MeDirected » dissertation

Moving and Shaking

mike — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:59:46 +0000

Ok it’s been a while since my last post and much has happened. I had a great Christmas and New Years and got to spend a lot of time with the family. I also did quite a bit on my dissertation after my advisor got my drafts back to me. More importantly though is what’s gone on with HPC. We’ve come closer to finalizing a deal with the international apparel and shoe company; caught the eye of a GREAT supplement company that wants to collaborate on some exciting projects; and this weekend I’m going down to NC to take a site visit at a facility in Apex , a suburb right outside of Raleigh. I’m leaving on Friday morning to check out a 10,000 sqft facility that is currently being used by an old acquaintance. I’m really excited about the opportunities that this presents and can’t wait to get started. 2009 is going to be big.

Waiting…

mike — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:52:51 +0000

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Well, as I posted on the blog about a month ago I pretty much finished my dissertation. I was originally planning on defending during the last week of the semester (last week) but a variety of factors conspired against me – my advisor was in China and quite busy, I couldn’t afford the plane tickets to get him round trip to America and back, I had a stats issue that needed some clearing up, and oh yeah, my dog ate my homework. So while I could have finished up, my advisor and I decided it would be best for all parties to just defend the dissertation next semester. The only holdup is that this would require an extension on the statute of limitations on my doctoral degree. No problem we thought. Well, I waited weeks to hear back and the semester actually came to a close last Friday with no news from LSU. I was uncharacteristically worried that I wasn’t going to get a chance to defend (at least at LSU…I would have just enrolled elsewhere). In the meantime, the waiting kinda put everything concerning my dissertation on hold. I didn’t get any drafts back from my advisor which in turn meant that I didn’t really have anything to work on and I had basically just spent the last month doing (instead of being) ABD. The fatally optimistic side of me pushed me on to continue on with the plans of moving and setting up a facility though. Today I received word from LSU that the extension had been….

[tune in tomorrow for answers to this and other cliffhangers]

Small business owners must be jack of all trades

mike — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:48:16 +0000

Long time since my last post. Been very busy writing my dissertation as well as making some changes to ELITETRACK and totally redoing the store and services section of the HPC site. I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of web work lately on my various sites. With the HPC site the changes were business motivated. Our store is getting enough business now where I thought it would be worthwhile to improve the shopping environment and make the site more secure. It took quite a bit of meddling but I think I’m done now. It took quite a bit of time and diverted me from some other things that I like but don’t need to do (i.e. blogging). All that to say, that as a small business owner, I often find myself having to wear many hats- web developer, marketer, coach, sport technologist, researcher, salesman, etc. Because I’m just trying to get this business up and running I don’t have the means to pay others to do things that might otherwise be delegated to specialists. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but it definitely places a high demand on time management and prioritization of tasks. I’ve found that becoming competent at a variety of tasks can save a lot of money but cost you a lot of time. It then becomes a question of prioritizing tasks so that you can figure out what you’d be better off outsourcing and what you should handle yourself.

Lost and Found

mike — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:25:01 +0000

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Killed it. Over the past week, that’s what I did. I finally found the focus that had been alluding me. I’m really get at getting things done, just not always the most pressing things. The past 2 weeks have been different though. Last week was especially good. I finished Chapter 3 of my dissertation, finished the literature review for my dissertation, finally got out the remaining videos from the Olympic trials that need to be digitized, finished up a couple photo shoots for some pictures for a pole vault book I’m helping out with, finished the usual week’s worth of training plans for clients and HPC Elite team members, and started progress on a new ecommerce shop for the company store.

The MOST impressive part about this though is that I did it all while getting totally and completely addicted to LOST (the tv show). I had been told for some time that I would really like it but 1) I’m not really one to watch much tv and 2) after season 1, then season 2, then 3 and 4 passed me by I didn’t want to try to come in in the middle of what I had heard was a deeply sequential story. Last Saturday, for some odd reason, I happened to be on the iTunes store looking for some NPR podcasts to download so that I could listen to something on my weekly Sat-Sun trip to my wife’s family farm (where there’s no internet, cell phone reception, and I stay up late as usual to do work). While there I found a purchased Lost season 1.

