Prioritizing Projects

One of my biggest struggles as a professional is setting priorities and sticking to them. The only time when I have real clarity of purpose is when I have deadlines. Recently, a colleague suggested that I try to categorize the work that I do other than teaching and service at the university. The goal of this exercise is to figure out how conflicting priorities and confusion develops and attempt to mitigate it at the source rather than when a conflict occurs.

I have five kinds of projects (and I suspect most academics have a similar hierarchy or typology of project types):

1. Vestigial or Legacy Projects. These are projects that rely on some work that I did over a decade ago that continues to follow me like a bad smell. Anything to do with church architecture in Greece, which was the topic of my dissertation, is a good example of a legacy project. These project rarely depend on any ongoing research and mostly rely on a kind of “expertise” that verges on a vague familiarity at times. In general projects that draw on legacy or vestigial knowledge are boring.

2. Ending Projects. There’s always a project that is lurching its way through its last stages. The final stages of a project are the worst. These stages involve the most tedious work: from reviewing copy edits and page proofs to various promotional obligations (e.g. giving talks on the topic of the project and the like). As I review the second round of copy edits on my Archaeology of Contemporary Americabook, this project becomes an ending project. Generally this kind of work is the easiest to prioritize because it has the most pressing deadlines. On the other hand, it is even less fun that fussing with a legacy project.  

3. Long Term Projects. These are projects that have trajectories that are knowable but often aren’t entirely visible in the distance. This semester, I’m working to finish one of these long term projects. They’re not the most interesting work, but nevertheless require the most sustained attention to bring the projects in for a soft landing. For me, publishing the results of our excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria and Pyla-Vigla is a priority, since we have the manuscript largely complete and “simply” need to revise one last time before submitting it to our press for review. These projects are a lot of work and some of the work is even vaguely rewarding, but they’re always at risk of being displaced by a more pressing deadline or some other low hanging fruit. 

4. Future Projects. Future projects are where the fun starts. These are projects that exist somewhere between my imagination and drafts on my computer. They’re projects that are impossible to prioritize because they are constantly erupting into my thinking and seem to demand attention and interest constantly. At best, they’re relegated to the back burner and at worst the constantly jostle for my attention. My current interest in pseudoarchaeology, which I’ve currently title “Advances in Pseudoarchaeological Practice,” is my favorite future project at the moment and I’m struggling a bit to keep it at bay!

5. Hobby Projects. If ending projects are the worst, hobby projects are the best. These are projects that are completely exploratory, have no firm set of expected outcomes, and as a result, have no real goals, no deadline, and no obligations. My work with the Grand Forks census is the quintessential hobby project. I’m doing it to see what I can learn about the town where I live and if something cool comes out of it, then I’ll figure out whether it’s worth moving to the rank of a future project or not.

There are two problems with this tidy typology of projects. The first is the reality that most projects refuse to stay in their lane. A vestigial project like Early Christian architecture informs my work at Polis on Cyprus. An ending project invariably stimulates new ideas as I develop critical distances from my own work. Hobby projects don’t stay hobbies for too long before they turn into something more and future projects almost always blend into longterm projects at some point. Most projects have a tendency, then, to be hybrids moving either up or down the hierarchy of priorities.

The other problem is that it privileges productivity over interest and sometimes discourages me from pursuing projects that I think might have the most value because I don’t want to make them an obligation or responsibility. There’s something pure and appealing about future and hobby projects that are not yet contaminated by the pressures of deadlines and professionalism.