M. underwent a bilateral medial resection and ended up with anterograde amnesia due to damage to the hippocampus. He lost the ability to remember anything for more than a few moments.

The Stages of Memory
Memory goes through three stages: 1) encoding, 2) storage, and 3) retrieval. Gabrieli finds the moment of encoding to be the "magical moment." He gave us all a small test, asking if we remembered what direction Lincoln was facing on a penny, or if we remember what was above and what was below him. Of course no one does remember something like this. He told us that suppose we say that on average a person handles a penny three times day. Despite the fact that we hypothetically from age 5 to age 30 have handled a penny about 30,000 times, and yet we don't remember this simple information. This is because most of our experiences in life are simply not encoded in the brain: "Only a tiny percent of what we experience is remembered." Consequently, the moment of encoding is indeed something of a magic moment.

Encoding is the Magical Moment
In order to study what is going on in the brain in that moment, a long series of studies were initiated. People were put in an fMRI (imaging) machine, and showed a large number of scenes and the subjects were asked to say if the picture was indoors or outdoors. Next, after the fMRI stage of the study, these subjects were shown some of the same scenes and asked if they had seen them before, or not. The researchers tracked how sure the subjects were about whether or not they had seen a scene before. The study was aimed at investigating what was remembered and what wasn't remembered, and what parts of the brain were most active when a subject remembered a scene correctly, in comparison with failure to remember a scene. Greater activity in encoding, the more likely they found, the subject was likely to remember the scene, with the simple conclusion that greater activation at the moment of encoding predicted subsequent memory. The hippocampus was to be found of central importance. Also significantly involved in encoding were the medial temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex.

Learning is Driven by Beliefs
He moved on to discuss mechanisms that enhance learning and memory: 1) knowing how to learn; 2) motivation to learn and 3) emotions influence and activate learning. Knowing how to learn is responsible for a student knowing they have learned enough to remember something, or if they have to continue studying in order to able to remember the thing they are trying to get into memory. This is related to the capacity to investigate your thoughts. The ability to gage the state of learning is driven by beliefs, and in this process there is increased activation of the left medial prefrontal cortex. Subjects were asked, when seeing a picture: "Do you think you'll remember that or not. Most fascinating results indicated that one's beliefs about learning and memory were predictive of remembering. If you believe you will remember something, you are far more likely to remember it. Thus in this way, our beliefs about our own capacity to learn and remember highly influences our actual performance in learning and memory. Here we have a rigorous scientific study supporting what we knew about the influence of teachers' attitudes towards students and their academic capacity or lack thereof. This also supports the idea of "intentioning," or imagining ourselves having succeeded in some endeavor we are beginning, hoping for success. In intentioning, the goal is to provide the brain with help in forming the belief that they can and will be successful, which then leads to actual success in the area around the intentioning.

Who is Left Behind: Implications of the Role of Beliefs in Learning and Memory
The implications of this series of studies are vast. A large number of children from disenfranchised sectors of our population are quite automatically considered less intelligent than others in the mainstream. Faced with teachers who have low expectations of them, they would be hard pressed to develop the belief that they can learn and remember, and thus they underperform. This phenomenon is based on beliefs, and confirms with neuroscience, the landmark study conducted by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966). In that study teachers were told that a small group of students within their classroom were exceptionally bright, even gifted. by the end of the year, that group of students who in reality were no different in terms of intelligence than other children in the classroom, had excelled far beyond what might have been expected had the teacher not been led to believe that they were indeed especially gifted children. Thus we can see a teacher's beliefs translate quickly to students' beliefs about themselves and their ability to learn and to remember, and this in turn, predicts how much they will in fact learn and remember. Our ability to learn is highly influenced by our thoughts about whether or not we can learn and remember. The medial frontal cortex is particularly important in this aspect of learning, and it is activated in essence, by beliefs.

The Second Ingredient for Learning: Motivation
The second essential ingredient for successful learning and memory is motivation. Motivation to learn rests on the activation of the nucleus acumben, in the midbrain. Scientists have known that when monkeys or rats are given the opportunity to press a lever, for which they are rewarded with food, they get very excited and the "reward center" of the brain (the nucleus acumben) is flooded with dopamine. It appears that the very act of anticipating a reward, acts as a great motivator. As teachers and students we all know that being motivated to learn, feeling like we have an important purpose, has an enormous impact on our ability to work at learning and memory. A study designed to evaluate the role of motivation in learning and memory was conducted with subjects who were told they would get $0.50 for participating and learning some task. Fifty cents is not much of a reward these days, and in fact nothing lit up in the brains of the subjects who were being promised $0.50. However when subjects were offered $5.00, in anticipating the reward they grew excited and were far more motivated to learn the task they were given and consequently they did much better than those offered only $0.50. Motivation to learn turns on the medial temporal lobe and the hippocampus, preparing the brain for learning. A tangible reward is not the only kind of reward that inspires us to learn. We all know how efforts to please a favored teacher, can motivate children's (and our own) learning.

The Third Ingredient for Learning: Emotion
The third ingredient for learning is emotion, focused in the amygdala. Gabrieli likened the amygdata, an emotion center, as the "Vice President" of the memory system. "The amygdala makes the memorandum for memory." If shown an upsetting picture, subject are far more likely to remember it than if shown a neutral picture. We remember powerful stuff far better." Thus the amygdala enhances memory, on the basis of learning. In the study in which people were show neutral to disturbing pictures they asked people to rate their experience of intensity at looking at the pictures. Items that were most intense were likely to be remembered. This makes total sense when we consider ourselves in the context of our evolutionary history. As living creatures we are always on the outlook for danger and safety and it is far more important that we have a high level of learning and memory in the face of danger, or 'high intensity" in order to avoid the danger in the future. Our highly active memory for danger serves a protective function, and no doubt through our ancient history, those who remembered danger would have higher fitness, that is would live to give birth to and nurture more children and grandchildren.

The Developing Brain: How the Child Differs from the Adult
Gabrieli then went into a discussion of the development of the brain. He noted that different parts of the brain are specialized for specific visual tasks. The back of the brain is selectively specialize for what we see in the world. When we look at shapes using the lateral visual cortex is particularly activated. When we see faces the fusiform facia responds. By age then, teh functional parts of the brain that we use to respond to shapes is as developed as it is in an adult. But the response to faces and to places is far less developed in a ten year-old, it is 1/3rd less developed compared to how it will be later. Another part of memory and learning that keeps developing from childhood to adult status is how we know where or under what conditions we learned something we learned, called "source memory." This apparently also keeps developing beyond childhood.

