{"id":67691,"date":"2023-04-01T18:57:48","date_gmt":"2023-04-01T22:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=67691"},"modified":"2023-04-01T18:57:48","modified_gmt":"2023-04-01T22:57:48","slug":"zombie-projects-and-the-forever-homework-of-academic-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/zombie-projects-and-the-forever-homework-of-academic-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Zombie projects and the \u2018forever homework\u2019 of academic life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Like many academics, I have too many things on. By \u2018things\u2019 I mean projects of all shapes and sizes, from \u2018write a book on neurodiversity and the PhD\u2019, to\u00a0\u2018Fix up the Bootcamp page on the ANU website\u2019.<\/a><\/p>\n

Exhibit A:<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m going on Sabbatical in the UK from May to August. To minimise disruption to the team, I bunched my first semester of teaching into two months. At the same time I stupidly decided to do a new podcast series with my sister about the Apple TV show Severance:<\/p>\n

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(it\u2019s going to be a blast,\u00a0you can listen to the teaser trailer and subscribe via your favourite pod platform here!<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This \u2018little\u2019 side project involved about 10 hours of watching the series (again) and writing notes, about 20 hours recording episodes, and at least 40 more hours editing sound. I did this in the evenings and on the weekend by the way (sadly, a recap podcast about a TV show doesn\u2019t really fall under my job title of \u2018Director of Researcher Development at ANU\u2019\u2026 although it might if I was a media academic, dammit!).<\/p>\n

Making this podcast was so much fun, but objectively it was a ginormous time suck. Side projects like this are one of the reasons\u00a0I never feel like I have enough time to finish everything I want to do, no matter how fast or hard I work.<\/strong>\u00a0And I constantly make it worse by taking on yet more things when I should be divesting.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to realise this feeling of \u2018never enough\u2019 is intrinsic to academic work and not something you will ever \u2018cure\u2019.<\/p>\n

The \u2018too much work in progress\u2019 (WIP) cycle tends to start early in an academic life. The PhD is the beginning of signing up for a life of \u2018forever homework\u2019: where the amount of work you could, should or want to do will always exceed your capacity to actually deliver. The business of making knowledge is limitless and we are finite creatures. All that you can do is manage your relationship to the work \u2013 and your feelings about it. And that means learning when to say yes to new things and when to let go.<\/p>\n

Making decisions about where to focus your attention are not always within your control of course. Most of us, with the possible exception of billionaires and\u00a0nepo-babies<\/a>, must trade off complete freedom to explore and create for a wage from an employer. But where you can exercise choice, it\u2019s important to develop your own ideas of what constitutes a worthwhile project and what doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I do like\u00a0Loleen Berdahl\u2019s matrix for assessing shiny new ideas<\/a>, where she catalogues prospective projects in four ways:\u00a0waste of time, low hanging fruit, soul sucking abyss and strategic investment.<\/strong>\u00a0(If you haven\u2019t subscribed to her excellent Substack yet, do it \u2013 I\u2019ll wait).<\/p>\n

While I think Loleen is 100% right in her categories, my problem is I can never recognise a soul sucking abyss before I find myself in it. And, of course, feelings can change: what seems like a soul sucking abyss while you are doing it, can end up being a strategic investment and vice versa.<\/p>\n

Exhibit B:<\/strong>\u00a0I had a blast conceiving and building the\u00a0Whisper Collective website<\/a>\u00a0with my colleagues\u00a0Narelle Lemon<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Research Whisperer<\/a>\u00a0crew, but this website is proving too technically complex to maintain and none of us have time to finish building out the review pages properly. We recently started talking about turning it into something simpler so it\u00a0doesn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0become a soul sucking abyss.<\/p>\n

Exhibit C:<\/strong>\u00a0I agreed to co-author a paper with\u00a0Adrian Barnett<\/a>\u00a0for the BMJ Christmas edition because it sounded like fun, but it totally stressed me out at the time because I was juggling the launch of\u00a0PostAc<\/a>. I remember writing the literature review by the side of the pool while my kid had swimming lessons. However, that paper has gone on to be the one with by far the\u00a0most downloads<\/a>\u00a0and earned kudos of my entire career. It opened doors for me professionally (such as\u00a0a recent piece commissioned by Nature<\/a>) and no doubt played a part in my promotion to professor. I\u2019m so glad I did this paper, but I came close to pulling out many times.<\/p>\n

So my point is this: even experienced people like me just can\u2019t tell where it\u2019s worth putting energy. Here\u2019s my hot take: as far as possible, work with good people on interesting problems and trust it will work out. This means, becoming an excellent project manager and, sometimes, strategically retiring a project or two.<\/p>\n

How do you tell what project to retire and which one to stick with? Dominica DeGrandis points out that anyone with too much WIP will also have Neglected Work. Neglected work has the potential to turn into Zombie projects \u2013 they look alive, but have already died\u2026. She has a really great description for neglected work in her book\u00a0Making work visible<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cNeglected work is perishable. It ages. And like rotten fruit, it\u2019s wasteful. Fruit is expensive, consumes space on the countertop, and gets old and mouldy and smells bad. And who wants that?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Identifying neglected work is a good way to start getting hold of your WIP load and making sure you know which projects might become Zombies. You can start identifying neglected work by doing a project audit. But maybe I need to go back a step: lots of people don\u2019t know how to usefully think about their work as a series of projects and can confuse tasks and projects.<\/p>\n

A project, according to David Allen in\u00a0Getting Things Done<\/a>, is\u00a0a deliverable that takes more than one step to complete and may involve the work of other people<\/strong>. A task is a single action step that moves your project along. If you take Allen\u2019s definition of a project as a starting point it\u2019s likely you have way more projects in your life than you think.<\/p>\n

A project audit is a way of identifying which project is getting love, and which are being neglected. Let me explain by breaking down the work I have on my desk at the moment. Here\u2019s a list of deliverables I\u2019d like to get done over the next six months.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s three key work things I need to do before I go:<\/p>\n