A friend just pointed me towards this great article in Inc. on business writing. It made me chuckle and then groan as I thought about my website. I think somewhere in the mix I am a “solutions provider”.

From the article:

What’s bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing. If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.

Sometimes I think that you need an outside set of eyes to see how to present things in an engaging way – if you are too close to the topic you can’t always see the bigger picture. “Can’t see the forest for the trees” and all that shtick.

Enjoy the read and I think you’ll be joining me as I go off to purchase some Saddleback leather.

I’ve always been a list-maker. My poor husband shudders when he sees me in list-making mode. Invariably some items on the list get done and others don’t. Why?

I’ve always used my list making as a brain dump or a mind-sweep. A list of every wishful whim that I have at the moment, peppered with meatier “have to dos” and “NEED to dos”. I’ve never really thought about it in detail, but there was always a prioritization process that occurred when reviewing the list and the stuff that never got done was chucked out as unimportant or irrelevant at the moment (or shifted to the next list).

I’ve been taking a course since January that has been causing me to rethink a lot about what I do, who I am and where I want to be going. One of the ideas within the course is that we are constantly filtering the world around us. The analogy used in the course was that a person uninterested in sports will unconsciously filter all inputs relating to sports out of their awareness, however someone who is interested in sports will be more aware of any and all inputs around them that pertain to sports. I’m sure that everyone has experienced this in their everyday life, have you ever started thinking about something and then started seeing that thing everywhere? Did that thing just enter your universe or were you previously unaware that it was always there?

Jo VanEvery recently had a post about planning, organizing and goal setting. In it, she shows a clothesline holding her to do list as a way to identify and focus on the tasks at hand. This is a much more visual and artistic way to manage ‘the list’ than my notebook (especially with the multiple coloured pieces of paper), but I’ve just learned that there is an actual term for what we are both doing. Mark Forster’s Autofocus system is a mechanism for prioritizing your never-ending to do list in a notebook format – which might be more amenable for the less artistic ones among us (like me). Coupling this technique with David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner (which I learned about in my course) – delivers an exceptionally powerful tool kit to organize your tasks and help get things done. I’m still learning these tools and trying to put them into practice, but I’m pretty excited about the results I am seeing thus far.

Back in November I mentioned that I hoped to get some sanity back into my life and schedule in December. Well, I had a brief break between Christmas and New Year and then things got busy again. I can’t believe that it is already March and I haven’t been blogging for over three months.

Lots of things have been happening, not the least of which is the 2010 Canadian budget. Last year I was pretty active in this discussion, but since I’m already late to the party – all I’ll do is point you towards Rob Annan’s thorough review on Don’t Leave Canada Behind. I’m not sure that I consider this budget a great one, but it is certainly much better than last year.

I’m still not sure if I will be doing more blogging in the near term, but I thought that I would throw up a post to show that I’m still kicking around.

Catch you sooner or later.

We’re getting down to the wire and I can bet that there are quite a few people that are just starting to get organized to write their proposals. If you are a regular reader, you know that I encourage an early start to ensure that adequate preparation goes into the proposal. That said, surveys of academics in North America suggest that the average researcher spends about two weeks on grant preparation*. So, if within the next three weeks, you can find ‘80 hours’ to commit to proposal preparation get out of those starting blocks!

I put ‘80 hours’ in quotes because I don’t know one person in academic research (or in many professions) where a work week equals 40 hours. More like 80 hours per week, although theoretically you could work over 100 hours a week, if you needed little sleep and had no other life to speak of. I am not sure that I could sustain the mental energy to do that on a regular basis, but I have been known to have short bursts of insanity occasionally.

In any event, if you are on a more moderate schedule, it would probably be a good idea to pull out your CV, review and update it, if you haven’t done so already. I’ll be posting a few CV related tidbits tomorrow.

*I can’t find the darn reference – but when I do, I’ll update the post. If I am being honest, don’t expect it until after fall granting season, i.e. December.

Last week I posted that Jo VanEvery has a SSHRC Grant writing guide e-book available on her website.

On Friday, she posted “Embrace the research process” on her blog. The process of research requires a lot of thinking and while it may not seem like you are accomplishing much during the thinking exercise, you are.

So, just as thinking is important and essential to the current functional and long term strategic growth of your research, identifying ways to create fundable projects within your research is critical to the grant writing process. Some funders want to fund projects, while other want to fund programs – and being able to distinguish both within your “big ideas” will help you in the grant writing process.

The NSERC Discovery Program is specifically mandated to fund programs of research. The easiest way to think about it is to consider a project a discrete and short term task within the long term strategic program of research. NSERC’s program description says:

[The] Discovery Grants (DG) Program supports ongoing programs of research (with long-term goals) rather than a single short-term project or collection of projects.

So, in order to fit with NSERC’s requirements, there must be some coherence to your collection of research projects and these projects must lead to some ‘ultimate goal’. The guidelines suggest that you state your objectives early in the proposal. My rule of thumb for distinguishing between goals is that short-term goals are 3-5 year objectives and long-term goals are your career goals 10-15 year goals. Think about what you can reasonably accomplish (in terms of discovery) within the 5 year funding window to set clear and achievable short-term goals. As you move though your research career, your long-term goals will shift as you gain knowledge and experience to enable you to set the bar ever higher.

*Update Oct, 9, 2009* I found this in the revised peer review manual and it might help give more context:

Program versus Project – The Discovery Grants program aims to support a researcher’s ongoing research program, which can comprise a number of well defined projects. The issue of whether the request is for support of a program or a project can be examined in the context of the “Merit of Proposal” criterion when evaluating the “Clarity and Scope of Objectives” (e.g., longterm goals as well as short-term objectives), and the “Significance and Expected Contributions to Research.”