Learning to Read: Difficult for Every Child
In the finale to his talk, Gabrieli moved on to learning disorders and the special problems of the human brain. Our brains evolved to speak and hear, and to be audio learners. We were not evolved to read, and the act of learning to read is very difficult for children. There are two kinds of learning involved in learning to read, the first being phonology or the sounds of speech. The second is orthography, or how to map something from sight to sound. This is a complex task that children have to master in learning to read.

He described dyslexic children who were "at risk" educationally, and having great difficulty learning to read. They were given special classes for only eight weeks, and their performance went up dramatically, and stayed up through the whole school year. Most fascinating in this story is that they found that the remedial training actually changed the structure of the brain, demonstrating the plasticity of our human brain.

How are We Going to Make Neuroscience Applicable to the Classroom?
Gabrieli ended with questions: "How are we going to make neuroscience applicable to the classroom?" and "How close are we in using brain science to help in the classroom?" He answered his questions by telling a story of 64 children, at risk for failure in reading, who were accepted into a special program. From neuroimaging the researchers were able to predict how the children would do throughout the year. This suggests that brain structure itself determines student performance. However I traveled back in my thinking, to remembering the Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966) study on the importance smaller on the importance of teachers' attitudes to children's classroom performance, and to Gabrieli's comments on the importance of the belief that we can learn effecting our learning and memory.

Day 11: Progress Not Perfection --GTD & Early to Rise

2007-03-11T11:18:00.002-07:00

"Progress not perfection" I'm telling myself. I've continued to put things in order, making files (not using the labeler yet, that can happen later, I have Research Assistants (RAs) to help me go back and label my work files. But the going is slow, and every time I turn around I've created yet another pile from something I just "had" to print out and read in hard copy. Hopefully this paper-intensive habit will stop now, as I am finally on my MacBook Pro with a big 15 instead of a 12 or 13 inch scrreen. Things seem much more legible, the key board is normal, and my writing is flowing again, wihtout the stops and starts of a keyboard layout that is not what its supposed to be. The 13 inch --on the sales end-- doesn't mention that they key board is a little bit off, and I wasted several months thinking the problem was me, I just had suddenly lost the ability to type in my sleep. As a psychologist I of course had the nagging worry: "Is the problem neurological?" But now having resumed my normal rapid typing, I can rest assured, Steve Jobs did something with the 13 inch keyboard, and failed to mention it in any public announcement that I've seen anyway. What a relief to be typing away at a breakneck speed.

But the habit I'm most concerned about right now is arising early. About three weeks ago (or is it four weeks now? I'm not sure) I vowed to change my sleep patterns from a life-long late to sleep and late to arise style. For many years now I justified my late to bed tendency on the grounds that I didn't have enough peace and quiet until very late at night, and therefore I needed to stay up late in order to write. As time marched by, in the last year or two I have found myself tired out by my heavily people-oriented work during the day, and realized my most alert and creative times were when I first woke up in the morning. And so began my journey of turning myself into a very early riser. This worked quite well for the first few weeks, and I found myself more productive, including beginning this full implementation of GTD methods aimed at finally feeling like a well-organized productive person. The last five days however, have been a bust, and I am slowly creeping back to staying up and rising late. Not what I want. Not ultimate productivity for me. I'm going to buy a super loud alarm clock today and put it across the room, so I have to get up to turn it off. Maybe that will work. Somehow GTD and rising up early are connected for me. So here I am, a work in progress not perfection. Steve Pavlina write lucidly about arising early, and a method he used to get himself to be an early riser. What you do is get into bed at various times of day, pajamas and all, set the alarm clock for a short while later, pretend to fall asleep until the alarm rings, and then jump up to turn it off and resume your days. Pavlina suggests this gets you into the habit of leaping up at the alarm, its a simple behavioral intervention.

Pavlina suggests:

What’s the real solution then? The solution is to delegate the problem. Turn the whole thing over to your subconscious mind. Cut your conscious mind out of the loop.

Now how do you do this? The same way you learned any other repeatable skill. You practice until it becomes rote. Eventually your subconscious will take over and run the script on autopilot.

This is going to sound really stupid, but it works. Practice getting up as soon as your alarm goes off. That’s right — practice. But don’t do it in the morning. Do it during the day when you’re wide awake.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/

I'm ready to try it, I thought I didn't need to go that far, but obviously I do. Pavlina also suggests that it takes 30 days to establish a new habit. He describes his own ventures into developing new habits, by promising himself that he will do the new habit he wants to develop, for thirty days, no less and more only if he wants to continue it after the 30 days. He says to look at it as an experiment, and one you have to do every day for 30 days before you decide if you want to institute some new behavior on a permanent basis. I don't know where he got his evidence for the "30 day mastery to a new you," meaning this might be one of those pieces of folk wisdom that is right on target, or it might be folk mythology. But having failed at waking up early, or seeing myself slip backwards, I'm ready to try Pavlina's methods, not only in the "going to bed in the middle of the day" behavioral intervention, with the addition of the cognitive trick, tell myself this is only for 30 days and I can change my mind at the end of 30 days, and not one day sooner.

2007-03-11T11:18:00.001-07:00

2007-03-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

Day 8: Implementing GTD

2007-03-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

I can't say this has been a wonderful week thus far; I am still processing that whole room “in-box” although I’m beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Most discouraging is that a large percent of the “stuff” –and even the stuff I am keeping—is not needed. I have thousands of articles on topics I’m still writing about and I justified keeping many of them on this basis. But in fact, there is always new material coming out since I’m a scientist. So I’ll always be in the process of getting the latest in the literature, and the “older” news from four years ago I could let fly into the recycling bin. But I didn’t. And then there are piles of journals that no one wants anymore, “We’ve gone digital” is what I hear when I’ve asked “Would you like to have these journals?” I’ve gone digital too, and that just reminds me that I have a whole other life, my digital files. I’m going to have to go through this same process on my computer(s). A computer sweep, collection, seems absolutely daunting because it feels less physical; my computer files are not something I can touch, move around in real time and space, or place in real physical piles. What has been particularly difficult is that I have tried to maintain my regular schedule. I held my seminar, met with students and clients, exercised, and otherwise maintained all of the regular patterns of my ordinary life. Thus the amount of time I can spend is limited, as I sift through that giant in-box, organizing and putting all those pieces of paper in the “right place.” The process has not made me have a ‘mind like water” which is of course the promise of David Allen’s GTD. But I admit, in the past three days, I have also finished an article that I should have completed two years ago, and it going out later today. So there has to be something in this process, difficult as it may be, that is liberating my work energy to finally move ahead with a rather formidable list of projects and commitments.

