I remember very clearly my flight back from the 2016 DLF Forum. I had presented with Mackenzie Brooks on open writing for Small Liberal Arts Colleges. My Facebook feed was full of photos of people voting in the US presidential election. Long lines. People putting one foot in front of another to vote. I flew back home on election night, and I remember the strange way that people in the airport started gathering around the television watching what was happening. Normally, people kept to themselves. That night, the anxiety in the air was palpable. As was the growing excitement (DLF, after all, was in Wisconsin that year). I remember the panic I felt flying and not knowing what would wait for me when we landed. When I got in my car and turned on NPR in a rush at 2:00 AM I first heard the results. I remember not being able to sleep.

In 2024, history rhymed. Conference week? Check. The ACH conference was the week of the election, and for months we had all wondered what the environment would feel like in the aftermath. We found out. Election results that were unexpected and, yet, all too expected? Check. At least this time I wasn’t on a flight: I could climb under the covers in my pajamas between sessions of the online conference.

I wrote both of my talks for this month’s ACH conference when Trump was just a second candidate. I helped to coordinate a workshop on articulating and defending the values at the core of your work with a whole raft of brilliant folks: Amanda Visconti, Caitlin Pollock, Pamella Lach, Kate Ozment, and Crystal Luo. Later that night, I gave a paper on speculative digital pedagogies with Seanna Viechweg, where we talked about the pasts, presents, and futures of imagination in the DH classroom. All of this work felt suddenly more urgent than ever. But I gave these talks in a stupor. As I spoke about advocacy and values I could not help but wonder about the limits and reaches of certain types of power. As I discussed the imagination and the future, I could not stop thinking about the past.

Did I still believe in what I was saying?

I’ve been thinking a lot about where I was eight years ago and where I am today. I’ve been at the Scholars’ Lab seven and a half years—roughly the span of the first Trump and the Biden presidencies. In that time, I have supervised dozens of students on a variety of projects. I have comforted them as they cried. Helped find them funding to survive. Worked to prepare them for and find them jobs. Advocated for them in spaces large and small. Organized alongside them in our wall-to-wall union. For some, this work helped. For others, it did not, and I remember every person for whom something didn’t pan out. I’ve learned hard lessons about the limits of my own ability to change things, and at times I’ve described the work as trying to steer a yacht through an obstacle course. You can correct the course slightly, but only so much. I’ve hit lots of buoys.

I believe in this work. I believe it has mattered. But eight years later I will confess to questioning a lot of its power. The words I was about to read to a digital space filled with other dazed people, all zooming in from their own rooms. They felt so small and insignificant. What good were my little words in the face of a country filled with hate, ready to visit and revisit new horrors on its population and on the world?

I recognize my own positionality. I am a cis white man with a comfortable job and salary. I do not face the same dangers to my bodily, financial, and political autonomy as so many who are most likely to be impacted by the new administration. Even so, I have so much fear. For my son’s future in a vaccine-skeptical world. For my LGBTQ friends and family who are worried about access to life-saving medication or the freedom to exist. For the immigrants in my life who are scared for their safety. My own anxieties and fears are a drop in the ocean, much wider and more vast.

As I was searching around for meaning and energy in the days following the election, I came across a few lights that I’ve been clinging to. As Josh Rezek posted on BlueSky, “Writing is part of surviving this! Your own and everyone else’s!” And my dear friend and collaborator Amanda Visconti shared a post by Brian LaRossa containing “a short thread full of words from people who are smarter than me about the vital role that artists play in society generally, and doubly so in the face of authoritarian regimes.” I don’t have any illusions that my own writing is as important or radical as the pieces linked in that thread. Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin. These are real heroes. I should be so lucky as to write anything a scrap as meaningful as what they produced. But these examples are helping me think less about where I was eight years in the past and more about where I want to be in the future. About the writer, teacher, and advocate that I want to continue growing into. And those heroes exist in the present, too, closer to home. Some of the most helpful conversations I have had in the week since the election have been with a pair of brilliant students with whom I share a DH writing group. They are more committed than ever to the pursuit of a better world. They teach me, as always, how to be better and how to help. And the work they produced these past few weeks moved me to tears (though I am a softy, to be fair).

