True Confessions

Since my last major post entitled If You Keep Doing What You've Been Doing, You Will Keep Getting What You Have Been Getting, I haven't been following my own advice.

I started out well writing 200 words and rewarding myself. However, gradually, I drifted back into old habits and making little progress. You might say, I started doing what I had been doing and I got the same results that I had been getting. What went wrong?

1) My environment changed - slowly. Since January, may work load at work has gradually increased, and more recently, dramatically increased. I did not read the changes in my environment and make appropriate adjustments in my commitments to the dissertation process. Consequently, in order to deal with the increasing pressure at work - I allowed myself to drift back in to my old unproductive habits.

2) I did not regularly review my commitments i.e. writing 200 words and rewarding myself and writing in the mornings before work.

What do I plan to do about it?

1) recommit myself to my commitments and attempt to stay attentive to how to adopt them to my environment. I intend to start writing 200 words with a reward and writing again in the morning. However, I may need to adjust my morning writing to burst of a few days or 1 week. It is difficult, for me, to sustain weeks of getting up at 3:00 am to write.

2) Make a small change. I often find Nancy Wichard's blog Successful Writing Tips helpful in jump starting my writing process. In her post Three Quick Fixes to Jolt You into Action on Your Dissertation (see RSS feed in left column), she proposes putting a short cut on your desktop for your dissertation so it is only one click away. Well, I cleaned up my desktop so there are only 8 icons on my desktop (including my dissertation). Then I gave my dissertation a distinctive green arrow icon. The green arrow icon makes the dissertation easy to identify and the image, for me, symbolizes forward action - get going!

Points to Ponder
Has your environment been slowly or rapidly changing around you and causing you to drop your dissertation as you, perhaps unconsciously, attempt to navigate the changes? What do you need to do to adjust your commitment to your dissertation to your changing environment?

Thank You for Supporting this Blog!

I looked at my stats for this site for a first time in months. There have been over 650 unique visitors to this blog, many of whom appear to be returning on a regular basis. Thanks for supporting the Writing My Dissertation in 15 Minuets a Day blog. I'm delighted that people are apparently finding something useful here.

I'd really like to hear what you find most useful about this blog, so I can provide more of that content. So, feel free to leave a comment.

If You Keep Doing What You've Been Doing, You'll Keep Getting what You've Been Getting

It's been a long time since I made a post to this blog. That's because I've really been struggling with this dissertation. Even though I've been making steady progress, it has been extremely slow progress. So slow in fact, that it appears almost impossible that I will reach my goal of graduating in May.

In coaching teams, I have often use the phrase that titles this blog entry: If you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting. It is truly insane to think that if you are not happy with the results you are getting in a certain project that you can get different results by continuing to do what you've been doing - or worse yet - by doing more of what you've been doing!

So, over the course of the past month I've been trying to change the way I do things in regard to this dissertation project. So, what did I change?

Well, I know that my mind is quicker and fresher in the morning, but I've been working on my dissertation in the evenings after work when I'm already spent. So, I changed the time I work on my dissertation. I get up two hours earlier in the morning and work on my dissertation before I go to work. The advantage is that by time I go to work, I know I've already made progress on the dissertation and that feels very good! I also go to bed two hours earlier in the evening.

However, it has not been enough. Even though, I was putting the time in first thing in the morning, which for me was a major step in the right direction - progress was still slow. Thankfully, yesterday I read one of the RSS feeds on this blog, What to do if you are not making the progress that you want. This article talks about setting reasonable goals and rewarding yourself for making those goals.

So, yesterday, I set the goal of writing at least 200 words daily - 6 days a week. This may not sound like much but the cumulative effect is astounding. If you calculate that 200 words is about 1 double spaced page of typed text then in about 6 months you have a 200 page dissertation, which is about the page range I expect for my work. Of course, this assumes everything you write is usable, which I am not naive enough to think that! However, if you look at it over the course of a year, writing 200 words 6 days a week, would give you double the amount of material you need for a 200 page dissertation. So, in that scenario you only need a 50% usability rate!

I tried it yesterday, and I felt like a made more progress in that one day, than I had in the past week. Of course, I wrote more than 200 words. However, I rewarded myself after the 200 the first two hundred words with a break to play my baroque recorder. After the second set of 200, I rewarded myself by doing some personal internet browsing.

I just finished my first 200 words for today, and my reward is spending some time posting to this blog - which I wanted to do for some time, but felt guilty for taking the time away from the dissertation that I was not making much progress on.

Feel like your not making progress? Read some of the RSS feeds on this page for some ideas on things you can change about how you are approaching the process. Ask yourself what can I change today? Then just do it - and keep changing as often as necessary!

Stay on Target with Activity Tracker

Today I started using a new Google Gadget to boost my productivity in my writing process. One productivity activity that I sometimes use is alternating between activities every 15 - 20 minutes. This is good if you are bored or stuck. Using Activity Tracker I set up several sections of my dissertation as activities. I also included 3 non-dissertation activities that I needed to work on today. I set up Activity Tracker to prompt me every 15 minutes to change activities. You can choose different time levels and different languages and voices you would like for your your prompt. In addition to this, Activity Tracker tracks how much time you spend on each task. You can view your results on a graph, print your results, or export them to an Excel file.