To be continued…

Day 4: GTD Implementation

2007-03-04T07:10:00.000-08:00

I had a real meltdown yesterday. I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbrer of boxes and piles of paper sitting in the middle of my living room. My husband helped me as I began to sort through the piles. I could not stick with it for more than a few hours at a stretch. I spoke to a coach from Davidco (that's the name of David Allen's company). She said that I had "over-collected" meaning I should have left some of those piles of paper wherever they were, as I should only be processing current data. But that would miss the point. First, I don't know what is current and what is not without going through everything; there's a mix in every box. The way I came to have all these banker boxes full of stuff is what I have called the "Thanksgiving Syndrome." We always have a large and wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, with all of our dearest and oldest of friends coming, as well as family and even some more distant friends. Preparing for Thanksgiving we start noticing the piles and piles of "stuff" everywhere, cluttering up every surface. What we do then is to put all the stuff into banker boxes and stash them away in a back room or closet. And that is where they have remained, until we began the major collection on Thursday. There must be at least 15 of them, in addition to the many piles of papers that were everywhere; sideways on book shelves, on top of every cabinet, every desk, and in my home office, in a variety of corners on the floor. This then is the issue at hand; how to whiz through these boxes without getting distracted, without the melt down I had yesterday. Furthermore, I slept in today which is upsetting. It was the first time since I began the program of changing this sleeping in habit and turned myself into an early morning writer. I am disgruntled, and heading off to more sorting out of the boxes.

Day 3: GTD Implementation, Getting Up Early, & Planning

2007-03-03T04:57:00.000-08:00

It's 5 AM and I awoke half an hour ago. This is the first time I woke up spontaneously, in what is now over two weeks of my new "habit formation," with the new habit of getting up early. I finally went to sleep early enough last night to get up this early, with no feeling of fatigue. I read e-mail and blogs for half an hour before feeling ready to write. I mentioned on Seah's blog a few days ago that I am very poor on planning and I'm trying to imitate Seah's new habit of taking an hour devoted to planning at the beginning of the day. I actually wrote this into my Google calendar a few months ago, but before I began getting up early I couldn't do it. Waking up at 11AM filled me with too much panic to engage in what seems to me a luxury of planning the day. I am a horrendous failure at planning. I have never been able to plan effectively; any plan I have made is likely to be broken almost immediately, as if I am defying an authority who is trying to tell me how to live my life and what to do, instead of running with it, knowing it is my best estimate for how to structure my day. Having done over two weeks of getting up early, I think today is the day to create a structure and follow it. I put it in the absolute so as not to give me room to alter it. Ordinarily I would say: "Today is the day to create a structure and try follow it."

I did little yesterday on GTD implementation, having completed the collection process the day before. Finding myself procrastinating, I pulled out the Task Progress Tracker or PCEO-TPT01-Standard. (http://davidseah.com/archives/2005/09/23/the-printable-ceo/) and at 6:30 PM I promised myself I would use the time-boxing system as I had planned. I committed to 15 minutes (measured on Minuteur, a free timer made for the Mac (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19356) of processing, i.e., clarification of each item from my 3' x 4' x 5' in-box collection, resulting from the Day 1 GTD implementation, the collection process that happened on Thursday. After the first 15 minutes I filled in a 15-minute bubble on my graphic representation of my progress. Then I went ahead and powered through another 2 hours, after which I was starving for dinner. After dinner I spent some time with a friend who was visiting us for dinner, and soon thereafter I drifted into a wonderful sleep.

Despite my history of failure in planning, I challenge myself to plan successfully, after awakening spontaneously at 5:00 AM, fully rested. Now (as in in the next ten minutes) I am going to pull out an Emergent Task Planner Form and plan my day. http://davidseah.com/archives/2006/09/16/the-printable-ceo-vi1-emergent-task-planning/
I have a few clinical appointments forming the fixed structure of the day, exercise (Kundalini Yoga) to be structured in, listening to my voice mail, reading any important emails, returning necessary phone calls, a few academic tasks, and the rest will be continuing to "clarify" and organizing the collected items, down to every single piece of paper. I am also going to do a mindsweep but that won't be exactly scheduled, just an ongoing effort every time I need a break from clarifying and organizing. I'm committing myself to tracking my progress here as well as on Seah's forms, in an effort to keep me honest, and to spend most of my time clarifying and organizing the collection dumpster in our living room. (See picture, I decided to make that public). Today's motivation will also rest on time-blocking as the task is too formidable to do it any other way, from my perspective and knowing my strengths and weaknesses. To be continued...

GTD Implementation Day 2: A Slow Start to "Clarification" and "Organizing"

2007-03-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

I am still just looking at the rather unbelievable mound of papers in my living room. As soon as it doesn't look like it looks right now, I'll post picture (yes we took pictures). Or maybe I'll wait until I can post "before" and "after" shots. Meanwhile I heard via email from Meg, the GTD coach who said it would be wise to just haul the things that are "current into my "in-box" (renamed "living room in my house")." I wrote back to her "too late" and it is, its all there and I have no idea what came from where so I can't just put it back. I am procrastinating jumping into it and beginning the process of "clarification" or asking "What is this?" Is it something I need to: Delegate, Defer, or Trash? Making the decision and acting. That's all I have to do, but I'm procrastinating.

Time-Boxing and Seah's Bubbles
So here is what I'm going to do right now. First I'm going to the gym (physical therapy). Then I'm coming right home and I'm going to pull out one of David Seah's Printable CEO (PCAO) "Bubble Charts" called Task Progress Tracker or PCEO-TPT01-Standard. (http://davidseah.com/archives/2005/09/23/the-printable-ceo/) Then, finally I'm going to tackle this project with the time-boxing method. What that means is that instead of saying "I"m going to get through the first pile in front of me" I'll tell myself "I'm going to do this for 15 minutes." Then if I get into it, I can do another 15 minutes. I can do almost anything for 15 minutes and by stating my intentions this way, I'll overcome the inertia I feel, just looking at the so-called in-box in front of me. As should be obvious here, I've decided to track my mental progress here on my blog, make my procrastination when face with an unpleasant task public, with the hope that it might shame me into dealing with the process before night falls and its on to the next day.

Implementing GTD: "Collection"

2007-03-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

Joining technorati Technorati Profile

Implementing "Getting Things Done"
I spent all day yesterday in the first phase of GTD implementation. Now I've been using parts of GTD for over a year, but I failed to do the first step, that is putting absolutely everythng that is somewhere it doesn't belong into my "in-box." It took almost six hours, and there are many things left behind, for which I am supposed to make a "placeholder" by writing them down, each on a single piece of paper, and put into my in-box so I have them included in the pile of things to be done. I have created a monster, and there are still plenty of placeholders. I think my pile is about 3 feet high and four feet by four feet wide. This is an incredble amount of "stuff" as David Allen calls it. I was then supposed to sit down and do a "mindsweep" getting everything I have to do, want to do, am supposed to do, and everything that has my conscious attention, putting it all on paper. I froze. I've done mindsweeps recently, maybe I can use those lists. I sat staring at this mountain of papers (things like "clean bathroom cabinet drawers" I delegated to a place holder, I couldn't see dumping the bathroom drawers on top of what is the most formidable collection of papers I've ever been privy to. I could do no more. Today, while I'm still fresh and have not yet gone down to my living room which is housing this so-called in-box so I haven't been startled and upset yet, I'll do yet another mind sweep. Then I plan to dive right into the clarification process, where I begin the process of "processing" this awesome collection. I can't see how I am going to do this in anythign under a week, and I have other obligations. Oh well, here it goes.