Well over the course of a week, I’ve now watched all of season 1, and half of season 2 and I would be in denial if I said I wasn’t thoroughly addicted. The odd thing is that what would seemingly be a diversion has matched up with one of my most productive weeks in the last couple years. I’ve got 2 and a half seasons left to watch before I’m ‘caught up’….hopefully I can continue this stretch of focus for the remainder.

Dissertation Progress Update

mike — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:50:08 +0000

I know, I know. I haven’t been posting too much on here. Or on ELITETRACK for that matter. In fact, even my inbox has been collecting some rare dust over the past 2 weeks. Client call backs are a little more delayed. HPC related business projects are being temporarily postponed.

It’s all for good reason though. I’ve been busting my arse trying to get some serious writing done on my dissertation. Yesterday I finished the final research chapter of my dissertation. As with most things, my fatal optimism and perfectionism got the best of me. Fatal optimism in that I had actually been telling myself “I’ll be done with this today”….for about 3 weeks. Part of the problem was that I ran in to some snags that forced me to redo a big part of it but the delay was also due in large part to my OCD of getting things PERFECT. All in all though, I sent it out to my advisor yesterday afternoon and hopefully won’t have too many revisions to make on it.

Now I just have a conclusion for the three research chapters and then I have to wittle down my literature review a little more and I’m ready for defense. I can’t wait to be finished. I’ve been unusually focused on it the last couple weeks as I’m approaching ‘crunch time.’ The last day I can defend this semester is December 19th and I need to give my 5 member dissertation committee at least 4 weeks to read it before then. So that means if I assume a defense date of the 15th (since no one will likely want to sit through a dissertation defense on the last day of a semester) that means I really need to be done writing some time around a week from today. That’s good and bad. Good because I definitely work better when I’m ‘under the gun.’ Bad in that it leaves me little time for anything else, including errors.

Dissertation Writing Overload

mike — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:43:23 +0000

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I’m feeling the pressure of finishing my dissertation. I had a stats section mixup that I had to go back and fix and then had to rewrite quite a bit of the discussion. This took some time I didn’t feel like I had. I’ve been getting a ton of writing done but my mind is racing about it all day. I need to finish this thing so I can move on with my life but my OCD perfectionist traits are eating up some time. I think since I’ve started running more I’ve been able to focus much better than usual. I’ve had 2 nights this week with under 5 hours sleep. In both cases, I actually went to bed, found my mind still racing (at 4am!) so got up and started working again. Today I’m starting to feel it though. My brain is lagging and I’ve got a little bit of an aura coming on. I haven’t contributed much to elitetrack in the past couple days, haven’t blogged here, and have pretty much been isolated other than a couple hours of play time each day with my daughter. Sorry if that was a rambling post. Thought it would be good to update the site and do something other than my dissertation for a couple minutes.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

mike — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 05:29:53 +0000

Well, so much for dropping the full time job to concentrate on my dissertation. My plate is officially too full once again. For goodness sake’s I can’t even follow my own advice. I haven’t written more than a paragraph on my dissertation in the last week (although I did finish the stats!) because I’ve been consumed with remastering HPC’s Baseball DVD series, writing a Rhodes Scholar letter of recommendation for an old friend of mine, trying to finish enough of a book I’m writing so I can send it to the editors, managing my 4 websites and 3 trillion social networking profiles (part of business marketing plan!), going to weddings (3 in the last month!), putting together the necessary information to give to Coaches Choice so they can finish the edits on HPC’s Olympic Trials Clinic DVDs, making out training plans for clients and HPC Elite Team members, preparing the shot put videos from Olympic Trials to be sent off for digitizing (THANK GOD I don’t digitize it myself anymore), and trying to be a good father and husband.

