In this week's episode, guest expert Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of Secondary and Higher Education and English at Salem State University, joins us to talk about meeting your goals, strategically saying yes to opportunities, using apps to plan your tasks, and leaving room for creative serendipity. We wrap up with our best tips and advice for being productive and finding time to do all the things and at the end we'll have an assignment for our listeners- try out a scheduling or to-do list app and share your story on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and tag us @university_of_venus on IG and @UVenus on Twitter or post it on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/ and we will share, retweet, and amplify! Find University of Venus on Instagram @university_of_venus , Twitter @UVenus , and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/
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Music Credits: Magic by Six Umbrellas
View from Venus Episode 4
Mary Churchill: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the View from Venus. I am joined on today's episode by Meg Palladino andLee Skallerup Bessette and today's guest expert is Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of Secondary and Higher Education and English at Salem State University. In today's episode, we'll be talking with Roopika about how she gets stuff done, meets her goals, and keeps herself motivated to do all the things. You will walk away with our best tips and advice for meeting your own goals and finding ways to stay motivated.
[00:00:38] And at the end, we'll have an assignment for you. So, without further ado. Dr Roopika Risam is an Associate Professor of Secondary and Higher Education and English and the faculty fellow of digital library initiatives at Salem State University. She is a scholar of digital and post-colonial humanities.
[00:00:55] We asked her to join us on View from Venus because we are so impressed with her ability to do so much. Last year she was awarded the inaugural Massachusetts Library Association's Civil Liberties Champion Award for her work on Torn Apart/Separados, a digital humanities project, documenting the sites of immigrant detention centers in the United States, and she also released her first book, New Digital Worlds: Post-colonial Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy from Northwestern University Press.
[00:01:27] Meg Palladino: [00:01:27] All right, so let's start with something fun. If you had one extra hour of free time every day, how would you use it? So, my answer to this one, it would be, I would like to read more. I have a small tiled and I don't have any reading time, and so that's what I would do.
[00:01:43] I'd love to read an hour a day.
[00:01:45] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:01:45] So I would love to say, read, and use that hour to read as well as I'm literally, my living room is overflowing with books that I keep buying. But I know the truth is, the truth is, if I had an extra hour every day, I would just spend it playing candy crush.
[00:02:00] Roopika Risam: [00:02:00] I'd sleep.
[00:02:06] Mary Churchill: [00:02:06] I would either sleep or do yoga, like the things that I always want to do every day, but end up getting pushed down to the bottom, so that's awesome.
[00:02:16] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:02:16] All right? So, what we're talking about today is, is again, how do we meet our goals? How do we get everything we want to get done, done and Roopsi, you, I've always been really impressed. We've known each other online for a very long time now. You do write and present a tremendous amount, and I'd like to share with our listeners how you do it and if you ever say no to anything.
[00:02:38] Roopika Risam: [00:02:38] Well, thank you so much for, for having me. That's a really great question. I'm highly deadline motivated, so if you tell me there's a hard deadline, I will.get it done by the hard deadline. If you don't tell me there's a hard deadline, then there is a significant chance you will be calling me up and saying, where is that thing you promised me? And then I will say, no, really give me a hard deadline.
[00:03:07] So because I'm deadline focused, I also ensure that when I am invited to give a talk or I give a presentation at a conference that I'm always thinking about using that to advance a bigger project that I'm working on, whether a writing project like a book or an article I'm working on or a digital project.
[00:03:29] Those presentations become deadlines as well for me, and so I was able to write my first book, New Digital Worlds, at a teaching institution, precisely because I had a lot of invitations to give talks and every talk, I ensured that I incrementally advanced my argument just a little bit further each time.
[00:03:48] I never gave the same talk twice and that was really helpful because also I was able to get feedback on the different parts of the project as I was working on it as well. As for saying no to anything, recently, yes, I have started saying no to things. Part of that is because I got tenure. Part of that is because I feel like I, that I want to now sort of focus on the work that I want to do and not the work that other people want me to do.
[00:04:20] In many ways, my first book actually came out of something other people wanted me to do. So, I was actually approached by presses wanting a book on post-colonial studies in digital humanities, and at the time, it made a lot of sense to do that. I wasn't really feeling like revising my dissertation into a book, and so I said, okay, I'll do that. And what ended up happening is I was getting a lot of requests for presentations around these issues of inequity and gaps and silences in digital archives and in digital humanities, questions around diversity and digital humanities. And so, I would agree to do these things because they were deadlines and actually built a career around it. Then I got to the point where I felt like I wanted to stop having the direction of my research agenda determined by what everybody else wants from me and expects from me. And so, it was really interesting, after I made that decision, which was about a year ago, I was asked to give a presentation and somebody wanted another one of these diversity digital humanities presentations, and I said, actually, here's what I'm working on right now.