Today is the Day: A Major Overhaul

2007-03-01T08:13:00.000-08:00

Today is the BIG day I've been waiting for. My house is like a giant inbox with piles of papers and books absoulutely everywhere. After almost two years of following David Allen's GTD and implementing as much as I seemed able to implement, I decided to take four dedicated days to go through all the piles, put post-its on everything as soon as I lay eyes on it, then sort and throw away or put in appropriate piles for labeling and filing. I have four wonderful Research Assistants (RAs) coming over on and off for the whole four days (they are free undergraduate labor from UCB, and the pay off for them is they will be knee high in research papers and they can sit down and read any time they want to --Its my job to be sure they are learning as they are in the act of helping me. I also have four new wooden file cabinets arriving tomorrow morning. Last summer I consolidated all of my offices here, into my home office, and there was an influx of stuff that is only now going to be dealt with. I get wooden files becasue they are essentially home furniture and metal would look way too cold. I have my fingers crossed that I can throw out enough such that the file cabinets already in the house, combined with the new ones, will be able to accomadate my papers. Some things we may have to put into storage. For example any data I have collected over the years that is in hard copy (now we use the Internet as our data collection device) has to be kept for at least 10 years, and I get worried about throwing it out before we hit 12 years. Suffice it to say there is way too many banker boxes holding years of studies, pre-Internet.

I think, following David Seah's plan of action (he is doing an experiment of trying to develop the habit of going to bed earlier and waking up at 6:30AM, and I've been doing the same --for two weeks now, and for the most part I've been successful and it is helping me get more done, much to my amazment. Well Seah's been doing it and he has developed a ritual of going to a coffee shop every morning and planning his day in a "morning notebook." I think I will imitate this, as I am so poor at planning and maybe it would teach me to become a better planner.

So I'm off to planning the four days of "collection" and "clarification."

The War on Global Warming

2007-02-27T10:26:00.000-08:00

Commentary on the LA Times story on epidemiological effects of global warming

I stopped by where my husband was watching the Oscars on Sunday night, to see Al Gore start to say --or was it just my wishful thinking?-- that he was going to run for president. I don't know because he didn't say it, it just seemed like he might. I thought I saw him overcome with emotion, or was Gore just joking, as he walked away with someone, whose arm was around Gore. I don't know, it was a brief moment, but I felt so absurd as my eyes filled with tears and I began crying. My husband looked at me strangely, I must have been making this scenario up, but I kept crying. The take-home message to me is that I am perhaps most concerned, involved, passionate about our need to save the planet and save it fast.

Watching Destruction
I have been watching the destruction of our air in the Bay Area since 1966. I wrote some songs about it, I said that we were living with "a big brown smog belt caused by male supremacy" by which I meant our constant need for expansion, to go yet another mile "forward." I am myself an expansionist, I always want to do something new, something different, I fail at strength in the area of simple ordinary "life maintenance." I watched with horror as the air over the S.F.Bay grew darker. In 1967, I could go to the top of Mount Diablo on a clear winter day, and see across the state all the way to the Sierras, and I could even see the far away snowly peaks of Mount Lasses and Mount Shasta. In 1967, when the smog belt over the city was already present, when flying across the country, I could look down from an airplane, and for the most part, our country was not entirely covered with that "big brown smog belt,” it still seemed somewhat local.

Population 1971: The Behavioral Sink
In 1971 I published an article in the SF State Gator, "Population 1971: The Behavioral Sink" discussing the stories of overpopulation in non-human animal species, causing destruction of their local environment, social disruption, failure at reproduction, and species extinction. I was sophomoric in my writing, and highly idealistic in my vision of the difference that women in high political positions might make. But I predicted that as the earth became more heavily populated by our own species, we would be faced with an onslaught of viral epidemics for which we had no developed defenses. When Europe became overpopulated given the technology of the middle ages, they were over run with Plague, a natural way to cut back on population. Disease is a natural mechanism to enforce control of the size of a population. Ten years later we witnessed the emergence of the AIDs epidemic, and I pulled out that old article, shrugged because it was so prophetic and yet I had had no way to do anything about it.

Canaries in the CoalMines
I have lived with a deep belief that our need for growth and expansion was leading directly to conditions that would, in the end, mean species extinction. "Overly dramatic thinking" I would tell myself. "Stop being so pessimistic, stop exaggerating everything.” But I never altered in my "exaggerated" vision of what lay before us. The planet is an ecosystem, a non-linear complex adaptive system that has sensitivity as great as any sensitive human psyche. The near hysterical feelings that inflicted many of us 40 years ago just indicated that we were canaries in the coalmines. The people who have already died in the wake of climate changes and the incredible number of species that have already become extinct are perhaps even more the canaries in the coalmines. The psychological impact of living with the specter of species extinction is unknown, and I'm not ready to go public with the difficulties I had myself, adapting to a vision that was so defeatist. I eventually emerged somewhat stronger and ready to be an environmental warrior, if only I knew where to put my efforts. But I could not throw in with the green agencies springing up everywhere; they seemed to imply there were private solutions. "If only" we would stop driving to the jobs we had to drive to, if we were going to keep the jobs that fed our families. "If only we would stop using paper, that was a necessary piece of our knowledge worker, working tools. "If only" we would personally stop doing anything that added to pollution in our small local environment. "If only" we would stop using foods that grew in the agro-industrial system of food production, and switch to organic foodstuffs.

There are No Private Solutions
It made no sense to me, given the image of the global eco-system, where everything thing is deeply connected. Yes, I could eat "organic" vegetables, but what about the water table, and the farms right next to the organic farms, where pesticides were used copiously, sinking down to the water table, and making the easy trip to the neighboring farms ostensibly free of pesticides. I knew the chemicals used so massively would end up everywhere, from the water table to the rainfall, to the air, and into every one of us, from our local environment to the poles of our planet. And sure enough, the bears in Alaska carry within them the pesticides and toxins that we sought to avoid in that personal local manner. "NO," I knew there were no private solutions. Our largest industries to our smallest organizational units were connected, and until we were able to effect the activities of those larger industrial complexes, until everyone was compelled to do the same things, because they were endorsed by our governing agencies, including our private, commercial and "for profit," organizational entities, we were in grave danger as a species. I followed our demise; we all have followed the signs of global warming as it raced forward through the years, always quietly thinking "there are no private solutions."

