I have a productivity plan. A way to get things done that I need to get done. It involves a Sunday night ritual where I go over my To-Do list, examine my weekly calendar, schedule appointments, pay the bills, look at my weekly expenses, and water the plants. It is a plan that, of course, involves numerous software applications and iphone doohickys, influenced by GTD, Clockwork Muse, The Creative Habit, and Inbox Zero. It’s tried and tested. When the plan is moving, it’s great. I get things done. I’m on top of the world. However, it has one fatal flaw.

I’m involved.

In order for this productivity plan to work, I have to sit down and implement it. I have to make the active decision to turn off the TV, lock my office door, sit down, and put things into gear. I’ve noticed that, as time moves on, I go from weekly to bi-weekly. Sometimes a weekend trip means I miss a week, and then it becomes once a month. Next thing I know, I realize I haven’t looked at my To Do list in months.

Typically these moments occur near the end of a semester, when I’m rushing to get projects done: There are only a couple things to do, and they are big, obvious, and due soon. I manage to convince myself that looking at my To Do list isn’t going to change anything, that big thing is still due, and it takes priority over everything else.  So I push the smaller things out of my mind, and forget about it. This summer, the Campus Archaeology Field School took precedent; I was barely in front of a computer for the month. And now, the stress and hubbub of moving across country has taken its toll on getting things straight. While packing, however, it occurred to me that I hadn’t sat down and taken stock of what I have to get done this coming semester.

So, this means that this week, now that I’ve settled in Williamsburg, I need to start planning. Of course, it helps that a new phase of work and life is beginning: that’s always a good time to refresh, reevaluate, and get started in new routines. It’s one of the reasons why I love being on an academic schedule; every two or three months the semester ends, and you can pick up and begin your routines from a fresh starting point. Often this gives me a chance to try a new piece of technology, or adopt a different productivity thing I read about somewhere. It also lets me ditch old ideas that haven’t worked.

This fall, however, the things I have to complete (ahem, my dissertation), are a little bit different than those things I’ve been completing over the past few years. There is no classwork due, and no regular desk/office/field job, and no boss to report to on a daily basis. I am in charge of my own time, making my own deadlines, and setting my own goals. I have to make sure that my days are spent working on my dissertation and other research. The people I report to won’t be across the hall, they’ll be across the country. This means that there are no daily reminders about what I should be working on. I’m simply cast out into sea and expected to return regularly with a chapter. This wouldn’t be a problem if, as I mentioned before, I wasn’t involved.

So, this means I’m going to have double my efforts to stay on task; I’m going to have to be my own boss. The weekly refresh may have to move to a different day or time, so that it isn’t so easily interrupted by weekend activities. Otherwise, I am just going to have to do a better, more consistent job of staying on task and sticking to the plan. We’ll see how it goes…

Do you have any tips or pointers? How do you stay on task? Also, I’m looking for any book recommendations about how best to approach this dissertation…please leave some suggestions in the comments!

Image borrowed from PhD Comics!

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I have spent most of my life in East Lansing, Michigan. I grew up here, I attend elementary, middle, high and graduate school here, my family lives here. The time I didn’t spend here was down the street, attending Kalamazoo College. I have made what I consider to be a pretty fantastic life here. This August, however, I’ll be leaving.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to many of you…I’ve been planning on moving to the Chesapeake for a while now, since that is where my dissertation research is located. Now that my proposal has been defended, I can begin the stage in my research where being close to my data is important. What has been up in the air has been the location, as it has revolved around where Ashleigh (@AshHeck), my partner in crime and life, found a new job. A few weeks ago, she was offered a fantastic job at William and Mary, working in their Career Services office, sending us to Williamsburg. We couldn’t have asked for a better spot, as it has plenty to offer both of us.

Needless to say, this is a difficult move for me. I will be leaving behind a family that lives down the street, a community of friends that I will miss seeing every day, a city that is finally pulling together and moving forward behind the strong will of so many great people, and a university that I have only recently been able to fully appreciate for all that it is, and all the amazing opportunities it has afforded me. I have little doubt that living in East Lansing and Lansing, being exposed to Michigan State’s education, and the relationships that I have made along the way, has shaped who I am as a person, and who I will become as a professional. Leaving that behind is a difficult thing to do.

With that said, Williamsburg will provide new opportunities, new challenges, new people, and a new setting. I am excited for the possibilities for both Ashleigh and I professionally. Thanks to generous funding from Historic St. Mary’s City and the MSU Campus Archaeology Program, I will be able to dedicate most of my time to working on my dissertation, and will be located only three hours from my research site and data, housed Historic St. Mary’s City. I am still working on what my schedule will look like, but it will certainly put me in St. Mary’s City, Maryland quite often. William and Mary and Colonial Williamsburg will provide a large community of archaeologists to work with, a fabulous campus to explore, and a town that has embraced and celebrates its past fervently. Ashleigh has what looks to be a fantastic job with great opportunities for her as well. We will also be closer to extended family, who live in Maryland, and will have chance to see them more often.