[00:05:35] It's.in the area. It's in the ballpark, but it's really about W.E.B. Du Bois and data visualization. Can I present on that? And I was really excited to find that people are absolutely open to the idea that I could present on something other than diversity and digital humanities and so...
[00:05:51] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:05:51] Well, but I mean, but that makes perfect sense in a sense where it's like, well, we're actually going to stop talking about it and actually invite someone to talk to like walk the walk. Do you know what I mean? Like it's not just talking about diversity. It's like we are, we are showing diversity by having data visualization in W.E.B. Du Bois in that sort of way. So that, that's great.
[00:06:12] That makes a lot of sense. And also, very strategic.
[00:06:16] Roopika Risam: [00:06:16] Yeah, I think the community had to do some throat clearing, and I was apparently a very convenient throat clearer on these issues. But it's really nice to find that there's a demand also for pushing the digital humanities forward in the actual fields, right? In the discipline.
[00:06:36] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:06:36] Yeah.
[00:06:37] Meg Palladino: [00:06:37] So I hear that you use some apps to help you to keep on top of things. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works?
[00:06:43] Roopika Risam: [00:06:43] I do. So right now, I use Asana for project management. I used it for a while and I really liked it because when you complete tasks, they put this little narwhal rainbow....
[00:07:01] Meg Palladino: [00:07:01] Awesome
[00:07:02] Roopika Risam: [00:07:02] ...across your screen. Yes. It's like a, it's almost like it's a unicorn, but it's a narwhal and it has a rainbow tail. So, it makes me very happy. So, I essentially organize all of my projects and I break all my projects down into steps and put them on Asana and use that as a project manager.
[00:07:20] I also use, for day-to-day to-do lists, I use TickTick. And so what I do every evening is I take a look at my schedule for the next day, how many meetings I have, and then I think about what is it on my project manager list of tasks that I can accomplish and then I put them on my daily to do list and I work it out with that.
[00:07:46] Mary Churchill: [00:07:46] I have a follow-up question to the first question. So how do you get invited to give so many presentations?
[00:07:55] Roopika Risam: [00:07:55] I think I've managed to do a lot of disseminating of my research on social media, particularly through Twitter, and use that as a way to build connections within digital humanities, friendships, more so than connections, right?
[00:08:11] I mean, these are, for me, very personal relationships with people. And so that's really been the source of, at least at the beginning, of the invitations that I was getting. In the last couple of years, I've started to just get invitations from people I don't know. And that was very interesting because at that point it seemed like there was a movement of my scholarship to beyond my own network of friends and colleagues and particularly in disciplines that I was completely surprised by like anthropology and archaeology and museum studies. t's super exciting because I learned so much from getting to go and talk to people working in these areas. I think that also when possible, I have tried to publish my scholarship, open access. I also put my scholarship, even when it's pay-walled, into the institutional repository that we have at Salem State and so that's disseminated my work as well. So, I think that making the scholarship available, putting it out there, interacting with colleagues, has really been key to developing, to getting invited to talk about my work.
[00:09:26] Mary Churchill: [00:09:26] That's excellent. And I love the fact that you're strategic about furthering your argument with each presentation. That, to me is, is just super smart, right? It's leveraging these opportunities, these deadlines to really keep writing your book or the next article. So, kudos to you.
[00:09:46] Roopika Risam: [00:09:46] What I wanted to say is also that it's very strange to me that people go on speaking tours after they've written their book. Which, I mean, it makes sense because they want to promote their books, but at the same time, for me, I've published that book. I've moved on from that argument. I'm working on the next thing, and having this orientation towards using invitations to further my argument, it actually doesn't make a lot of sense for me to go give a talk on the book I already published, right?
[00:10:16] So it's always a delicate art of showing how the work I'm doing now builds on the work that I've done before to do that kind of marketing piece for your book that's expected of you, but at the same time, to really use the experience to have some new kinds of conversations.
[00:10:32] Mary Churchill: [00:10:32] That's a great point and I think you're right. I think it makes sense for people who are reading your book to bring you in. But for you, those conversations would have been much more helpful and productive if you could have had them before you finalized your book.
[00:10:46] Roopika Risam: [00:10:46] One of the things that I've noticed, and I wish I had realized this sooner. I wish I'd realized this as a grad student. I wish I had realized this the first few years of my professor job, which is that there are particular times in the day that I am most fresh for particular tasks. And so, for example, I might be too tired or not super motivated to write, but that's a perfect time to edit a podcast or it's a perfect time to answer some emails.
