Learning how to ask a busy person for something is a skill that few people are taught. It encompasses a range of personal and business etiquette skills. I am a busy person who often has to ask other busy people for things. Busy people ask me for things. People who are not busy also ask me for things. I have totally screwed up asking a busy person for something, so I am also speaking from experience. My husband likes to tease me by saying I am obsessed with RULES!!!! but sometimes I suspect people are craving for someone to write down all of these unspoken norms. So let’s talk about what works and what doesn’t.
Before I share my own practices and preferences, a few caveats: I am a white Midwestern woman in my late thirties who grew up in a lower middle-class family with parents who worked in non-profits and education. I was a weird kid who would occasionally read Emily Post etiquette books, and to this day have a tendency to over-research new situations so I am prepared for all possible outcomes. I am also a Quaker and put disproportionate emphasis on integrity and equality which can sometimes be at odds with traditional etiquette practices. After working 15 years in a salaried role, I switched to self-employment almost two years ago, and that has also shifted some of my thinking regarding what is an appropriate and inappropriate ask depending on one’s employment status (more on this here).
This advice is likely most useful to folks working in North American libraries, education, nonprofit, and similar work. It is also written mainly for those who do not have a close preexisting relationship with the person you are asking. Once you have an established relationship with someone, you generally have a mutually negotiated level of trust and communication preferences that will likely be much more flexible than how you communicate with strangers or acquaintances. By the way, if you’re interested in this topic from the point of view of others, here are a couple articles from guys in venture capital and tech.
What is fine with me may be anathema to someone else. For example, I do not have strong personal preferences about honorifics and when to address people as “Dear Dr./Ms./Mr./Mx. Last Name” versus “Dear First Name,” as Quakers have a long historical tradition of avoiding honorifics and titles. However, plenty of other busy people value these titles and honorifics for very understandable cultural reasons.
Bottom line: etiquette is both an intensely cultural phenomenon and also very situational.
THE BASICS
The more upfront work you put into your ask and the more you anticipate the possible questions your busy person might have, the more likely you will get a quick response and potentially a yes. Show that you have done your homework by making it clear why you are asking me in particular, or that you’ve done some basic information gathering before reaching out. While the secret to being viewed as extremely competent is having good scripts you can adapt for all sorts of situations (I have several Google Template responses that I use in my working life), I like to see that your ask was at least personalized for why I’m being asked and not some other random person. Do this by presenting as much information as you can as concisely as possible. Do not be vague.
Here are typical examples of vague requests I get:
“I am thinking about becoming an archivist. Can you talk to me about your career path?”
“I want to put together a panel for next year’s conference about archives and social justice. Will you be on it?”
“I am working on a committee project about libraries and climate change. Can I ask for your thoughts?”
These are vague asks because they do not have the level of detail that my over-scheduled, spreadsheet-driven, calendar-addicted, beyond caricature Capricorn brain needs in order to give you a quick response. By being vague, the requester has transferred executive function responsibility on to me to ask questions that could have been answered in their opening ask. Now it’s my responsibility to have to ask all sorts of questions about scheduling, how much time it will take, what kind of role you are planning to play, and, if a considerable amount of my time is involved and it isn’t obviously a potential business conversation, what stipend or other benefits are on the table.
Really busy people will often ignore these vague asks because they are so swamped that it’s not worth their time to try to get those additional details. I am a recovering people pleaser so I try hard to at least acknowledge every ask I get (sometimes I fail! My inbox was seriously in chaos mode for much of last year when I was hospitalized and experienced a concurrent death of a parent, and then months later experienced multiple hospitalizations of another parent!!!!), but I also keep a vast mental Rolodex (did you know they actually still sell these) on the vibes of the asks I receive. A very specific and tightly written ask signals “this person is on my wavelength and even if we can’t make it work now, I want to leave the door open for the future” and I’m much more likely to send an enthusiastic response or suggestion if I cannot say yes in their timeframe.
Here is how I prefer that a vague ask would be rewritten:
“I am thinking about becoming an archivist and have started to apply to library schools. I have been a circulation desk student worker at Regional University library and my supervisor recently shared a webinar you gave to Regional Archives Association about climate change and archives that appealed to me because I am involved with my neighborhood community garden. Do you have time next Wednesday or Friday afternoon so I can ask you some questions about what library school courses would be helpful for an archives career?”
“I want to put together a panel for next year’s conference about archives and social justice. The conference is scheduled to be in November 2024 in Nashville and the proposal deadline is in two months. I am currently seeking a speaker on climate change. I envision a 45-minute panel of three speakers who will have 10 minutes each with time for Q&A, and I think a short summary of the themes from A Green New Deal for Archives would be great. The conference is only occurring in-person, so this would require travel on your part. Would you be interested? If so, let me know and I’ll send out a Doodle poll for a one-hour planning meeting next month once I confirm other speakers.”
“I am on Fancy University Library’s new committee on sustainability. We are collaborating with the Fancy University climate justice student activist group on a day-long event scheduled for this fall. We are wondering whether you might be interested in teaching a workshop on historical research and climate change activism since many of these students are interested in archives. We do not have a final budget, but our Dean has indicated her tentative support for the project. Our committee is meeting next Thursday afternoon to discuss event planning if you are able to join us for 20 minutes, or feel free to send us a scheduling link if that time is not good for you.”
