Today like most every day is a busy day. It starts with waking before dawn. My brain has the unfortunate tendency to peter out in the afternoon (email writing is nearly always a mistake at that time). So today Im up early because Im productive but also because I enjoy it.
Routine before arriving at Library
- Drink coffee – necessary to maintain equilibrium
- Turn on computer – see the below image which makes me smile – something Ill always associate with DH – important to not take yourself too seriously, be okay with being humbled
- Twitter – interesting things are favorited and automagically sent to a Google Spreadsheet and Evernote for later reading using IFTTT, also might make a wisecrack or two, promote interesting DH opportunities by retweeting
- Email – given brain weakness in previous afternoon, powerful(relatively) morning brain tackles outstanding issues and composes messages to drive forward other DH goals at MSU – each time I write in this medium I think about an excellent lecture that Jeff Grabill gave to the new librarians on professional communication in email – a medium characterized as fulfilling either relationship building, reporting, or proposing – consisting of a series of “moves” – thanking, alignment, or requesting
- Goals & Objectives – review DH and subject area goals document in Evernote for the week, the semester and so forth
- Current Project Review – glance at MSU Google Drive docs to prioritize task tackling for the day – Google Docs have their issues (formatting hell), but they are great for working on docs collaboratively, either from instantiation or once you are ready to share a draft with a group
- Drink more coffee
- Hacking/Reading – messing with new tools and methods, doing the same with new/old readings, some DH some not – motivation to do either is typically driven by seeing an interesting project and wanting to reverse engineer it – always helps my DH motivation to have a concrete example of why I would want to learn a skill/method/etc rather than an attempt in the abstract
- Framing – when the days are loaded and it seems like the overwhelm becomes a physical thing, I try to recast the difficult aspects as challenging opportunities – nothing worth getting ever came easy