By complete and total happenstance this is my hundredth post on my personal blog. Lots of little words. This post, then, is less a statement for others than it is for myself. A commitment to keep going in the face of fear. To keep growing. I will keep recognizing the limits of words and work to act beyond them. But I will also try to hold in my heart the belief that words carry power. So a week after the election and a bit better rested here I am. Putting one word after another. And recommitting myself to the regular practice of doing so.

(Part 3 of a 3-part series: see also the 1st post on email practices and some caveats about my particular academic job context, and the 2nd post on Slack, task management, meeting notes.)

My previous two blog posts shared some of the ways I approach “work chores” (email, Slack, tasks) to keep them more sustainable. In this third post, I wanted to share a bit about how I try to do things as a manager/director re:similar expectations-impacted work-chore practices, so that my colleagues in the lab can also try or use the approaches to work that work best for them.

Not just asking about work sustainability; offering to act

As a manager, I try to regularly check in: Do you have time blocked out for focus, work-chores, time off? But I try to not only ask “are you doing these theoretically useful approaches”; I also want to discuss if the person needs those or wants something different; what is making it difficult to use these or other work-management approaches; what can we do to make this all more sustainable. Do you need actions from me/other colleagues to support that, e.g. changing deadlines, moving or cancelling meetings, changing communication formats (emails, Slack, meetings), notes from a meeting you can’t make? If you’re going to ask if people have time blocked out for needed things like focus and time off, being prepared with possible ways to help if they don’t makes sense.

Where expectations are needed, make them as loose as possible

As a manager, I try to make space for others to figure out the what, when, how of the practices that work best for them. To do this, I try to communally discuss and set agreements on what outcomes are critical (e.g. impact colleagues and people we support) and which are nice to have; and to let folks know they can question and advocate for something different these expectations, which are often ultimately somewhat arbitrary (e.g. why answer most emails within 2 workdays rather than 3 or 4?). I try to keep expectations as high-level and brief as possible—setting these as what’s fine for us to generally at least meet, rather than what’s ideal (but not required to happen all the time—or at all, if doing so impedes other work/focus/non-work time). And I try to talk about my reasoning for expectations, since that can often be useful context (e.g. something that isn’t a big issue if 1 person does it, but I ask for because I have not 1 but 10 full-time staff reporting through me, so effect of approach x multiple people may be a big issue) or allow my colleague to suggest alternatives that still meet my goals while also meeting theirs.

For example, when responding to our lab’s consult listserv, we want people to feel welcomed and know they’ve contacted folks who will get them to the right place, even if that isn’t ultimately the lab. We do also balance a lot of consultations against longer projects, teaching, fieldwork, events, etc., and try to set public expectations of our availability for consultations as usually 2-3 weeks out from original email date (though we can meet faster when there’s an urgent need). So our expectation is that we try to have someone on staff reply to any initial message requesting a consultation with us, to us within two workdays if possible; but that reply can simply be “thanks for your message; we’re discussing internally, and will get back you with more by [DATE]” if needed. This is useful when an ask requires us to talk to colleagues in different units about a project’s history, ID whether anyone has some specific software experience, and/or when multiple relevant staff across units might all be available to attend a consultation together.

This meets our goals of making sure the person contacting us feels welcomed and knows we’ll be helping them, but also does not require staff to constantly check or reply to email. As with my post on personal email/etc. approaches, we often reply to folks within the same day! But setting the minimum bar higher is good for making sure folks can set boundaries on email management, and also get non-email work done.

I try to emphasize communication over conformance: it’s okay if you need more time, need to change plans, etc. But the way you make this not adversely impact colleagues is by communicating as early as possible when you need a change and why. (E.g. if you’re repeatedly asking for extensions after deadlines pass instead of well before, it could be a sign that deadlines are being set too soon, you have too much work, or something else we should work on making more sustainable.)

