Monday problems
Today I got back to the meta-analysis that I was working on. I reviewed my notes and my original search structure. Next was adapting it to the vocabulary of the next database. The run produced similar results in terms of numbers. Unfortunately, I was stumped by the inability to save or export the list in an RIS format. I left it hanging while I went to a faculty meeting. When I got back, I had a sympathetic, but overall unhelpful customer service agent at Elsevier. She couldn’t do anything for me. The only explanation I got was a “system-wide” outage that hadn’t been resolved.
The recommended that clear the cache, but I refused because there was no way to save the search and I didn’t want to recontruct it from a text file. I could, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to leave it for the night.
The other problem was determining the scope of what work I would do on a grant another college is submitting. Unfortunately, with our indirect costs, it killed anyone but a graduate student getting paid for the work. I was hoping for more, and seemed there was a desire to offer more. It just wasn’t there. None of the investigators and participants was taking any FTE on it. All the work by faculty was “in kind.” So that’s that. I’m waiting for clearance to sign the LOS anyway and then that will be another, consultation-sized project on the horizon.
I had the briefiest of moments to do some planning at the end of the day. I blocked out my entire semester from nine to noon for project work. After going to a productivity seminar last week, I realized while I block out things well, I also schedule in such a way that no one can schedule with me. That becomes a different type of problem. My fall strategy is to spend the morning working on project (teaching, reference, research) and to leave my afternoons free for appointments. This set up me up to be productive before I get distracted or disrupted by the rest of the day. I need to think about what having a smaller block in the afternoon would look like, and how to work in office hours.