So, in all, I am full of different emotions about this transition. I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m sad. I will be moved for good by August 15th, with Ashleigh leaving to start her new job at the beginning of August. So our near future is full of packing, wrapping up things at work, all while stuffing our faces with as many Jersey Giants, Peanut Barrel Olive Burgers, and Golden Harvest breakfast burritos a possible. Of course, I will be back often to visit family and my dissertation committee, and I will be sure to let people know ahead of time.

Thanks for everything, please stay in touch, and please, please, please come and visit. There’s lots to do in Williamsburg.

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Over the past two and a half years, I have worked in the Department of Student Life at Michigan State University, helping to coordinate the Sexual Assault and Relationship Violence Prevention Program. Although my time spent working with the office diminished from 25 to 10 to 5 hours a week, I have learned a great deal from this position that I would not have learned otherwise. Additionally, my girlfriend is also a student affairs professional, leading to many a conversation about what Student Affairs is and does. I have been, I feel, well exposed. Or at least, more exposed than most anthropology graduate students.

Needless to say, the culture in a student affairs office is dramatically different from that in my office in the Department of Anthropology. A lot of this has to do with the intent of the department: Student Life adopts a student-first orientation, where the single priority is students, particularly their “life outside of the classroom” (a phrase I hate, but people seem to keep using). An academic department such as Anthropology views their discipline first, and students are viewed as one of the priorities through that lens: how do we use anthropology to teach students about the world and how to view it critically? I think that what I have learned at Student Life will (and has been) valuable to my work as a member of an academic department for two reasons: first, it exposes me to a student-first perspective, and second, it provides me with in-depth knowledge about what student affairs programming exists and how I can use it to enhance what I do.

Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting that many faculty or student affairs professionals aren’t capable, or don’t already do, what I’m about to talk about. Many of them do. I’m simply writing about how my exposure to Student Affairs has led me to these realizations about how I hope to approach my professional life. Carry on.

When I walk in the doors at 101 Student Services, I’m responsible for looking at every idea from the perspective of the student. This means I have to look at our programming to figure out how it is relevant to a 19 year old student in 2010. How will this program benefit the student? How will get them there? How will the program get across its message in an effective, relevant way? In order to do this, you have to “know” the student body. You have to know how they work, what they do, what music they listen to, what music they don’t listen to, and so on. You also have to know about where students are developmentally, what skills they have, what they don’t have, why they do what they do. This is part of the student-first perspective. This perspective allows you to keep in touch with what students are thinking, how they perceive the world, and how they are struggling to function within it.

The importance for faculty and administrators in academic departments, then, seems obvious. Instead of asking how can we teach students through anthropology, we can ask how can we teach anthropology to students in ways they will find relevant to their lives and perspectives? How can our teaching help them develop into better people? Instead of focusing on what questions a student missed in office hours, a student perspective might lead to a discussion about studying habits, or what other elements of student’s life might be impacting their learning. Understanding what a student’s life is like will help me make a student’s education more valuable to them.

Working in Student Affairs has done another thing for me that is also important: it has opened my eyes to the number of things that are happening outside of academic departments. Even more important, it has become clear to me that these are not things that are happening separate of academia, they are happening along side it, and would be better if they were working with academia. Additionally, they offer things for our students that would make academic departments and classes work better. And when these collaborations do happen, it will be a great benefit for the partnership when I’m able to utilize a student-first perspective, in addition to an anthropology-first perspective (and for the student affairs side to do the same). Being able to make connections between academic and student affairs programming will help me a great deal in these situations.

Certainly, these are not the only things that I have learned from this experience, but I think they are the most important. There are plenty of other ways for faculty members to gain this perspective. What are some other important cross-over skills that you think I may have benefited from? On the flip side, do you think Student Affairs may have benefited from my perspective as a researcher? As an anthropologist?

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The role of the advisor is just that, to give advice. My advisor, Kenneth Lewis, came through big time last week during an impromptu meeting we had last week about my dissertation research questions (still being worked on, but I’ll post them once they’re completed). I had a feeling it was going to be an important conversation as it was happening, and thankfully I hit the record button on my iPhone half way through. I have since revisited the discussion a couple of times.

What he asked me revolved around the focus of my dissertation: was I looking at a methodology or process? Obviously, these are both important elements of a research design: you need a model that describes a process of human cultural behavior, and you need a methodology by which to test that model. Both are critical to a research design. But what he wanted to know was which one of these parts will I be emphasizing; which one will be the “new” thing I’m contributing. Of course, it could be both, but that could potentially reinvent the wheel, and in this case, it would be.

Many archaeologists have done analysis and tests of how you can identify the negotiation of power on a plantation. Delle looked at space (Delle 1998), Orser examined ceramic values (Orser 1988), and so on. There is no reason for me to focus my attention on developing new ways to show this negotiation through the material record: it has already been done, and I can use these methods again. A methodologically focused research design would have done something like identifying negotiations of power through a certain artifact, let’s say, marbles, and developing a methodology that would allow that to be done.

