Prioritizing: a Negotiation with Yourself

Dr. Jean Kutner, Professor and Division Head for General Internal Medicine, in CU Denver's School of Medicine recently served as our faculty expert for ORDE's seminar on Charting Your Research Path. Dr. Kutner shared her insight around how to prioritize and manage work load.

She suggested that work/life balance was the wrong way to think, but instead we should realize that it is "all life." She was quick to say that it didn't mean you should let your work consume your life. Instead, it is important to be clear on our goals and priorities and to choose our work and responsibilities based on this.

Dr. Kutner published an article on Balancing Competing Professional Commitments in the SGIM forum in September, 2011 that highlights the importance of recognizing that when we take on a new professional commitment, one of three things will happen:

• We choose to resign from another professional commitment
• We reallocate our personal time (vacation, evenings, time with family) to meet the new responsibilities
• Our level of focus and quality of work committed to the new responsibility and/or other commitments is poorer

Certainly, this is logical, but still many smart people, and especially our high-achieving faculty have difficulty putting it into practice.

Dr. Kutner passed along an interesting Harvard Business Review blog entry by Erica Ariel Fox that looks at how we negotiate with ourselves when we are setting priorities and taking on tasks. Entitled, The Most Important Negotiation in Your Life, Fox's entry talks about how each of us have four different internal forces at play in our decisions. She labels them, the dreamer, the thinker, the lover, and the warrior, and posits that any time we're making decisions or setting priorities, these forces are negotiating with each other.

Your dreamer side is focused on the big picture and prioritizing your long term aspirations. Your thinker side is more focused on the most reasonable choices and information right in front of you. Your lover side is looking at relationships and how you can build/strengthen important relationships. And, your warrior side is action oriented and driven.

Likely, one or two of these sides resonate more strongly for you, but what happens is oftentimes, we let our warrior or our lover make all of our decisions without considering the other perspectives. For instance, if our lover tends to be our strongest side, we may be prone to taking on more commitments just to please people who are important to us, but not listening to our thinker who's telling us we don't have the time to do a good job or our dreamer who is pleading for us not to sacrifice our long term goals.

Making decisions by first considering these perspectives is a way to make balanced decisions and set priorities that are rooted in reality, yet moving us in the right direction.

Metaphorical Problem Solving

Even the most innovative researchers get stuck. We all have days where it is hard to focus, get creative, or solve a problem. Metaphorical problem solving can be a useful technique to help unstick you in these situations.

If you are like me, then you have found that if you focus on a problem too much, all you can see is that problem, and it becomes an insurmountable barrier to whatever you are trying to do. Metaphors can allow us to see the problem from a different perspective and prompt us to consider unique solutions to that problem.

How does it work?
To get started, consider all of the aspects of your challenge and try to find a fitting metaphor. For example, a common challenge that researchers sometimes deal with is receiving ambiguous or confusing comments on a grant proposal that has been rejected. Based on this, we define the following problem and corresponding metaphor:

Problem: You don't understand the comments from your grant reviewers.
Metaphor: Flying blind

Now, forget about the actual problem and focus on the metaphor. Think of all of the solutions you can to the metaphor of flying blind. Below is my list:

• Find a co-pilot who can see.
• Use my instruments to tell me where to go.
• Call back to the airport, so someone can describe where I am / where I am going.
• Take off my blindfold.

Now that we have created a list of solutions, consider if and how these might be translated back to the original problem:

Metaphorical Solution	Translation
Find a co-pilot who can see.	Ask a colleague to look at the comments to get their interpretation.
Use my instruments to tell me where to go.	Go back through your grant to re-orient yourself and see if it offers you more clarity on the comments.
Call back to the airport.	Reach out to the Program Officer to get their take on the review.
Take off my blindfold.	Oftentimes, researchers are understandably frustrated when their grant is rejected. Take a few days to feel disappointed and when you are able to take off your blind-fold of frustration, take another look.

This example may be a little simplistic, but the more you experiment with metaphorical problem-solving, the better you'll get at it, and the more useful it will be.

Bonus:
Aside from using metaphors as a problem-solving tool, they also serve as a great communication tool. If you get good at converting complex ideas into metaphors, you will likely find that you have an easier time explaining your research to colleagues, funders, and the layperson and they may be more engaged in the conversation!

More on Metaphorical Thinking and Problem-Solving:
Thinking Metaphorically: How to Look at Things a Different Way - Michael Michalko
Metaphorical Thinking: Using Comparisons to Express Ideas and Solve Problems - Mind Tools
Collaborative Leadership in Action: Metaphorical Problem Solving (p.89) - Patrick Sanaghan and Paulette Gabriel

Preliminary Results - When do you have enough?

As you probably realize, there is no straightforward answer to what constitutes enough preliminary results to be ready to submit a major grant. It is dependent on the field, on the topic, and on the project. The only commonality, then, is that researchers across disciplines struggle with how much is enough.

Previously, I interviewed Dr. Jeffrey Stansbury, Professor and Associate Dean for Research for the School of Dental Medicine and Professor in Chemistry and Bio-Engineering at CU Boulder and he discussed with me a common mistake that he sees in Early Career Investigator (ECI) grants that he reviews: Often the ECIs could have done one more simple experiment and strengthened their preliminary results to a point where they would have likely been funded.

Yesterday, Dr. Stansbury spoke to a group of faculty at the ORDE Grant Writing Approach Faculty Seminar on the Anschutz Medical Campus and he offered some insight into this challenge. He urged ECI's to take a critical look at their research and preliminary results and to look for holes that peer reviewers would likely focus in on.

By acknowledging the gaps and trying to close them before writing your grant, sometimes you can discover some additional work that will be worth doing before you go after more funding.

Dr. Stansbury also suggested combing the literature to see what data is out there currently that you could possibly work with in another way instead of always creating what you need from scratch.

These are just a couple of expert suggestions around preliminary results, but let's not stop here...

How do you determine how far to go in gathering preliminary results before submitting a larger grant for your research?

Pre-Grant Timeline

Oftentimes, investigators do not start preparing for major grant applications earlier than a month before. Although some proposals are successful with a short timeline, investigators are likely to limit themselves and their opportunities for funding if they wait till the last moment.

ORDE recommends that investigators follow at least a 6-month timeline. You may think, "There is no way I need to spend six months writing a grant!" and that is fair, but this timeline suggests that you spend the first two months doing background research on potential sponsors and doing the important relational work and project-honing with a Program Officer (PO).

This work includes significant preparation and tailoring your project to get to the point that you are ready to reach out to a PO. Once you are ready, below is a suggested PO outreach process/timeline.

As you can see in this graphic, once you contact a Program Officer, things move fairly quickly. However, you need to have at least a draft of a pre-abstract and a one-two page concept paper draft ready to go before your first contact. Letting things lag once you have reached out can stall your progress; POs are busy folks and if your project falls off once they are interested, you have likely missed your chance to partner with them to create a better proposal.

Richard Nader, a former Program Manager with the NSF, has written an article that provides very practical tips on reaching out to and working with Program Directors (NSF's version of POs): Advice for Faculty Meeting Program Directors at NSF

In ending, your time is too valuable to waste in putting together grants that don't even get reviewed because they do not meet the sponsor's needs.  Grant development is a marathon, not a sprint, so give yourself the time you need to do it right!