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The tracklayer’s portmortem – Last week, the last section of track was laid, and the train pulled huffing and puffing into the final station. I had intended to write this postmortem last weekend, as that was when I was originally supposed to finish, but things didn’t go exactly according to plan. Thus my hurried note at the end of January.

Let me back up a bit and explain. Some of you reading this will know what kept me so busy, but the internet is a big place, and you might have no idea what I’m talking about. In brief, I’ve been involved in a project over the last five years to create a series of online Korean studies classes. I was responsible for one course in the first year, and now, in the final year, I am responsible for another one. The first time around, we only had a vague idea of what we were doing, and it was kind of a mess. In the intervening years, things seem to have become a lot more organized.

The course I designed for this year is a class on Korean literary translation. I already teach a class on literary translation at the undergraduate level, but teaching a class in person and recording online lectures are two very different things. My in-person class is very student-centered and depends on a lot on interaction with and between the students; the online class is me basically lecturing for well over an hour straight.

I started prepping for this course toward the end of last semester. My plan was to write my notes for each class and get all of my materials organized before the end of the semester and then start to write the actual scripts once the semester ended. I got through my notes for six of the eight classes, but then I had to turn my attention to another project with an earlier deadline. By the time I finished that other project and wrapped up the semester, I realized that I needed to start writing my scripts and creating PowerPoint files, as I was scheduled to begin filming in the first full week of January.

The studio wanted us to upload our scripts and PowerPoints to a shared cloud drive a week in advance of the recording session so that they could prepare them for filming. The PowerPoint files in particular were a bit unusual, as they told us not to use animations or any effects—I would normally animate my slides with notes, highlights, and other effects, but everything I wanted to do had to be its own slide. I later discovered that this was because they converted all the PPT files to PDF files after making sure that everything conformed to the styles they were using. Presumably this was to avoid any possible PowerPoint glitches and make sure that everything went smoothly.

The studio had us reserve times online, through their Naver page, and I reserved slots every Thursday afternoon from the 8th of January—well, almost every Thursday afternoon. Thursday was not available during the second week, so I scheduled that session for Wednesday instead. I would record two classes each session—from my experience in the first year of the project, I knew that any more than that would be too much—which meant I would be done on the 29th of January. This was the plan, at least.

Things start to go a little sideways from the very beginning. I had to complete my scripts before I could make the PowerPoint files, and by the time I got everything done it was Monday morning. I had already cleared this with the PD (the Korean abbreviation for “producer”); he said that three days was the minimum time they would need to prepare everything for recording. So I was good for that week, but it also meant that I was behind schedule for the following week.

On the 8th of January I went out to the studio for the first recording session. It’s not close to where I live—in fact, it’s not even in Seoul. That’s not to say it is out in the middle of nowhere, but it is technically in the satellite city of Goyang, just over the border with Seoul. It’s also kind of a pain in the neck to get to; there’s no subway station nearby, so I have to take the subway out and then get a bus across the river to where the studio is located. This bus only runs once every twenty-five minutes, so you have to keep a close eye on the time. On that first day I got lucky, and the bus was pulling into the stop just as I arrived. I never got that lucky again.

I had left with plenty of time to spare, which meant that I arrived at the studio a half-hour early. This ended up being a good thing, because I had not formatted my script in a prompter-friendly fashion. The PD was actually going through and reformatting everything when I arrived, and I watched what he was doing to get an idea of what the script should look like. There were also some issues with the PDF file that had been created from my original PowerPoint, so we sorted those out as well.

With everything set, I entered the recording room. They had me sit on a very uncomfortable chair (more a stool, really) in front of a green screen and read from the prompter. If that sounds like a pretty easy thing to do, you’ve obviously never done it before. Reading from a teleprompter and still making it sound natural is quite tricky. There is also the matter of the PDF, which is what the green screen is for. I appear on one side of the screen, and the rest of the real estate is taken up by the PDF. Every now and then, I’ll want to gesture to the screen, but I have to remember that what I see on the monitor is a mirror image. That is, if the PDF is to my left on the monitor, I need to gesture with my right hand. This is fine if the shot is always the same, but there are three different camera angles, and sometimes the angle will switch to the other side. Bottom line is that there is a lot to keep track of.