Here's the office description from the Activity Tracker site: Track all your daily activity and find how you spend your time with this cool little punchclock gadget. Print cool graph and get a log or timesheet of all your activities. Punch-in when you start and punch-out when done. Let the gadget alert you when you forget to punchin or punchout. Use it - for improving productivity, as a recorder, as stopwatch, to jot down all tasks, for project management, for time management, as a counter, timer,simple tracker, to track todo list, to simply track your progress, to find time spent in meeting and appointments, as a graphing tool. Be productive and effective with this gadget. Perfect for anyone - student, consultant, employee, employer.

Download Activity Tracker for your Google homepage

Gearing up to write . . . again!

It has been awhile since I've done some serious work on my dissertation. The holiday's came and then I had an illness. All of this taken together through off most of what I had hoped to accomplish during the holidays. So, there is nothing left to do but regroup.

Once again MindManager had been a useful tool. I had to devise a plan for finishing my literature review. It was as simple as adding due dates to the branches of my literature outline map. Here's the map with the plan.

State of the 21st Century World - Part 1

Heading into the last two years of the first decade of the 21^st century, global problems weigh on our collective consciousness. J. F. Rischard (2002), former World Bank vice-president for Europe cites twenty contemporary global problems (p. 66).

Table 1: Rishard’s 20 Global Issues

Sharing our planet:Issues involving the global commons	Sharing our humanity: Issues requiring a global commitment	Sharing our rule book: Issues needing a global regulatory approach
Global warming	Massive step-up in the fight against poverty	Reinventing taxation for the 21st century
Biodiversity and ecosystem losses	Peacekeeping, conflict preventions, combating terrorism	Biotechnology rules
Fisheries depletion	Education for all	Global financial architecture
Deforestation	Global infectious diseases	Illegal drugs
Water deficits	Digital divide	Trade, investment, and completion rules
Maritime safety and pollution	Natural disaster prevention and mitigation	Intellectual property rights
		E-commerce rules
		International labor and migration rules

These problems are by-products of two major forces (a) demographic explosion and (b) the new world economy. According to Rischard these major forces will introduce unprecedented stresses on the world. At the same time, the technological and economic revolutions fueling the new world economy will introduce unprecedented opportunities (p. 7). Nevertheless, Rischard asserts that, “for many urgent global issues the turnaround time is now, in the next two decades, not in the next half century” (p. 200). Additionally, he argues that there exists “an undeniable failure of the entire international setup and the world’s nation states at the task of fast and effective global problem-solving” (p. 201). This is the case because the exploding population causes an exponentiality of scarcity. Simultaneously, the new economy offers an exponentiality of plenitude. Together these forces create a crisis of complexity, because the rate of change exceeds traditional institutions capacity to change rapidly (p.38).

Although Rischard insists on a 20-year window of opportunity to deal with these global issues, he does not specify the consequences of failure to address them. He does offer a solution. Rischard calls for a move from hierarchal government to a system of networked governance. Central this concept is the creation of Global Issues Networks (GIN). Each GIN addresses a specific global problem. The composition of the GIN is comprised of three types of partners: (a) national governments concerned by or experienced in the issue, (b) international civil society organizations who can contribute individuals with deep knowledge of the issue, and (c) businesses that have both knowledge of the issue and the ability to represent other business (p. 172).

In summary, Rischard uses twenty global issues which he admits is not an exhaustive list, to call attention to the crises of complexity caused by exponential growth in world population and creation of wealth by the new world economy. Fueling this crisis is the inability traditional nation-states and other international governance institutions to keep pace with the rate of world change. Rischard’s work appears grounded on three assumptions (a) a general sense of global crisis of complexity, (b) a perceived inability of nation-states and other international governance organizations to address the sense of global crisis and (c) and an implicit failure of leadership (national and international) to effect the necessary changes in nation-states and international governance organizations.

Reference

Rischard, J. F. (2002). High noon: 20 global problems 20 years to solve them. New York: Basic Books.

Starting the Literature Review Today

Here's a draft of the introduction to the Lit. Review


The central concern of this study is “What does organizational leadership mean in a chaotic, nihilistic, and apocalyptic era?” I posit that applying Paul Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation to John’s Apocalypse offers a relevant response to this concern. This chapter provides a foundation from the scholarly literature supporting the appropriateness of the data source and the method of analysis in addressing this question.

Beginning this foundation, I answer from the literature two questions:
(1) Does the state of the 21st century world support the research question’s underlying assumption of a broadly chaotic, nihilistic, and apocalyptic contemporary reality?
(2) If there is support of this assumption, what evidence of chaos, nihilism, and apocalypticism exist in contemporary organizations?
In the course of answering these questions, I define chaos, nihilism, and apocalypticism.

Continuing the foundation, I turn to an examination of the current philosophical and theoretical models generally applied by leaders within their 21st century organizational realities. I explore the apparent inadequacy of positivistic epistemology to respond to the contemporary organizational context. Within the literature, Chaos Theory and theories of spirituality rooted in postmodern epistemology emerge as alternatives to theories grounded in positivistic epistemology. Consequently, a thorough discussion of these two theoretical orientations follows. As a part of this discussion, I define organizations and organizational leadership.

Furthering the foundation, I show from the literature how Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology philosophy offers a step forward in constructing theories and best practices in organizational leadership within contemporary reality. Here I discuss the current application of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology to organizational leadership studies.

Concluding the foundation, I demonstrate from the literature the potential of John’s Apocalypse to speak meaningfully to contemporary reality in general and in specific to the realities of 21st century organizations. Finally, from the literature, I offer an explanation of the appropriateness of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenological philosophy, and the theory of interpretation derived from it, in explaining and understanding John’s Apocalypse.