[00:11:22] So I spend a lot of time thinking about how do I align parts of my schedule and the spare time that I have in between meetings or in between longer chunks of time when I might be writing and align that with tasks that sort of take up brain power in a very different kind of way. And so, the downside of this is I feel like I'm almost constantly working, but the upside of this is, hey, it's plenty of time to work.
[00:11:54] Mary Churchill: [00:11:54] Which is why you said if you had an extra hour, you'd sleep.
[00:11:59] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:11:59] So as well as being an Associate Professor, you are also a Faculty Fellow of Digital Library Initiatives at Salem State. Did I get that right? Is that the title?
[00:12:09]Roopika Risam: [00:12:09] That's correct.
[00:12:11] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:12:11] So how are you, how are you...I guess going back to that what brain energy is that taking from you or are you devoting to that?
[00:12:19] How does that fit into your productivity schema, I guess you could say.
[00:12:27] Roopika Risam: [00:12:27] So this is,following up on a theme from the first question, which is that I try to ensure that everything I do is repurposable in some kind of way. So, the work that I'm doing at Salem State in the library, which spans from developing our open educational resources initiatives to building community outreach through digital humanities to working with undergraduate students on digital humanities research. All of this for me is also a site of research and a site of teaching. And to that end, I've published two articles in collaboration with two librarians that I work with on digital initiatives, and that's been a way that we've taken our experiences and reflected on them and written them up and then disseminated them. And that's been, and particularly writing around issues of faculty-librarian collaboration. And so that's the answer there, right?
[00:13:34] Everything I do, whether it's an administrative task, whether it's teaching, whether it's research, whether it's a presentation or digital project, I'm always sort of thinking about how do I repurpose this? How do I use it as fodder for my research agenda? How does it improve my teaching? How does it improve my management skills?
[00:13:55] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:13:55] That's great. And I have the exact, well, and maybe it's because I'm in an alt-ac role now, but I have almost the exact opposite impulse, which is I'm going to agree to do things that are wildly unrelated to one another and then just make a narrative out of it later about how it does actually all fit together.
[00:14:16] Roopika Risam: [00:14:16] I think that's actually highly thematic of my career I feel like in many ways, because I spent so much time, at least the first four or five years after graduate school, doing the things other people wanted me to do rather than something I actually had some burning desire to do it, and it was sort of at that moment, for example, when I was putting together my tenure narrative, that I was really able to take a step back and say, how do all these pieces of research, these different strands of research, these teaching experiences, these service experiences, how do they all fit together into this narrative of who I am as a, as a scholar, as a professor, as a colleague?
[00:14:58] So that was a really exciting moment to actually start feeling like these things all do actually fit together and there's actually a logic to them.
[00:15:06] Mary Churchill: [00:15:06] I was going to ask you about, you know, how much of the framing device was developed before doing the work, because I think I've, I've actually taken that from you: teach a class that reinforces the book that you're writing, do projects at work that reinforce the book that you're writing and the class that you're teaching, and really kind of pile that on and go deep. But it feels for me at least, it's organic, right? I'm taking advantage of opportunities. I'm reframing things as they come my way and trying to say no to things that are too far outside the framework.
[00:15:39] But how early on do you develop your framework for this decision making and reframing?
[00:15:45] Roopika Risam: [00:15:45] I didn't, I didn't really until recently. And then it's now because I am just so inundated with requests there is literally not enough time to do everything that would be asked of me. So, I generally evaluate it in terms of how well does this opportunity match with what I need? So, for example, if I feel like I'm not happy with the amount of publications I have in the pipeline, that might be an opportunity to look at a publication opportunity and say, yes, I'm going to, I'm going to get on board with that.
[00:16:17] There's a really interesting case recently where some colleagues wanted to start doing a series of posts about doing computational textual analysis on the corpus of The Baby Sitter's Club books, which if you are, if you were a young lady in the 90s, you may have read this,
[00:16:37] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:16:37] Devoured them, absolutely devoured them, waiting for them to come out at the bookstore, ready to buy it and read it immediately. So.
[00:16:44] Roopika Risam: [00:16:44] It's great. I mean, I'm a total skeptic about computational textual analysis, but I know a lot about The Baby Sitters Club and it so transpired that these colleagues, Quinn Dombrowksi, Katia Bowers, Maria Cecire and Anouk Lang asked or wanted to put together the Data Sitters Club where we would actually write some how-tos around computational textual analysis using this corpus of teen girl books. And you know, it was one of those moments where I almost, I would have said no based on all of my internal scheming around how I'm planning my time. I really should've said no, but actually it just seemed like it was going to be kind of fun. And also, it was a good opportunity to build up my own knowledge in the area of computational and textual analysis. So that was sort of one of those moments where, it really defied the usual calculations, and I think it's important to leave moments for chance, you know, for an opportunity that doesn't. necessarily align with exactly what you think you're going to be doing. But I've also found that sometimes those opportunities create these moments of serendipity where sometimes it gets you thinking about your own work in a new direction or connects you with people that you wouldn't have worked with previously.