Killing Mentation and Global Warming
I thought about trying to vote for women in public office, thinking they might do better. I thought of the work of David Buss from U.Texas. He studied "killing mentation" and found that men think about killing many times, every day. I think women are socialized differently, they don't think about killing all the time, it is not socially sanctioned. We think what we are socialized to think, we are not born thinking about killing, it is not hardwired into our species-specific, psychological mechanisms. The capacity to think of killing, to day-dream of killing, is present and hard wired, however, the fact of killing mentation has to be the byproduct of learning and special environmental conditions. Buss uncovered something urgently important. Men who were socialized to think about killing constantly, were running all those agencies I mention, the governments of the world to most of the Fortune 500, and even many of our non-profit agencies including those devoted to the conservation of the planet. At the lead are people who constantly think of killing.

Modern Warfare and Global Warming
Modern warfare rests entirely on the oil economy. You all know how much oil based energy it take to fly those planes we use to bomb, --over and over, night after night-- the people in the Middle East. The victims of the bombing are not just other men, the warriors of nations. The victims are also the women and children, hiding in their homes in absolute terror. If there is such a thing as unusual trauma, it defines the life of the people who live with nightly bombings over which they are entirely powerless. PTSD takes new meaning in those circumstances and one is reminded of living with the Nazi's in WWII, never knowing when the Gestapo would bang on your door and carry you and your loved ones away to an almost certain death under inhuman conditions. All this contemporary fear-ridden "war against terror" where the opponents of terror may in fact be terrorists, this is all dependent on the oil economy and ever growing global warming and the march to species extinction.

Our Soldiers are also Victims
Our soldiers are also victims, we send our least advantaged young men and women to fight our wars, to live in countries where they are not wanted, to commit acts that are not normal and therefore only feasible when one believes that one is acting for the benefit of one's social group, one's family and one’s nation. Fighting in a war is an act of altruism; it is self-sacrifice for the benefit of your group. Even suicidal acts of "terrorism" are self-sacrificial altruistic actions, with personal death and "the good of the nation" as the only reward. And the net result for everyone is yet another step forward in our march towards species extinction.

The War on Global Warming is the War on Species Extinction
The war on terrorism has to transform to the war on species extinction, and this is the war on global warming. In this, Al Gore is our leader. We voted for him once before, and the trickery built into our constitution made room for our vote to make no difference. I have never before seen a politician who I believed was inherently honest and not out for his own aggrandizement. But I think Al Gore is honest, and ready to lead our war on global warming. We will all sacrifice when the changes that have to occur in our daily lives take place. However, it will not feel like sacrifice when making those changes are mirrored everywhere, and we are all doing it together, not as a private solution, but as a unified nation joined to fight the same “external” enemy, global warming. (See the comments passed on in Seah’s blog, reporting on how we tend to form and solidify friendships based on common enemies or people and things we “don’t like.” http://davidseah.com/?s=my+friend+is+the+enemy+of+the+enemy&submit=search+site

We Need our Leaders
We need the buy-in of our leaders, and we need our leaders to see this battle as the only battle that matters. Fighting global warming will bring ethical changes to our lives, and therefore whatever the difficulties, we will all feel better. Everything is affected by the smallest change in a non-linear complex adaptive system. The biggest change and one that might have a chance of reversing the march to species extinction is to put at the head of our nation, the greatest and bravest warrior that has yet to step forward, in the fight against global warming. I think I cried when I felt that moment that Al Gore might announce to all of us that he is going to run for president, because I thought there might be hope in the future, for me and for my family, my small personal community as well as for my global community. It was perhaps a perfect example of crying at the happy ending. Lets all work for Al Gore as he might lead us away from the pending disaster we are facing.

The following article from the LA Times describes in vivid detail the changes in diseases, the sudden development of new bacterial growth in Alaskan oysters, the appearance of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, malaria and encephalitis on the slopes and valleys rising up to Mount Kenya. If you didn't believe in global warming before, reading this article might change you. If you already knew what we are facing across the planet, you might find this article calming, as it demonstrates the work being done by scientists who are devoting their lives to research that could help Gore and the rest of us, in this war on global warming, destruction of the environment across our planet, and the pending species extinction. To calm myself all those years ago, when recognizing the emerging patterns, I would tell myself “well cockroaches will survive, they might have the right DNA to make it through the climate changes, so life itself will continue on, despite whatever happens to us homo sapiens.” But frankly, that isn’t enough for me, I have higher hopes for our capacities for self-correction.

To see the article from the LA Times, by Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer, follow the link below. However for those of you who don’t want to follow the link, I think its important enough to include the entire article, reprinted beneath the link below.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-sci-disease25feb25,1,3847467,full.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true

LA Times

Global warming: enough to make you sick
Rising temperatures are redistributing bacteria, insects and plants, exposing people to diseases they'd never encountered before.

By Jia-Rui ChongLA Times
Times Staff Writer

February 25, 2007

CORDOVA, ALASKA - Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound.

The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.

But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark. Cruise ship passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming down with diarrhea, cramping and vomiting - the first cases of Vibrio food poisoning in Alaska that anyone could remember.

"We were slapped from left field," said Aguiar, who shut down his oyster farm that year along with a few others.

As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the bacterium, but the warming that allowed it to proliferate.

"This was probably the best example to date of how global climate change is changing the importation of infectious diseases," said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, acting chief of epidemiology at the Alaska Division of Public Health, who published a study on the outbreak.

The spread of human disease has become one of the most worrisome subplots in the story of global warming. Incremental temperature changes have begun to redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects and plants, exposing new populations to diseases that they have never seen before.

A report from the World Health Organization estimated that in 2000 about 154,000 deaths around the world could be attributed to disease outbreaks and other conditions sparked by climate change.

The temperature change has been small, about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 150 years, but it has been enough to alter disease patterns across the globe.

In Sweden, fewer winter days below 10 degrees and more summer days above 50 degrees have encouraged the northward movement of ticks, which has coincided with an increase in cases of tick-borne encephalitis since the 1980s.

Researchers have found that poison ivy has grown more potent and lush because of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In Africa, mosquitoes have been slowly inching up the slopes around Mt. Kenya, bringing malaria to high villages that had never been exposed before.

"It's going to get very warm," said Andrew Githeko, a vector biologist who heads the Climate and Human Health Research Unit at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kisumu. "That's going to mean a huge difference to malaria."

Githeko, 49, grew up in the central highlands in a tiny village near the town of Karatina, about 5,700 feet above sea level.

His home was different from most of Africa. The air was damp and chilly. On clear days, he could see the glaciers on Mt. Kenya, the second-highest peak in Africa at 17,058 feet.

When he was a child, lowland diseases like malaria were unknown in Karatina. But perhaps 10 years ago, a smattering of cases began to appear.