Look for ways to support others’ needs

We know other Library colleagues sometimes have in-person, or urgent questions from visitors for us. While protecting time to do the kinds of focused work we’re tasked with (and acknowledging we’re not staffed to have someone guaranteed available and able to drop their work at any time for unscheduled non-emergency drop-ins), we’ve got several approaches to staying available to other Library staff, including:

• Our consult listserv goes to our whole team of 12 people, so even if each person is only checking email once a day (not the norm), when that happens would vary enough we’re getting someone seeing incoming emails who can usually note if something’s urgent.
• We use Slack a bunch, and its notification settings make it easy for us to find each other and ask for a quicker reply, when one’s actually needed.
• We’ve set “core staff hours” when it’s most likely you can find a free staffer somewhere in the lab, and shared these with library circulation desks; as well as non-public, broader core times when at least several of us are physically in the lab and findable if needed.

Ultimately, we are privileged to encounter few work-related emergencies (e.g. site is down before a conference talk about it; water is leaking into the makerspace; short-notice funding possibility). We try to make our availability and response practices clear, so folks know how and when they can find us.

Part 2 of a 3-part series: notes on what works for me, when managing alt-academic job work-chores. This one covers Slack, tasks, and meeting notes. The 1st post covers my email practices, as well as some caveats about my particular context relevant to why I can and do things this way. The 3rd post on supporting work practices like these as a manager will be linked here, once it’s published (assuming I remember…).

Slack

I have a daily “Slack catchup” time, like I do for email. This works best when I do it at a time there aren’t many folks actively chatting, so that I do eventually get to all waiting messages; on the downside.

• As with email, I do in practice check Slack elsewhen, but having the daily catchup time lets me close Slack (and Outlook) when I’ve scheduled myself to focus on getting a specific thing done. I could easily spend all day answering email and Slack if I just kept them open and checked them throughout the day.

Slack has a couple helpers I like, both superior to “mark unread” (as it’s easy to accidentally open a channel, and have it auto-mark something as read when you didn’t actually look at it):

• Bookmark icon/”save for later” holds messages in a “later area => stuff I want to remember or look at again during my weekly Brain Day time or after, but zero urgency
• Message menu > remind me about this => for messages I want to be reminded of at a specific time (e.g. something I skimmed but need to respond to by the end of the day, but not now because I’m leaving for a meeting; something I want to remember at the end of term).

Task management app

I use a task management app that allows setting recurring reminders:

• There are many good, free options; it’s worth playing with a couple to see which is comfortable and matches your particular way of handling tasks (also look for: syncing to phone/between computers; ability to export/backup in readable format). I use Things3 for Mac.
• I keep a “Brain Day” area on my task app that fills with recurring tasks on my Friday “Brain Day”s, in the order I want to do them in (stuff I can’t miss doing weekly or it’s a problem, e.g. email catchup, first).
  • I add a weekly reminder to check Slack’s “later” area for messages I should respond to, that I do once I’m on top of email.
  • This approach also helps with non-weekly reminders, like “add your consult stats to LibInsight bimonthly” and “bimonthly block out any leave days on my calendar for the next two months” (so I remember to mark stuff so people know when they can’t schedule me).
• I have task app areas for various categories of things, including
  • “flagged” (do this first when you start work on x day)
  • sets of tasks I only want to look at/work through in priority order at specific times (e.g. my ACH volunteer work, during the ACH meeting’s work time)
  • tasks I can’t/shouldn’t do until a specific date (so I don’t need to see them until then)
  • things I asked of others (as a manager; reminder of when to check in, if don’t hear back)
  • “errands” (zero-urgency things I get to in priority order, just as time allows)

Meeting notes

I use a Remarkable 2 tablet (e-ink tablet) to take notes during meetings:

• I use a different notebook for each meeting kind: 1 notebook per
  • recurring 1:1,
  • recurring groups like our all-staff meeting,
  • related aggregators of ad hoc meetings, such as external consultations, SLab website sprint discussions
• Each new meeting date starts on a new page of the notebook, with the date and meeting title at the top.
• I keep a small lined paper pad and pen next to the Remarkable. If a task for me comes up during the meeting (something I need to do or say), I write it on the paper tablet:
  • Things that must be done before my next “Brain Day” get a star, and I try to remember to do them or add them to my task app that day. I used to use symbols in my meeting notes to mark things that were tasks, but that means I need to look back through my meeting notes to find tasks from the past week, and I repeatedly did not and let those build up.
  • Keeping tasks on their own paper list means I can just see all incoming tasks there; paper vs. directly into task app means that the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and “I can do this in 30 seconds after meeting ends” don’t clog the task app (I used to struggle with putting way too many “wouldn’t it be cool if” ideas into my task app, making it hard to see what’s actually urgent and look like I’m behind on working though tasks).

I’m sharing some approaches to work chores (email, Slack, etc.) that are currently working for me. This is another “my SLab colleague told me I should write a post about this” post—thanks to Brandon Walsh for suggesting I make some of my more personally-successful work-chore practices (which I periodically have shared with various staff, when asked) into a public post. I’ve found it most useful to try out small changes at a time, not huge swerves among different systems of task management.

Short version, pls

tl;dr of the hacks detailed below and on subsequent posts in this series:

1. Have a daily email/message triage time, putting those messages that can wait for reading/reply until a weekly email catchup time, into a folder to attend to then.
2. Block that weekly catchup time on your calendar, preferably the same time each week, at a time you won’t struggle to put aside other work to finish going through those emails (e.g. I do it first thing Friday mornings).
3. Use: Outlook rules to divert low-priority emails and highlight high-priority emails; Slack “save for later” and “remind me about this” (not “mark unread”); a task manager that supports recurring tasks.

Some caveats

This is a very “your mileage might vary” post; this doctor is not saying whether these approaches are right for you. Directing a library-based DH research center means my workday involves a variety of communications (e.g. Workday notifications, budget reports, sending many recurring meeting invites to various groups) that make it more useful to have a more formal system for balancing them against focused work time, as do my own particular work habits and neurodivergence. (FWIW, I am very much an Always Inbox Zero, Task App: Too-Many person.)

I also recognize my privilege in having the job type, security, supervision level, accessibility accommodations, and more that mean I get to make these choices. Some workplaces have invasive policies about when, how, how often; some jobs actually need you to be checking or replying to communications as they come in; some teams would be negatively impacted by someone not checking messages as often as the group truly needs. Different jobs have different needs and/or culture regarding what goes into email, Slack, recurring meetings, or ad hoc conversations.

In particular, the part about how often I check my email felt a bit fraught to share, especially without sharing more context about accessibility. But it’s made a significant improvement in how well I can focus, make progress, maintain work boundaries and sustainability, as well as do well by my colleagues—so I wanted to share it, even if it isn’t necessarily something everyone else can implement as described. (Part two of this blog post will discuss how I try to accommodate similar practices for my colleagues, as a manager/director).

Ultimately, I try to balance two things:

• being able to get to the kinds of focused work that are part of my job, without interruption (unless something is truly an emergency)
• responding to messages within a reasonable timeframe, and having a triage system keeping my inbox manageable so I can more easily see if a colleague sends an urgent-response-needed message

Some approaches that work for me, right now

Email management

I use a daily triage practice, plus a weekly block for catching up on reading/replying to things that can wait until then:

• I have a daily time when I’m always free (5-30min?), that I block for managing email (Outlook is what UVA uses for staff). I put this daily email time as a recurring hold on my calendar until it became habit, and now I just do it first thing, before any meetings.
• I have a “process today” email folder; when this daily email time happens, I dump everything currently in my inbox into “process today”. I don’t require myself to look at my inbox again until the following day, unless* I’m done with all my other work and feel like it.
  • This helps me not get caught up answering constantly incoming stuff, which can usually wait a bit, and get to older reading/replies first.
  • * In practice, I do actually check my work email several times per workday. I try not to do so until I’ve both done that initial transfer to the “process today” folder, and until I’ve processed that “process today” folder (as described below). This means that any other emails I get to are a bonus, so they don’t carry the same feeling of “I’m behind until I clear this from my inbox”.
• Emails that can wait until my weekly “catch up on work chores” block (Friday mornings) get moved to a “Brain Day” folder.
  • This keeps my inbox more manageable, so I can more easily visually skim it between meetings to notice if someone does have an urgent and/or easy-to-answer question
• I try to reply to everything else in the “process today” folder during that daily time, even if it’s just to say “I received this, but it’ll be [a couple days] before I will have a more substantive response”. I send that kind of message if I’m not sure I’ll get to something (better to followup up sooner than promised, than to forget to respond).

“Brain Day” for weekly work chores

I use a weekly, scheduled catchup block (“Brain Day”):

• During “Brain Day”, I catch up on all emails I moved to the “Brain Day” folder during the week—the ones that could wait to be read (including non-urgent FYI things, newsletters), and emails I told people I’d need more time to reply to.
• If I can’t finish working through all my email then, I block time to do so the following week (rare/ugh).

After completing email catchup, I also use that “Brain Day” block to do other weekly or monthly recurring work chores, like updating our budget, planning what tasks I’m doing the following week, and prepping for the next week’s meetings.

Other email hacks

I use Outlook rules to:

• route stuff that I mostly only need to skim or can wait to read until my weekly “Brain Day” (e.g. from our “general announcements to all Library staff” listserv, which tends to more “here’s an interesting webinar” and less “urgent info to read today”) into the “Brain Day” folder, so I don’t have to look at it nor manually sort it until Fridays
• route stuff I need to get to sooner (e.g. emails to the SLab consult listserv; emails from SLab staff, supervisors) into a place I’ll see them easily
• Move some sent emails to a “Waiting to hear” folder, if I need to make sure I do hear back a response (vs. assuming someone will definitely write back); I check this during weekly “Brain Day” to see if I need to ping anyone about a non-response (when enough time has gone by)

I don’t currently need this, but if staying out of your inbox is hard because you need to notice specific things: I used to use USB LEDs called Blink(1)s to alert me to things I wanted to notice. For me, that was during my dissertation’s Infinite Ulysses open beta, when I wanted to know when someone created a new account on my digital edition, or posted an annotation. But you could hook these up to IFTTT or Zapier and have specific combinations of person and text on Slack or Outlook trigger the light turning on, or blinking in a pattern. (I can’t use sound notifications—if you can, you can of course set up Slack/Outlook to make a noise for certain things, though I think this isn’t granular down to e.g. “make this sound if x person pings me”?)

The next two posts will deal with Slack, task management, and meeting notes; and handling expectations vs. healthy work practices, as a manager.

Or, do I? Why do I need to? It’s not the same as why Drew said he needed to write a post.

It’s a thing I’ve been thinking about with some degree of frequency for quite a while. A little over eight years now.

In 2016—for all sorts of reasons I don’t feel comfortable explaining in detail—I deleted pretty much every trace of online self. My old Twitter account, @clioweb, which I registered the summer of 2006 (early adopter); My Flickr account; Del.icio.us (remember that?); even my GitHub profile and all the code repositories I had. I also deleted my entire website, clioweb.org, which I started in 2003 as a graduate student before WordPress even had themes, while colleagues at CHNM and elsewhere were wondering whether blogging was something academics should do. I don’t have backups of any of these things. I deleted it all with the intent to never return, for many definitions of return.

My favorite author is Ursula K. Le Guin, and my favorite story of her’s is “The Day Before the Revolution,” and my favorite line in that story is “True journey is return.” So, with hesitation and doubt, I returned and I continue to return. I didn’t return because of this line or this story, but I’m returning to that line now to think about why I might need to write a post here. Why I might need to write a post on my current website. Why I might need to return to sharing the thoughts and feelings and ideas in my head with whoever used to want to read those years ago, and who might still wish to read them.