[00:18:03] Mary Churchill: [00:18:03] So this has been fantastic. We're almost out of time, so I just want to be aware of that. And we like to end with kind of top tips based on the topic of the day, productivity, finding time to do all the things. And Meg is going to start us off.
[00:18:18] Meg Palladino: [00:18:18] So I don't know if I've cracked this nut. I do a lot of multitasking to get all the things done, but I also am working on saying no to things and also trying to be a really good delegator.
[00:18:29] And so, you know, who can I get to do this thing for me, is what I spend a lot of time thinking about instead of doing the said thing. So, you know, say no, get help or do it all at once.
[00:18:39] Mary Churchill: [00:18:39] Excellent. Lee?
[00:18:41] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:18:41] So I've recently discovered, and I have, I recently got an ADHD diagnosis, so late in life.
[00:18:49] And so my productivity and how to get everything done, tips are, are, I don't want to say idiosyncratic, but more geared towards my non neuro-typical approach to things. And so, one of the reasons why I do so many disparate things and agree to do them is because I need new, shiny things.
[00:19:10] So if I get bored or disengaged from one task, I can go to this other task that's completely different and be reengaged with that and then eventually come back around and being like, Oh, the thing that I was bored with is now a new shiny thing again. And so, I'm going to keep going with that.
[00:19:27] But you know that that's kind of a, again, a sort of idiosyncratic, and I don't even know if it's a good coping skill, but it's the one that has benefited me.
[00:19:35] Mary Churchill: [00:19:35] Excellent. Roopsi, anything you want to add that you didn't already share with us?
[00:19:40] Roopika Risam: [00:19:40] I do. I do the same task switching that Lee does. So, I find that really useful as well.
[00:19:47] And that goes back to the point about how there's sort of certain tasks that are suited to how I feel or to my concentration and brain power at a given moment. The other I would also add is that my best tip is sometimes stop working. I often, it's always a joke, some of my friends will message me on the weekend and say, is it okay to take Saturday off, and I always say yes because inevitably taking- I can spend more time working on a task, but at a certain point there are diminishing returns if I have not spent some time not working. So. Often, I will then return back to work refreshed and way more productive.
[00:20:27] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:20:27] Thank you for saying that.
[00:20:28] I think that that's really important. You're completely right and we don't say it enough. When we don't give ourselves permission enough to just stop.
[00:20:36] Mary Churchill: [00:20:36] For me, it's, I'm highly scheduled and as you all know, my morning starts very, very early either somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00 AM, and that's when I write.
[00:20:47] That's when I, in my kind of daily journaling, I also do a bit of, okay, here's what's coming up, here's what I need to cover in this meeting. So, there's planning that happens in that early morning journaling as well. And sometimes, I can write a tremendous amount in just an hour and others, it's slow. But, a good strong start for me is really important.
[00:21:09] When I don't have that, I'm kind of off my game all day. But I do a lot of planning. I plan the weeks. I plan the days. I plan the months, quarters, and that helps. I try to set goals and kind of what you were saying Roopsi about using Asana and TickTick together kind of. You've got your project, you've got your to do list.
[00:21:29] And so for me, it's big goals and then breaking it down into what can I accomplish this week, today, in that area. And just making sure that I'm also not ignoring family and friends because I, and my health, because I tend to focus too much on the work and not enough on taking care of myself and keeping my relationships going.
[00:21:51] So I put goals there as well, so that I'm forced to kind of, okay, what am I…Have I talked to any friends today? I need to talk to a friend. That's like a to do, right? So, and that's my downtime, but it really helps me mix it up. So., I want to close in thanking Roopsi for joining us.
[00:22:10] And, this has been really fun. So, thanks for joining us on productivity and how you get everything done. You're a superstar, so thank you.
[00:22:20] Roopika Risam: [00:22:20] This was fun.
[00:22:21] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:22:21] Yay.
[00:22:22] Mary Churchill: [00:22:22] What another fantastic conversation. Okay, listeners, here's this week's assignment. Try out a scheduling or to do list app and let us know how it goes.
[00:22:31] Share your story on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and tag us at UVenus and we'll retweet, share in our story and post on Facebook. As always, thanks for joining us and we'll be back next week with tips on how to deal with
[00:22:48] imposter syndrome.