So I’m sitting there on this stool that causes my legs to fall asleep, with two bright lights on me, and I have to read from a teleprompter as if I were speaking naturally, not to mention keep track of where I am in relation to the content I am referring to but which I can’t actually see. If my tongue gets tied up, I misread something, or I gesture the wrong way, I have to go back to the last pause in the narration and then switch to a different angle (so it’s easier to edit later) before starting again. In spite of all that, I made it through the first class without too much difficulty. I took a little break as the PD prepared everything for the second class and then went back into the recording room. I was fully warmed up by that point, so things went well for a while.

Then, at somewhere around the three-quarters point of the second class, thing started to go south. My energy levels suddenly dropped, the teleprompter went blurry, and I started tripping over my tongue a lot. I knew I didn’t have much left to do, so I just powered through it, but by the time I was done I felt like I had been wrung dry. When I left the recording room, I told the PD about my difficulties, especially being unable to see the teleprompter clearly, and he said, “It’s the lights.” Apparently sitting there for so long with bright lights in your face takes a toll on your vision. I’m sure the dropping energy levels didn’t help, either.

Before I left, we talked about the schedule for the following week. As I wrote above, I had scheduled my second session for Wednesday instead of Thursday, which meant that I would have to finish the PowerPoint by Friday morning—in other words, by the very next morning. I wouldn’t get home until after six o’clock that day, and given how exhausted I was I knew there was no way I was going to finish everything that night; I needed the weekend, at least. So, even though I didn’t want to delay things, I didn’t have much of a choice but to skip the second week and schedule a final session for the first week of February. We basically held the train in the station for an extra week while I ran on ahead to lay more track, hopefully giving myself enough leeway to stay ahead of it until we were finished.

Of course, you know how this story ends. I did indeed manage to get everything done, and I uploaded the files for my last two classes last Monday. Well, to be precise, I uploaded the PowerPoint files on Monday, because those are the only files that really need that much time. Having watched the PD prepare the prompter on that first day, I knew how to properly format the scripts, which gave me some extra time to look over and proofread the scripts before uploading them the day before recording. Another thing I learned from that first session was that I was going to need some extra energy for the recording sessions, so beginning with the second session I brought along some energy gel to slurp down between classes and a granola bar for when I was finished. By the time I wrapped things up last week, I felt like a pro.

Speaking of preparing scripts, though—I hadn’t realized how used to writing these scripts I had become until I started writing this entry. I’ve become accustomed to writing short paragraphs in order to give myself natural break points for when I invariably screw up while recording. That was probably the most painful lesson from my first recording session: Having long paragraphs meant that if I screwed up in the middle of a paragraph I would have to go back and read the whole thing all over again. As I was writing some of the longer paragraphs of this entry, I started feeling anxious when I passed a certain point, and I automatically started looking for a place to break up the text. It took me a while to realize why I was feeling anxious. It’s weird how much of a relief it is not to have to deal with those constraints anymore.

I was not the only professor to be doing a course this year—in fact, there are ten total courses this year, split across the three majors in our department. But it doesn’t appear that everyone had as hard a time of it as I did. Some of the professors are using a divide-and-conquer approach, farming out classes to lecturers so that each person does only one or two classes. I wish I could have done something like that, but I had a very clear vision for what I wanted to do with the course, and everything tied into everything else; it wouldn’t have made sense for me to parcel classes out like that. Oh, and there’s also the fact that I am the only person doing these classes in English. The courses are all ostensibly aimed at foreign students, but my colleagues are doing their classes in Korean (their native language) and relying on subtitles to get their message across. Not that I blame them; I can and do teach classes in Korean, but I’ve also lived in Korea for over thirty years. At any rate, the fact that the class was in English meant that I wouldn’t have been able to divide and conquer even had I wanted to.

