I hope to finish with all the revisions by 9:00 am, so that I can send the draft to advisor by noon his time. As I was supposed to send the revised draft yesterday I'm only a couple hours "late" in sending this, but I still need to get it done ASAP. He had originally asked for the revised draft by the 23rd but I had bumped up the deadline to the 16th in an effort to proactively deal with my procrastination, so I'm glad I did that. I use a particular coping mechanism to help minimize the negative effects of my procrastination. I figure out the real deadline, I give myself a deadline that is well in advance of that deadline, and I figure that even if I can't meet my self-imposed deadline I will still be getting things done earlier than the true deadline. Example: Advisor says the revised draft is "due on the 23rd", I tell him I'll get it to him "by the 16th", and then I figure that I will actually end up turning it in on the 17th or 18th, which is still earlier than the original deadline and it will allow leeway if there are any issues (such as if he finds more errors that I need to fix -- this way, I won't have to fix them last minute on the 24th because I will have that buffer zone of a few days to deal with the issues).
It is a crutch that allows me to function with my procrastination but not deal directly with changing my procrastinating behaviors themselves. A crutch is better than nothing, especially if you don't have the resources for the time being to fix the actual injury. It's better than just accepting that I will inevitably procrastinate and then be late on the true deadline, so I give myself a pat on the back for using this strategy pretty effectively. The strategy amounts to lying to yourself that the deadline is earlier than it is so that you can use the anxiety to motivate you to get work done on it. It's probably not healthy in some ways (in my head I can hear my counselor telling me that), but it's effective in getting me to more forward in graduate school and at work, so at least it helps me function.
It's amazing, and kind of depressing, that writing even a mediocre paper can take months and months of full-time work. This is going to be my sixth draft that I'm sending today, meaning that my seventh draft is the one I will be publishing. That is fewer drafts than I went through for my Masters, but I feel that this is probably a lot better than my Masters. I think at this point my paper is better than mediocre because I actually spent about 16 hours editing it in order to improve it (this is not something I have usually done in the past -- usually I just let my first pass be good enough and I never look back or edit very much). I have gotten away with my bare minimum work in the past because usually what I produce on the first try is "good enough", but I wouldn't call it good. I would call it "okay", but usually I take that label as acceptable and decide not to put more work into it.
There's a whole cost-benefit analysis that goes into the motivation behind improving the writing of something, and usually when I am exhausted, I don't view the benefits of improving the paper as very high. I have done a lot of editing of this draft in the last couple weeks. I hadn't put much work into the actual editing of it until the last few weeks, so before then it was kind of a jumble of words grouped into sections, along with some numbers thrown in. A 130-page jumble of letters and numbers. But since the initial draft, it has greatly improved in readability, clarity, and content. I still honestly think I could keep editing this for a few more months of full-time work before feeling "great" about it, but I suspect that is how many people feel. That is why you need to just do the best you can, set a cutoff deadline, and throw your hands up at the second that the cutoff deadline happens. Otherwise, you could go on editing into eternity.
In many ways, I find myself relating to the "anal retentive chef" skit by Phil Hartman on SNL. That's one of my favorite SNL skits to this day. It cracks me up (and it reminds me of both my grandma and my dad haha). It also reminds me of myself, but only as it relates to research and writing. I am no stranger to mess (in fact, I haven't even unpacked boxes from when I moved across the country over a year ago...lol). I'm kind of infamous in my family for being able to tolerate mess. I just don't care enough to fix the mess for now (or for the previous 15 years of my life...hah).
If I didn't have the valid explanation that I'm just plain busy and too exhausted to clean up because I move so often, I should definitely have been nominated as a subject for the TV show Hoarders, as my apartment has started to approximate that level of mess at points. Nothing nearly as bad as keeping dead animals and 10-year-old yogurt (although my great aunt was a hoarder and she saved tea bags, expired food, and the works! Gross), but definitely messy and chaotic by normal person standards.