He had long ago left his home to study the great plagues of Africa - Rift Valley fever, malaria, cholera and others. The appearance of malaria in the highlands, however, was a mystery worth returning home for.

Githeko dispatched a colleague to collect mosquito larvae in puddles and streams around Mt. Kenya, some as high as 6,300 feet. Tests later identified some of the mosquitoes as Anopheles arabiensis, one of the species that carry malaria.

Githeko's findings, published in 2006, marked the highest A. arabiensis breeding site ever recorded in Kenya and was the first published report of malaria infections in the central highlands, he said.

He knew by watching Mt. Kenya's gradually disappearing glaciers that his world was warming, and that lowland diseases would eventually work their way higher. "But we did not expect this to happen so soon," he said.

Githeko's work has been echoed in a small number of studies around the world.

In 1996, health authorities reported a human case of tick-borne encephalitis in the Czech village of Borova Lada, elevation 3,000 feet. Until then, the Ixodes rinicus tick, which carries the disease, had never been seen above 2,600 feet.

The case caught the attention of Milan Daniel, a parasitologist the Institute for Postgraduate Medical Education in Prague who has been studying the movement of ticks in the Czech Republic for half a century.

He scoured the Sumava and Krkonose mountains and found that the ticks had migrated as high as 4,100 feet largely because of milder autumns over the last two decades, according to a series of studies published over the last four years.

>From 1961 to 2005, the mean temperature in the Krkonose Mountains had increased about 2 1/2 degrees.

"This shift of the ticks," Daniel said, "is clearly connected with climate changes."

According to a landmark United Nations report released this month, global warming has reached a point where even if greenhouse gas emissions could be held stable, the trend would continue for centuries.

The report painted a grim picture of the future - rising sea levels, more intense storms, widespread drought.

Predicting the future of disease, however, has proven difficult because of myriad factors - many of which have little to do with global warming. Diseases move with people, they follow trade routes, they thrive in places with poor sanitation, they develop resistance to medicines, they can blossom during war or economic breakdowns.

"No one's saying global warming is the whole picture here," said Dr. Paul R. Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. "But it is playing a role. As climate changes, it's projected to play an even greater role."

In a Beltsville, Md., laboratory filled with bathroom-sized aluminum chambers, U.S. Department of Agriculture weed physiologist Lewis Ziska is peering into the future of one of the key components of global warming - rising carbon dioxide levels.

CO2 levels have been on the rise since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago. Today, they are at their highest point in more than 650,000 years.

In the tightly sealed chambers, Ziska re-created pre-industrial conditions by turning down the concentration of carbon dioxide to 280 parts per million. In another box, he simulated the present with 370 parts per million. In a third box, he pumped up the carbon dioxide to 600 parts per million, the estimate for 2050.

Much of Ziska's work has centered on ragweed, a noxious plant that sets off allergy sufferers, such as Ziska himself. The weeds inside the tanks suck up carbon dioxide. "It's like feeding a hungry teenager," he said.

Collecting yellow pollen in plastic bags fitted around the plants, Ziska found that current conditions produced 131% more pollen than pre-industrial conditions. Future conditions produced 320% more.

"For us weed biologists, this is the worst of times and the best of times," he said.

The impact of global warming has not been all bad. Researchers recently found that rising temperatures have helped reduce some diseases related to cold weather. One British study found that the number of children infected with a cold-like virus known as respiratory syncytial virus has been declining with warming temperatures.

Combining meteorological data and emergency room admission rates from 1981 to 2004, physiologist Gavin Donaldson at University College London found each increase of 1.8 degrees clipped three weeks off the end the virus' winter season.

"A small amount of warming can go a long way, as far as changing disease transmission dynamics," said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of Global Environmental Health at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Given the gradual pace of warming, there are also some chances to adapt.

After Prince William Sound's Vibrio outbreak in 2004, the state required more oyster testing in some areas. In the last two years, there have been only four cases of Vibrio food poisoning.

Life in Aguiar's remote inlet has largely returned to the way it was before. This winter has been cold. Aguiar, a bear of a man with a riotous beard, huddled inside the houseboat for warmth recently as the temperature outside hovered around 20 degrees. The pale Northern Lights pulsed over the snow-laced Chugach Mountains, and skins of ice grew on the still water.

Come summer, Aguiar will start sending oyster samples to the state. When the temperature hits about 55 degrees, he'll drop his oyster baskets 60 or 100 feet in the water for about 10 days to clear out the bacteria.

It's a solution he can live with in a warming world.

"It's not all evil," he said. "I just don't like to see rapid change."
jia-rui.chong@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-sci-disease25feb25,1,3847467,full.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true

Rules of Blogging & The First Blog I Read

2007-02-25T06:26:00.000-08:00

The Rules of Blogging and Pseudo Geekdom
I'm just learning the rules of blogging, so if anything I do in terms of quotations, or reprinting stories or parts of articles that I like and I don't do it right, please bare with me. And let me know if anything logistical (or anything for that matter) bothers you. If I'm breaking some blogging rule, it is not by intention but by sheer ignorance. How much I am a pseudo geek became increasingly evident as the past year rolled by. A wannabe geek sort of like the blog title of a blogger whose name I don't remember at the moment (another apology due) who calls her/his blog, a "wannabe GTDer" which I definitely identify with. I not only wish I were a geek instead of a pseudo geek, I wish I were more successful at GTD (again for those of you not yet into productivity as a passionate subject in life, this is in reference to David Allen's methodology presented in his book "Getting Things Done."

I'm so much a pseudo geek and an impulsive scientist that even though I was using my first Mac in 1895, I have never read a software manual, and I haven't found out what the rules are in blogging, and how to be sure I follow them. I've been writing every day since --never mind that-- lets just say way before I had my first Mac, but as I mentioned a few days ago, I was writing to people I knew, boyfriends, colleagues, my analyst, bosses, friends, my children, anyone who I thought might read at least some of what I write. I was not writing for the public, except in my scientific articles and the people who read the journals they appear in are hardly the public at large. Readers of scientific articles are almost always other scientists or students being forced to read that boring style by their teachers. So whatever I wrote, it always seemed rather private and I didn't worry too much about it. Oh I wrote political things that got around, but even there it was in relatively small circles and even if I should have worried about it, I didn't. Now I want to continue addressing my students (hear hear everyone) because if I'm not writing to someone in particular, it has to be a group of some-ones. I think going public might be somewhat daring because I might lose track of whom I'm talking to. In fact I might have no idea who I'm talking to. I wonder if I should do the ad thing, through Google or if that is considered crass. I am sure of one thing, at this age I don't intend to start worrying too much about what people think of me. But I can't stand the idea of hurting someone's feelings, or getting sent to blog hell because I didn’t follow rules I didn't know.