The other two professors charged with recording courses this year in my major are in the same boat—both of them are doing all eight of their classes themselves. I spoke to one of these colleagues the Friday before last and was surprised to hear that he had already finished recording all of his classes. (I later asked the PD about this and learned that my colleague had divvied up his classes over three recording sessions: three, three, and two. He is a number of years younger than me, but still, I don’t know how he did it.) We also talked about the length of our scripts, and he said he wrote fifteen pages per class. My scripts usually ended up being at least 25 pages, but it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison; for one, his scripts were in Korean, which is a much more compact language (as in the physical space that words take up) than English, and I also formatted my scripts with a lot of blank lines in them for the prompter.

I then complained about having to do all the PowerPoint files as well, and he looked surprised. “You made all of your PowerPoint files?” he asked me. I was equally surprised. “You mean you didn’t?” He waved a hand and said, “Nah, I just had my research assistants do it. I don’t care about that sort of thing.” I was a little dumbfounded by this, as I couldn’t imagine having my research assistants (my grad students, that is) do it for me. They would have needed a much more intimate knowledge of what I’m trying to achieve with the class, and even had they had that I’m not sure I would have delegated the task to them. Not that I don’t trust them—they are very capable people—but I know exactly how I want things to look, so it made sense for me to do it.

And that’s the problem, really. The truth is that I invested way too much time and energy into these classes. I probably could have gotten away with a minimum of effort and made my life a lot easier, but... well, I honestly don’t know how to do that. My problem is that I am incapable of half-assing things. In other words, I am a perfectionist. This does not mean that I always achieve perfection and everything I do is awesome—in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever actually achieved perfection—but if I decide to do something I will do everything I can to get as close to that ideal as possible. I know this sounds like a reply to that famous interview question: “What would you say is your greatest weakness?” People assume that being a perfectionist is not a weakness, but it kind of is.

Let me elaborate on that: Striving for perfection itself is not a weakness, but being unable to perform mental triage—that is, deciding when and where you should spend your limited time and energy—is a weakness, I think. At least, it sure does make life a lot harder. I sometimes find myself wishing I could care just a little less about some things. I’ve got plenty of other projects that I had to put on the back burner, and I probably could have kept those going on the side if I had been capable of not devoting myself entirely to these classes. Now, though, I find myself in the position of having to shift gears and try to get back into a project that has had about two months to cool off.

Then again... maybe I wouldn’t have been able to keep all those plates spinning at once. I think a corollary of my inability to not give my current project everything I’ve got is the inability to shift back and forth between projects. I tend to pour all my time and energy into a project until it is done or something else more urgent comes up. I’ve tried dividing up my attention between projects, spending a couple hours on one project and then switching to another project for a couple of hours, and it hasn’t really worked out too great. I think I tried it because I had read somewhere that it was an efficient way to work or a good way to avoid getting into a rut or something like that, but I don’t think my brain works that way. It takes me a while to get warmed up and really get into an efficient flow, so if I am constantly switching projects, I feel a lot less efficient than I might otherwise be. I suppose that’s a long-winded way of saying that I’m kind of crap at multi-tasking.

This doesn’t mean that sitting at my desk for five or six hours is the most efficient way for me to work. I do need some time to get into a groove, but I can only maintain focus for so long. When I’m in my office and I don’t have class to distract me, I try to break up my day with walks, where I’ll go out for fifteen minutes to half an hour to get some sunlight and fresh air. In addition to getting some physical activity, it also gives my brain a chance to shift into neutral. I’m not concentrating directly on what I’m working on, but the processes are still running in the background, to borrow a computing metaphor.

So, that’s how my brain seems to work. I think because I can’t really multi-task all that well, I end up doing one thing at a time, and I have a hard time not devoting all my processing power to the task at hand. It’s all connected. And I suppose it’s good to know that, but it doesn’t really feel like something I can change, especially not at this point in my life. I suppose there are other ways I could improve, such as getting better at time management. I don’t think I’m horrible at that, but there’s certainly room for improvement. We’ll see. Now that I am shifting back into some long-term projects, maybe I can come up with a system that allows me to use my time more efficiently. One step at a time, I suppose. For the time being, at least, I don’t have a speeding train breathing down my neck.