Measuring Progress

The process of becoming a PhD is measured in milestones. These are certain achievements that document the progress I’ve made since choosing my committee members (Fall 2008) through total dissertation completion (Summer 2013). 

I have been in milestone 10 – committee approval – for about six months. I confessed my response to a particular committee member’s remarks by describing myself as a petulant child.

Last weekend, another member suggested changes that would require significant sentence-level editing. On Tuesday I just glued myself to the laptop and did it. Five hours of editing later, I’m ready to try for milestone 11.

Milestones help us in two significant ways.

First, they articulate where we’ve been by naming that place, tagging the memory. We use milestones like anniversaries and birthdays in this way. Events help us put regular days in context. For a while we referred to things as happening “before 9/11” or “after 9/11.”

During football season we use the game weekends to define the calendar. “That’s Florida State weekend,” or “That’s after homecoming.”

Milestones give us names to help distinguish one day or date from another. For example, Charlie and I have been married 12 years. When I think of year six, I’m not sure, exactly, when that was.

Saving Daylight

I went out for a run at 3:30 in the afternoon. I usually go at 9:30 in the morning but it was raining so I held off until 3:30.

Not too long ago I had a single time slot for a workout: 5 a.m. If I got up and went I was proud of myself, if I missed it there was no second chance and I’d berate myself all day.

Now, though, my days are much more fluid.

I eschew schedules. Always have.

I have a certain number of things that need to be accomplished and I will put them in logical order and work through them. I will work until they are done. But the same thing every day? No, thank you.

I didn’t used to have this freedom. I had to have my butt in a chair every day by 8:30 a.m. I was stuck in that chair until 5:30 p.m. That was me paying my dues.

But now I have control over my own destiny and I’m a little bit like the new pilot asking in mid-air, “where to?”

Right as the Mail

I’ve decided to be a joiner here in my first few months in Columbia and I thought I’d join the book club at the Sandhills Library. In May they read The Postmistress. I didn’t finish it in time, so I skipped the book club. (I made it in June, funny story, maybe next Monday’s post ;-)

Anyway, The Postmistress completes my tour of World War II that began in 2010 with Lisa See’s Shanghai Sisters. Then I read The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons about WW2 in Leningrad. Then Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford about San Francisco and On Folly Beach about the southern coast of South Carolina. Then Gilgamesh and Sarah’s Key about an Australian woman in Armenia and an American woman in Paris, respectively. Then The Piano Teacher about Hong Kong.

That’s World War II in Shanghai, Leningrad, San Francisco, Charleston, Australia, Armenia, Paris, and Hong Kong. I was missing England. The Postmistress delivered.

Love the Process Art

At some point (Sunday) I realized I am simply too old to spend $30 on a swim suit. When the $30 suit looks awful and the $120 one looks fantastic, you don’t question why, you just lay down your credit card.

So I did. All the time wondering, “how did I get here?”

In my 2010 goals plan I gave myself this theme: Learn to love the process. Not coincidentally, by the end of that year I was ready for a new career as a process analyst. I adopted the theme because the dissertation was taking significantly longer than I had anticipated.

Interventions

Last week I went to the State Museum’s lunch art talk hosted by Paul Matheny, III, Chief Curator of Art. The artist was James Busby, a Columbia resident who teaches art at the University of South Carolina.

I won’t bore my non-art-fan readers with details about Busby or his art. I’ll just highlight what I found most interesting.

James said when he was younger he went through the process of priming a canvas as quickly as he could so that he could create his oil paintings upon it, covering all of that priming work.

Next Stop: Clarity

Transcendentalism can be outgrown. Yet, right after junior literature class extols the virtues of nature and before it shifts to boring readers with the pastoral poets, American college kids begin to romance a summer traveling through Europe.

Not to be confused with McCandlessian adventures, Europe offers a higher level of enlightenment than domestic countryside. And better shopping. It therefore requires several weeks of hostels, backpacking, journaling, and collecting oddities like McDonald’s ash trays.

My friend Matthew ended up in Austria on one such journey and boarded a train in Vienna seeking an authentic Austrian experience. Unable to make sense of the map, Matt asked assistance from a friendly Viennese youth and was directed outbound, toward Salzburg, the destination lingering at the end of a long orange line.

Map It Out

Many train map designs derive from London’s Underground: its large colored tubes snake from one side to the other intersected by bloated circles demarcating stations. The Washington, D.C. Metro map is similar. Its orange line carried us from Vienna, Virginia into the heart of the capital for parades and museum tours when I was a child. I had often heard the map’s cities on traffic reports but didn’t really know where they were: Franconia, Ballston, Dupont Circle, Clarendon.

Our CIO has been in Japan recently and is particularly fond of the subway map. He suggested such a diagram could provide clarity to the end-to-end nature of the processes our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system currently runs.

Out of necessity a metro map must be very clear to see, require little to no instruction to read, and be translatable into any language. Its concept is at once complex: how to leave one place and arrive some other place intentionally; and simple: travel without confusion.

This weekend I considered the subway map as an alternative to flow charts for process documentation. How can we map the ERP software we maintain and develop? What purpose would such a map fulfill? What kind of clarity would it provide?