The First Blog I Read: Introducing Steve Pavlina and How to Succeed in 30 Days
I read a great article tonight, or to be more accurate, I reread an article by Steve Pavlina who I is a kind of productivity blogger. Pavlina is what psychologists should be, but unfortunately we don't usually make it. I'm trying to change; I think I'll hand out the Pavlina blog I discuss here, to my Professional Development Seminar this week.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to

The first time I read Pavlina's "30 Days to Success," I really didn't know it was a blog because I didn't know what a blog was, I hadn't heard of it (see, pseudo geekdom, if I knew anything about anything, I should have known what a blog was by 2005). I thought it was an article and I loved it. Rereading it tonight I loved it even more. Pavlina discusses a great tactic for getting yourself to attempt to do some piece of life improvement (personal betterment?) by posing it as a short-term challenge, and not a life-long commitment to something onerous. For example, if you want to become a day person, someone who gets up early with the rest of the world, or if you want to become an avid exerciser, Pavlina recommends you give yourself a thirty day challenge, and nothing more, nothing less. He says that its really hard to overcome inertia and that that first step to quitting smoking, or learning to run, or learning to write a blog, can be overcome by promising yourself that you will do this new "habit" you want to form or "habit" you want to make a thing of the past for only thirty days. Pavlina suggests that new behaviors take about 30 days to become habitual. I am not sure if there is scientific validity to that proposal, it takes most people a lot longer to get over excessive alcohol consumption, or to lose any sizable amount of weight, or to stay on a diet beyond a month or two. But he has a point, namely that if you do something for 30 days as a sort of personal experiment and you find it has a good effect (if it becomes inherently rewarding because it makes you feel good, or feel better), at the end of thirty days you are likely to decide to keep the experiment running for another thirty days, and then, past that, up to 90 days and then it really is a habit.

Pavlina as Superman
Pavlina described how he once promised himself he was going to exercise every day for a year, even when he was sick, and he did it. And then he went on for a few more weeks, and its sounds like he still exercises every day. He definitely eats vegan and got to that through a series of 30-day experiments. Obviously Pavlina's exercising every day for a year speak to a great deal more than his original suggestion to do something for 30 days, and it made me think he was made of steel or something and completely unlike the rest of us mortals.

It reminded me of another blog Pavlina wrote about how to get things done by working efficiently, and he spelled out how he went through college in half the time it normally takes using a large number of mind-numbing but effective tactics. When I read that one I knew he was beyond most people in terms of work and capacity for disciple, and the whole time I was rereading this piece I find encouraging, his unusual prowess was in the back of my mind. "Well maybe that is true for YOU Steve Pavlina, but the rest of us couldn't begin to do that." But maybe its true, we can do things we think we can't do if we make it time-limited. I'm trying to become an early riser (also written about by Pavlina) and I'm taking the thirty-day approach. However, my husband and I just joined Weight Watchers but not by telling ourselves we'd follow "the plan" for thirty days. If we thought we had to discipline ourselves that long, we would never have initiated this new behavior. We're hoping that after a week we might decide to do another week, but that is as far as it goes.

Despite all my reservations and usual "where is the evidence for that, where in the scientific literature have they demonstrated that it takes only 30 days to form a habit?" I think he might be right and I think he was on to positive psychology just as it was hitting the mass media. Everyone knows about breaking difficult tasks into smaller and smaller pieces until you get the job down into such small pieces that you can really begin it, its easy. Maybe Pavlina rather brilliantly applied that to overcoming bad habits and picking up good ones. I'm sure ready to give it a try, and I'll keep everyone posted.

Introduction and then: Practice Your Personal Kaizen: from Jason Thomas & Lifehacker

2007-02-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

My Introduction, Excuses, & Apologies
As I confessed a few days ago, although obliquely, in the past several years I've become a follower of David Allen and the "Getting Things Done" methodology of how to work and how to live one's life, and perhaps even get a few things done along the way. As a rather sloppy kind of person by nature, along with my scientific bent, I always believed that one was either born organized or disorganized, much the way the twins studies tell us that the tendency to neatness (or to messiness as well) is a heritable quality. Twins separated at birth who find one another years later, discover to their surprise, that their twin shares the same proclivities in the neat/messy department of life. And it seems, the neatness or messiness of the enviornment in which they developed was irrelevant to how they turned out on this variant. So I assumed that my proneness to ignore all the things that needed to be put away or otherwise tended to was an expression of my genetically inherited --ok I admit- messiness "by nature." I excused my lack of calm methologies by claiming that my love of fast excitment and discovery just didn't go along with a great sense of organization, this was a gift I failed to have and would have to live without. But then I fell into what some have called "a cult," the world of David Allen and "Getting things Done," inhabited by CEOs of Fortune 500s, and the genius geeks who I so admire and who brought me to GTD. And low and behold, I discoverd that good organization, unlike neatness, is something that is LEARNED, and that anyone can learn. I'm still a novice, and I sure am still messy, but as the Kaizen method goes, we only make small improvement a bit at a time, one thing at a time. Maybe one of these days I'll remember to put my laundry away and I should because my husband does our laundry. We're both packrats, we're both messy, but he is far less lazy than myself. All that aside, this is just to introduce a great article that appeared in Lifehacker.

I understand that the blog world differs from the world of my listservs in which we forward whole articles to one another, and it is well-thought of if you distributed someone else's writing about research findings, no matter who does the reporting. This is probably due to the fact that as scientists we want to ge the latest findings OUT, and if someone forwards a report of our findings that adds to our personal reputation. In fact it often isn't the scientist himself or herself writing the brief report that gets forwarded. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't, but the pride is not in the writing, its in the discovery. However, I've learned that in the world of blogs this is not considered a kind and honoring thing --in other words, the author of this wonderful article that follows, won't get credit because I felt I just had to pass this on to you and I didn't want to chop it up, I wanted those of you who wouldn't follow a lead, to read the whole thing, that is how good I think it is. I think this may be because in the blog world, if I have it right, the honor is in writing, not in being cited, or quoted, or passed on in whole form. Futhermore I've learned, I need to pass on the URL address move obviously, because that does lend status to the original writer. I am trying and trying to make this happen and my pseudo geekiness is now confessed. I can't seem to get the thing here to put the URL in a form that anyone can click on it and get to the original article. So bear with me, I think within 24 hours I'll have this right, but if you happen to read it before I do, I apologize, and this really SHOULD be acknowledgement of the great article below, written by Jason Thomas of Lifehacker. And the URL is right here, even if you can't just click on it and get to it, you can copy and paste it into your browser and not only find Thomas, but also find Lifehacker, both of which are a real treat. Everything that follows except for two small factual additions by me, is all from and by Jason Thomas and Lifehacker.

http://lifehacker.com/software/kaizen/practice-your-personal-kaizen-207029.php

by Jason Thomas.
The following article appeared in "Lifehacker" a very cool blog, in November 2006.