What hasn’t been done, however, is to examine the process of the transition from slavery to freedom in border state plantations, particularly in Maryland, and how power was renegotiated between the planters and laborers after the Civil War. This is what my main contribution will be: to see how this occurs, and how it is different or similar to the processes that have taken place in other places. My research, therefore, is focused on questions that are asked of the process, not of the methodology. I will be using methods already adopted by other archaeologists to test a processual model that I have developed using the specific historical context of the area I am investigating.

This was extremely helpful way of compartmentalizing the sections of my research design, and helped me describe what it is I am hoping to contribute with this research. Hopefully, it may also help some of you out there who are working on proposals themselves…

Delle, James A.

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I am working on my dissertation proposal.

Or so I say. I haven’t really written much. But, that should all change this week. This week, I start writing. Up until that point, I’ve been Thinking. I’ve been in the Thinking Stage.

For me, this stage often takes up the most amount of time in my process. For a lot of people, writing happens through drawn out processes, while for me it all sort of happens in one giant jolt. My comprehensive exams were that way, I spent an hour reading the question, jotting an outline…then all of a sudden I looked up and I had written 10 pages in two hours.

In this case, I have been surrounded by this research project for years. I was given access to the St. Mary’s City project the summer after I started graduate school, in 2007. I’ve written a good deal about it already: a couple research proposals, two conference presentations, a comprehensive report. This is the collection process: gathering the info. Collecting the data. Seeing the pieces, but not how they fit together.

But since I gave the paper at SHA, I haven’t done much writing. I’ve been taking some notes, talking with my advisor, scribbling a little on a white board. Trying to see what fits and what doesn’t. I’m in the Thinking Stage.

The Thinking Stage is an important part of the process for me. This is when I gather my thoughts. Start connecting the pieces that I have collected. This is when the creative process occurs: when two seemingly unrelated objects are connected, or linked, together. This is the fun part. Sometimes this happens in a flow chart, or an outline, or on the back of a napkin. It’s the best part. It’s when it all comes together.

I have some good news: the Thinking Stage is nearing a close. The pieces have begun to come together.

So, this week, I write. See you on the other side.

How about you? What is your process? Do you have an equivalent stage?

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As fun as it is to think that I will have all the time in the world to sit around and read great books, passing comprehensive exams is really just the beginning of the important part of my time in graduate school. The fun/hard part starts now. Writing the dissertation. And the first part of that process is writing a dissertation research proposal.

My research is going to use data excavated by Historic St. Mary’s City in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. St. Mary’s City is the site of the first capital of Maryland, which was settled by British catholics in 1634. It remained the capital, and has been historically examined as the birthplace of religious toleration. When the capital moved to Annapolis after the Protestant Revolution in the 1680s, St. Mary’s was abandoned, and eventually fell into ruins.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the space went through multiple transitions as a slave plantation. There has been a good deal of survey work that has identified these transitions, and historical work that links these transitions to changes in ownership through sale, marriage, and inheritance. My dissertation research will look at one of the final transitions: the shift from before to after the Civil War.

During this period, the plantation was owned by Dr. John Mackall Brome, who had a very specific idea as to how he wanted to organize his plantation and surrounding space. His quarters appear to be organized in a straight line, along a road leading from behind his manor home to the agricultural center. He organized his slaves in family sized single and duplex quarters, and controlled the entrypoints to his community by constructing a wharf. Dr. Brome was very much in control of the landscape.

After the Civil War, instead of renegotiating new terms for the former slaves who lived on his property, he began to work out additional deals to industrialize the region. Unfortunately, none of this worked out. The power he had lost during the Civil War was more than his control of labor: he had lost significant amounts of regional power, as well.

Historic St. Mary’s City has excavated two of the buildings that once housed some of Dr. Brome’s laborers. One of these structures, a duplex quarter, was occupied from 1840 until 1950, and still stands, although in a different location. The other building, which was next to the duplex, was a single quarter and stood until the 1930s, although it was probably uninhabited soon after emancipation. Both quarters are in the photograph above.

My dissertation research will be examining the material record of these two structures. In particular, I will be looking at how the inhabitants of these buildings adapted to their newfound freedom. Some evidence of this is already apparent: after emancipation, the walls that separated the duplex were knocked down. The African Americans were already beginning to exercise their newfound power within a household that had now become their own, not Dr. Brome’s.

I am excited about this research. I am also excited to share what I can with all of you. I am hoping that I will be able to share some of the exciting pieces of history and culture that I uncover, run ideas past you as I work them out, and hopefully develop a meaningful dialogue with you. I am hopeful that there will be a number of different communities following along: certainly there will be archaeologists and non-archaeologists. My hope is that this will be a space where both groups will feel comfortable asking questions, challenging my work, and engaging in good conversation about archaeology. If anything I write about is unclear, please, ask. Nobody learns if you don’t.

Follow my running commentary via twitter @brockter through the topic #TerrysDis!

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