99% of the time I know where things are, though. Even though I moved in haste 2 months ago, I can still remember which color box I put something in and what other objects are in that box. I know that if I want to find a stamps, I would have to look in the ripped, large, brown shopping bag that has a lot of junk mail in it to be shredded, and also my envelopes. That's just a random thing to remember. Why do people remember such things when they are not necessary to survival? Is there any personality characteristic that triggers our "survival processing" that makes us think, "Oh, I better remember where that stamp is at -- it could save my life one day!" And it's not like I was organized in my packing -- it was the opposite of organized. I threw things into anywhere there was space. I didn't plan out which items were similar and should be stored together, I just threw them in boxes in a matter of hours in a mad rush to meet the move-out deadline. There was nothing strategic about my packing, but I can remember nearly everything about it and often times I wonder why my memory is so good for that kind of thing. I suppose have a really good spatial intelligence, maybe that's why. I think my good memory and high spatial intelligence is the ONLY thing that has let me tolerate such a crazy level of mess throughout my life. If I didn't know where things were I would never get anything done, but I pretty much always remember where they are.
The best way to sum up my personal daily consciousness and experience as I go through life would be to say it's something like "photographic memory with a big serving of attention deficit mixed in". My office at work looks like the absent-minded professor's office with papers EVERYWHERE (it's pretty embarrassing, now that I realize how messy it was), scribbles of statistical equations, mathematical formulas that I was solving on post-its, and coffee stains all over half the papers, lol! It was actually kind of embarrassing when I was cleaning my office before my leave of absence because I was forced to realize how my office must look to an outsider. Yet, when someone came in for help I always knew where the exact paper was and which of the 20 other papers were covering it. I'm not really sure how I encode that information, because I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.
I would be interested to learn more about other people's experiences with spatial memory, things that interfere with the encoding of spatial memories, and how all of this can be explained by evolutionary psychology and survival processing. I wonder if people with levels of certain personality traits (OCD or other things related to detail orientation or conscientiousness) let those traits mediate their memory of particular things. So, someone with OCD might remember locations of things because they do things in a very particular order and method and the OCD causes them to notice things that help them encode memories better. E.g., they know that they would never violate a particular order or method of doing something, so therefore they will always remember certain things better. I suspect this is true, because I know it's true for me and for people I've met who have OCD. It is almost as if the repeated habits of OCD individuals allow them to remember things easier because they do things repeatedly and in the same order, which are both characteristic and probably required for good encoding. I know that I MUST shut all cabinet doors, as a rule. It bothers me when a cabinet door is left open (going back to the survival idea, I am afraid of hitting my head on a corner of a cabinet so I always make sure to close it). So if a roommate leaves a cabinet partially or fully open, I immediately know that someone else was there. I imagine people are primed to remember these details pretty well, but I know there are MAJOR individuals differences here. I have lived with a variety of people who have absolutely no concern about things the cabinet-closing or remembering details or locations of things. Even people who are very intelligent in other ways. They leave towels on the floor, cabinets open, and constantly lose things. I don't remember every losing anything except once. I'm sure I've lost a couple other things based on margin of error (I'm not completely racking my brain at this moment for everything I've lost), but still, I am not a person to lose anything. Everything has its place -- even if it's a very, very, very messy place! One of my old bfs lost his glasses multiple times a day, and he's really intelligent otherwise. Even has a great episodic memory. But he is TOTALLY not spatially-oriented or detail-oriented. It's interesting to think about how personality might play a mediating or moderating role that makes us remember certain things better. I suspect that the presence of OCD makes a person more apt to remember things better. But of course, this is just me rambling...I haven't read any research on this so it's just an educated guess! Very interesting, though.
However, now that I'm about to be out of graduate school, I do find myself wanting to settle down and unpack for the first time in my life, really. Anyway, I highly recommend that you go watch the anal retentive chef skit if you haven't seen it...
There is a very interesting line between "good enough" and "good", especially when you move into the realm of perfectionists and researchers. Many researchers, if they are like me, see one thing and think of another. They see an idea and wonder how it applies to another idea. They see a statistic and wonder, "Did they transform the data? How is the variable calculated? How did they deal with missing data? Should they have used the Spearman or Pearson coefficient? Should they have used Bonferroni or Tukey? [YADA YADA YADA??? forever]". It is an endless line of questioning that goes on in your head when you read something. This is what we are trained to do, so it's normal, but it is an absolute NIGHTMARE when you are trying to finish editing a document as big as this. If you let yourself go on tangents about everything you thought about, wondered about, wanted to analyze, or wanted to summarize when writing your 130-page paper, it could easily become a 1,000-page paper. I'm sure that if I weren't limiting myself, my paper would have easily been 300 pages by now. 1,000 pages isn't that difficult to imagine, either. Luckily there are some unwritten rules for how long the paper should be so the 1,000 pages didn't happen, but it could have. I "settled" for only 130 pages. It's hard to reread my paper at this point because I find myself just wanting to add "one more paragraph" here and there. I need to be cut off!!