Rhode to Success

Tackling Monumental Tasks

mike — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:58:15 +0000

As I’m forced to remind myself from time to time, my current focus is on finishing my doctoral dissertation. When I left LSU several years ago I was done with what seemed to be ‘the hard part’ at the time but little did I know that the real ‘hard part’ would be in getting myself to focus on it long enough to finish it. I was busy taking on new things (like another job at West Point), managing my growing company, and trying to stay active with my websites and media production (books, dvds, and articles). Long story short…my ADD got the best of me and in the 3 years since I left LSU I did little to move forward from when I left. Since I resigned at West Point though some things have changed. At least I’ve tried to make them change.

The most important thing I’ve done is take a new mindset on how to tackle seemingly monumental tasks. Normally, I’m GREAT at taking on a million things and juggling them with a high level of proficiency. On the flip side though, I SUCK at completing the jobs that I start. On top of that, I tend to take on anything that is offered or thrown at me and often find myself wasting time trying to get things PERFECT rather than just finishing it. The combination of these traits means I’m often baking a lot of really great cakes but all the while having a hard time putting the icing on the cake so to speak. This was especially true with my dissertation. Since I started rethinking my approach, things have been more productive though. Instead of looking at the remaining chapter of my dissertation that I have to write and thinking “where do I start,” or “I can just do it tomorrow,” now I approach it with the following two points in mind:

I give myself a fairly low minimum level of expectation for daily work on a given task. For example, on my dissertation writing, I now tell myself that I have to write a paragraph a day. That’s it. Just a paragraph. Sometimes I write 2 or 3 in a day but I’ve pretty much been just writing 1. I know it doesn’t sound like much but I’m actually finding that when stringed together over time, these little bits of progress will add up to the completion of my seemingly monumental task. It’s kinda like the lifetime prisoner who chips away a fraction of his prison wall each day. Before he knows it, he’s broken free from what was holding him back.
The second thing that I’ve done is tried to put my OCD perfectionism at bay. I fight the urge to stay on something until it’s perfect and instead just plow through whether the work is good or not. On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a good idea but I’ve found that because of how I operate, it’s better for me to “Just Do It” because if it isn’t perfect the first time around I’ll fix it later. With writing, this approach makes it easier to just sit down and wright and is a nice way of busting through periods of writer’s block.

If you find yourself in a position like I’ve described and have the same disposition as I do, try out these tips and let me know if they work for you.

Dissertation Writing- Ugh

mike — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:59:21 +0000

Well, I have to be honest. For the last couple days I’ve little to nothing on my dissertation. Despite the fact that it SHOULD be my primary focus right now, my OCD/ ADD has gotten the best of me. I’ve been spending too much time blogging about the Olympics on ELITETRACK, setting up streams of passive income, making adjustments and new feature additions to my 3 websites, taking care of the athletes I work with, and watching the Olympics. I had set the goals of writing a minimum of 1 paragraph of dissertation writing a day but that hasn’t happened over the last couple days. That seemingly small goal (which if done adds up quickly and makes the writing much more manageable). Also, I’ve got stuck on the stats section. I hate statistics. Kinda odd for a person that almost got his doctoral degree minor in the subject, but I hate it. I tend to over think and over-analyze my statistical methods and it just slows me down. Sometimes, I just need to “DO IT” without caring of whether it’s perfect or not.

Living with OCD

Welcome to MeDirected

mike — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:32:08 +0000

Hey. Glad you found the site. Welcome to my new home. I started this site to blog about my new life. If you aren’t aware, I was a collegiate coach for the past couple years trying to juggle that and my business startup venture. A month ago I resigned at the United States Miliatary Academy so that I could pursue my business full time and in the more immediate-sense, to finish up my doctoral dissertation which has been largely put on hold for the past 3 years. I’m gonna use this blog as a sounding board to vent some ideas and random thoughts and as a way friends and family can follow my new venture.

MeDirected » dissertation

Moving and Shaking

Waiting…

Small business owners must be jack of all trades

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Lost and Found

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Dissertation Progress Update

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Dissertation Writing Overload

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Do As I Say, Not As I Do

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Tackling Monumental Tasks

Dissertation Writing- Ugh

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Welcome to MeDirected