QUOTE BEGINS "Practice your Personal Kaizen"
"A Japanese* management strategy called Kaizen roughly translates to "continuous slow improvement." In the corporate world, it's an efficiencyand defect-proofing system often used on factory floors. But Kaizen emphasizes the well-being of the employee, working smarter, not harder and developing best practices so that workers don't have to think. As such, Kaizen is an ideal approach to improve one's personal workflow."

(*Sidenote from LynnOC: Kaizen actually was developed first in the US, during WWII. After the war it was exported to Japan where it really took off, as Japan rebuilt its economy, post WWII, a small fact picked up from an interesting short book about Kaizen --Maurer, R. (2004) One Small Step Can Change Your Life,Workman Publishing Company Inc.

QUOTE CONTINUES "Getting Things Done with Kaizen"
"Getting Things Done** methods work well within the practice of Kaizen. Kaizen would be the overall strategy, and GTD a collection of tactics for process improvement. To apply GTD in a Kaizen way, you might choose a few related ideas from GTD that will help you immediately in areas where you need the mostwork. Then you'd implement one tactic every week for a month. You'd work on that one tactic-- 43 folders, say-- for a week, consciously using it and thinking about it. After a week, you'd have it down to the point where you don't have to think about it anymore. The next week, you'd move on to the next device while continuing to use the one you just mastered."

(** Side note from LynnOC: Getting Things Done --or GTD-- refers to a method of work and life organization developed by leading business and productivity consultant David Allen, and spread throughout the contemporary culture with the publication of his smash-hit book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, published first in 2001, Viking Penguin.)

QUOTE CONTINUES "That way, you're continually improving your process, painlessly, without having to interrupt much of your present workflow or take anything new by storm. There's the thing with Kaizen: you have to stick to it. It doesn't necessarily require a huge amount of discipline front loaded, but you have to hold on to each small gain you make. Since each step is a small increment, that's easy enough to do.

Kaizen in practice
To start your own personal Kaizen, sit down and make a list of the areas you want to improve. If you're not sure where you can make your day more efficient, try timing your activities during a representative day. You may be surprised atthe result -- you might be wasting a great deal of time in places that you don't expect. Check out Gina's previously-featured Time Map for a good way to track where your day goes.

Say you find three areas you can streamline: you spend a lot of time processing email, taking phone calls interspersed throughout the day, and writing reports. Say that email is the single greatest source of lost time, disorganization and thrash. You lose them. You forget to respond to them. Every time you read one or respond to one, you need several minutes to find where you were in the report that you were writing. So you should deal with the email problem first. It's fairly easy to tackle, and that's another idea of Kaizen: to take on the low-hanging fruit first. Then you're getting tangible benefits right away that will stand you in good stead while you conquer the more difficult problems later on.

You might introduce a folder flow. You're all email wizards by now, so this is just an example. You might have an inbox and an urgent box. You set up a filter so that all email marked urgent go into the urgent box, and all others sit in the inbox. You set aside five minutes every hour, right before you refill your coffee cup, to deal with the urgent items as quickly as possible-- you want that coffee, right? And twice, right before lunch and before you leave for the day, you clearout the inbox, reading and dealing with all items that weren't marked urgent. Easy and simple, with process improvements and thinking built in.

Kaizen in principle
You want to externalize thinking and book-keeping as much as possible, and you also want them to happen "for free" as much as possible, or as artifacts of other tasks. You also want to build in error-proofing as much as possible. The "urgent" filter is an example: by clearing the "urgent" box, you know that you haven't missed any urgent items. By chunking it together into a small piece of time at the end of every hour, you're cutting down on thrash time, the reorganizing overhead that happens at the beginning and end of every task when you're trying to reorient your brain.

Kaizen also focuses on eliminating waste. On the factory floor, this means wasted movement. Setting up tool stations so that everything is within arm's reach is an easy way of cutting out wasted steps, and iterated over the course of a day, or a month, for two hundred workers, this means greatly increased productivity. It also means less wear and tear for the workers themselves, and
that's good for everyone.

In the office environment, "waste" might refer to wasted brain time. Hemming and hawing to think of what to do with a given email. Having to look up from your report every five minutes to answer an "urgent" email that ends up having to do with someone needing to find a home for his kitty-cat. Across the course of a day, these little interruptions add up.

Standardization is another Kaizen principle. With standardization, you think about what "best practices" are, and you do so in advance. Then you externalize those best practices as much as possible, and you work those practices so that they become automatic. When things get hectic, when you have ten things to get done before tea and they're shelling the trench lines for the third time today, you can just fall back on your habits and follow the procedures that you decided upon during a calmer time.

My Kaizen
I've been adopting one new practice every month. As I got more and more freelance writing assignments, I had to set up a folder pipeline to keep track of that. Folder pipelines include error proofing and memory aids built in so that you don't need to think about them, and if you perform the menial Tetris tasks of moving things from folder to folder as required, they don't take much thought at all. Seconds per day, really. Compare that to time spent looking for documents, deciding if the documents are the right one and wondering whether you already pitched a story to a given editor.

A few months back, I started using GTDTiddlyWiki. It's packed with features, and I've found a number of them that I like very well-- really, it's just a canvas on which you can design your own process improvements and workflows. I store lots of data there. I back it up by sending it to my Gmail account. I'm continually tearing apart my system of hyperlinks and reconfiguring them in ways that make more sense, are simpler and easier. It took some time getting used to it, but that single, free HTML document ended up being my killer app, and I would miss it terribly. Now I use it every day, and using it is unconscious. I don't have to think about what I'm going to do with a phone number or a contact name. I don't need to wonder where I wrote that little idea. All that thinking is inbuilt.

Another month, I started using a Hipster PDA. It was very quick to get used to. Kind of like crack in that way. It also solved numerous problems related to forgetfulness, lost slips of paper and clutter.

Kaizen for a better way of life
Kaizen is a system for introducing process improvements. But the most important thing is to use these systems to make your life easier. You can use them to pump out more work, and that's a good thing, but remember that the whole purpose is so that you don't have to work those twelve-hour Fridays.

Organization systems are there to remove hair-tearing and nail-biting and rushed deadlines. They don't have to become a way of life, like that guy sitting next to you who sanitizes his own phone handset with industrial disinfectant before and after he's using it, the one who has different color-coded file totes for each day of the week. He worships that stuff. Those totes aren't just totes, they're totems. It doesn't have to be that way.

Make your improvements small and gentle and you'll stick with them."

http://lifehacker.com/software/kaizen/practice-your-personal-kaizen-207029.php

Jason Thomas is a writer and computer professional living in the Twin Cities.