I think everyone who goes through graduate school has a personality made up of extreme traits that aren't "normal" for most people, whether it's a highly increased need for achievement, OCD, high intellect, big ego, pressure from parents to enroll, insatiable curiosity to learn things, or inability to let go of being a student forever...the list goes on and on. Whatever it is, I would put money on the fact that most graduate students have at least one trait that is well outside of the norm, or a combination multiple traits that are well above/below average. That's the only explanation for why anyone would "want" to put themselves through this horror. I know I have certainly questioned my sanity throughout the process (and have also questioned the sanity of everyone else who chose to go through graduate school too lol). We are certainly "different" folks. More on this later. :) Haha.
Back to my point -- it's really an interesting concept when you think about performance from an individual standpoint -- what do I as an employee perceive to be "good enough" versus "good"? And how does that perception of the quality of my performance compare to peer or supervisor ratings of performance? This is something that I have become more interested in, especially after studying performance in recent research. The belief of certain researchers that certain sources of performance ratings (i.e., supervisor) are inherently more accurate ratings of performance. It seems blatantly obvious that they would be more predictive than other sources of ratings such as self or peer ratings because the supervisor is the one rating performance at the end of the year! So of course when you correlate ratings of performance in a research study with actual ratings of performance, it seems really obvious that those ratings would be predictive. That's basically just a repeated measures design in which the supervisor is just rating performance at two time periods, so of course it makes sense that the ratings are predictive. If the measure is good, the correlation should be very high, well over .7, is what I would predict. So there is some research claiming that supervisors are better sources of performance ratings. Well, that is only true in some cases. If you are predicting in-role performance, then they should be better raters because they are the ones actually giving the true performance rating at the end of the year. But sometimes we're not just interested in performance ratings by the supervisor -- I am interested in what the employee perceives to be good performance. This part of the process is critical because how are you ever going to improve performance if the employee doesn't have a good idea of what good performance is? In a way it seems useless to just evaluate supervisor ratings of performance because what we're really interested in is the discrepancy between what the employee thinks is good performance and what is actually considered good performance by the supervisor. This gets into the performance feedback and performance rating process too, which is something I would like to focus more on as well. Once a year evaluations are not enough, in my opinion. I have ideas for different programs of evaluation. Research idea!
However, I take an argument with the fact that other types of performance, extra-role performance, may be more accurately assessed through supervisor ratings. From personal experience, I know that my supervisor probably has no clue that I have gone out of my way to help other coworkers, that I've come in early, that I have proposed ideas to help the organization. My supervisor wouldn't actually observe those things because they are not coming across his desk. He might have hear-say experience of some behaviors, like, "She stayed late all night to help me solve this problem!" But if other employees don't report those behaviors, the supervisor is unaware of the true extra-role performance. Peers might have a better idea of some of these extra-role behaviors, but how does one peer really know what all his or her coworkers are doing to help out every other coworker? They don't. In many ways, only you know the true extent of your extra-role performance. I believe that self-report ratings of extra-role performance have some merit, and I would like to investigate this further. I would like to investigate the measurement of extra-role performance more as an area of research. I'm not sure what I would like to investigate, but it's something I want to include in future applied studies. I just got an idea for a study...I wrote it down! I won't detail it here, but it would definitely be interesting.
My current job could potentially give me access to applied data. Because of my position, I have a good chance of being able to ask to conduct a research survey in the organization. I have a number of ideas that I would like to investigate at work, especially on the populations I work with. This is one reason I am considering sticking around for longer, so that I can do research. But the whole physical sickness thing at work thing is still there...ugh. I don't know what to do.
Wow, that was a long ramble about performance. Back to work.