This is hard for me now, though. The person that I was so many years ago, who could tweet, give a presentation, organize with energy and joy a fairly successful unconference, or even churn out a blog post without any hesitation and doubt on a weekly basis seems like a complete different person to me. It feels now just like it felt in 2016, when one day I looked around my desk and felt like all the things there belonged to someone else, and I was sitting in their chair waiting for them to return. Those memories feel like someone else’s memories, ones I can’t fathom trying to imitate now.

But like Whitman, I contain multitudes, as do we all. (Don’t worry; I’ve gone to therapy and take meds and do all sorts of “self-care” things, even though I loathe both the phrase and its overuse.) The person I was waiting for at that desk in 2016 was the person already sitting there. I still have to keep convincing myself of that. We’re all carrier of the multitudes of our selves, and work on returning to those multitudes in different ways. Who those multitudes actually are, and how they manifest to meet all of you who might read this or might meet with me over coffee or in a classroom is, for me now, part of the “true journey” I find myself on.

So, I need to write a post to simply take another step on that journey of returning to myself, and see how the journey progresses.

When I was 16, I burned my math exams in a bonfire. I remember holding my last ever math exam in front of my friends, on which a 0.25/20 was marked in bright-red ink, and throwing it in the fire. Feeling a rush of excitement, realizing that I will never have to endure math classes ever again. I would never have to be singled-out by my math teacher for being the worst student of the class, probably of the year, potentially of his career, ever again. Now, I look back at my math years with a more acute sense of how coming from an underprivileged background where no one monitors your homework (and checks if you successfully learnt your times table) and how internalizing a gendered form of knowledge from a very early age (you are a girl you will be drawn to humanities) is a recipe – dare I say the components of an algorithm – for mathematical disaster.

When I applied to Praxis, I was fully aware that being awarded the fellowship would be the first step of a healing journey (as dramatic as it might sound), a healing journey in which band-aids have numbers on them, and not just the fathomable computer binary 0 and 1, but also the mean-looking ones, with squared numbers and exponential functions. Praxis would mean confronting myself to coding, which would require confronting myself, to a certain extent, to mathematics. It feels as though Scholar’s Lab people have now become experts in “teaching the math basics you will need to understand for you to engage in coding” to Humanities people with a varying degree of proficiency in arithmetic. From Shane’s goofy-looking dog Rocky on the first slide of the history and genealogy of computing to constant reassurance, we were presented with a progressive complexity which made our first assignment, “write out in plain English an algorithm to sort a deck of cards” a funny and appealing game.

Now, I have to be honest and confess that I cried on my way out of the Scholar’s Lab, after this first “Introduction to Data” session. Not because someone said something wrong or made me feel bad – of course not. But because in front of this whiteboard on which were written so many numbers, I felt myself going back in time ten years earlier, blankly staring at the whiteboard in my math class, not understanding a single thing. Not because I did not want to (or perhaps unconsciously), but because I was utterly unable to comprehend what was going on. As if I was stuck in a fever dream where whatever was written down felt like a language from outer space and where someone would just keep repeating “how can you not understand this?”.

Then, I remembered the “So you want to be a wizard?” zine that Shane handed out and had us read, and its writer Julia Evans’s positive reframing of difficulty. In this programming zine, she presents bugs as learning opportunities. Bob Ross would have added – “happy accidents”. Somehow, crying after this “Introduction to Data” was a personal necessity. I needed to get my math trauma out of the way, and the deep feelings of shame, guilt, and incompetence that have been hindering me for years. I have no illusion as I know I won’t become Ada Lovelace, Elizabeth Smith Friedman or Mavis Batey – I will still be bad at math, because my brain must have rewired itself differently. But now that we are being invited to learn, fail and learn from apparent failure, I know that I will hold my head high up and try, fail, learn and try again, differently. Praxis has allowed me to move on and make peace with the teenager in me who still feels the burning shame of being the last at something. Now, I can tell her that a bad math average makes for the best potential for growth. 0.25/20 is not so bad.