Now, with all these examples, I won’t necessarily say yes, but it gives me virtually all the information I need to send back a useful response so you aren’t left hanging. This level of detail allows me to check my calendar to determine if I am available, and if I am available, if it’s worth spending my time on. And if I cannot make it work, or if it’s not a good fit for any number of reasons, I also have enough context to offer some suggested resources or alternative contacts.
SCHEDULING BEST PRACTICES
You’ll notice in all my rewritten asks above, the asker took a proactive approach to scheduling. Open-ended requests with “I know you’re busy so let me know what time works best for you” probably sounds polite but it doesn’t work with a busy person like me (who does not have anyone managing my calendar for me but a girl can dream) because it actually puts more work on me to go in and identify which of my few open slots over the next few weeks I want to offer up (not knowing if when I do, it’ll turn out not to be a good time for you and it will turn into an irritating scheduling back and forth). If you throw out a few dates, then I can quickly check my calendar and get back to you.
When you are asking someone to do a thing, you need to be prepared to assume the responsibility of all scheduling logistics unless they go out of their way to indicate it is something they would prefer to handle. Once someone responds to your request, be proactive in setting up a calendar invitation with all the information they need to connect with you (like a Zoom or Google Meet link, or what number you’ll be calling from if it’s an old-fashioned phone call) and email it to them as quickly as you humanly can. I usually like to send the same logistical information in an emailed response to the last email I received from them since sometimes people don’t always use calendaring systems, and it never hurts to have meeting information like time/date/Zoom link in multiple places.
If you are asking a busy person to do something in a group and this requires the use of something like Doodle or WhenIsGood for everyone to declare their availability within a specific span of days/weeks/months, then please use these services responsibly and with mercy. Nothing drives me more absolutely bananas than holding several slots open on my calendar for more than a few days. Reliance on Doodle polls that stretch out for way too long for everyone to respond is getting so completely out of hand in library circles that I purposely under-report my availability. This way I am not locking up a bunch of my calendar unnecessarily, especially because this is often an unpaid commitment that could otherwise be potentially billable time. As a self-employed person, time is my primary inventory. Asking for someone’s availability has a very short statute of limitations: it is rude to ask for people’s availability and then not act as quickly as you can, since they may have put a schedule hold on their calendar while waiting for you to make a final decision. Here’s how to responsibly ask a group for their availability:
Provide everyone a deadline to respond to the scheduling poll and keep it short (like a week or 5 business days)
Do not offer 20,000 time slot choices. I think once you offer more than 5 days for people to pick from, you’re getting into decision fatigue zone. People are so worried about including every single person’s scheduling constraints that they forget about the tyranny of choice. This is why we have minutes, so if one person on a committee can’t make it, you can send them a recap of what they missed.
Enforce your deadline by sending out a “one last day to respond” reminder to the group, and then send everyone a calendar invitation with the Zoom/meeting info inside. Also, try to send out information separate from the calendar invitation about what you’d like those who cannot attend to do if they cannot make it. If someone declines your calendar invitation due to availability, they will not have access to any agendas/notes if this is the only place you linked these items.
Let’s talk about the use of scheduling links. You should be aware that that the use of scheduling links is subject to a lot of business etiquette debate at the current moment. Calendly is probably the most famous scheduling tool, but they basically all work the same. You select a time from a busy person’s calendar (they have already determined their windows of availability in which they are willing to take meetings) and typically you then receive a Zoom or Google Meet link, either automatically or once they have approved your request.
I don’t necessarily mind an ask that directs me to a scheduling link, however I appreciate when it is worded thoughtfully, especially because not everyone is into scheduling link culture and it can otherwise come across as a bit presumptuous (like placing a call to someone then immediately putting them on hold). A good way to phrase this would be “If you are interested, does Wednesday afternoon work? I am wide open that afternoon, but if you are not available, please feel free to use my Calendly link, or if you have your own scheduling link, feel free to send it to me.”
Really busy people often have assistants, and this is great news for you if they confirm their interest, because assistants are amazing and incredible professionals who spend their days juggling really busy people’s calendars for a living. In general Quakers frown on playing the lottery, but if I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I would win, I would do it (sorry God!) so I could hire someone to be my assistant and handle all of this for me. The really busy person will typically either forward your request to their assistant or copy them in, and then you can take your cues from there. Sometimes assistants screen incoming email for whoever’s calendar they manage, so it’s possible they’ve already been in the loop from the second your email hit the busy person’s inbox. You never know who is reading and forwarding your emails besides the addressed recipient, so always be polite and courteous.
Finally, I can’t believe I have to say this but apparently I do: always, always, ALWAYS send a thank you communication after the busy person follows through. I don’t really care if it’s email, snail mail, or a passenger pigeon brought back from extinction through some questionable genetic science. I try to give freely and try very very hard not to keep score, and I can also tell you that I have done things like written recommendation letters, given talks to classes, and made key business introductions and never received any kind of follow up. That bums me out! There’s no reason not to send a quick thank you email. In an age of AI writing prompts, you have no more excuses, sorry. You can even ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini something like “Please help me write a thank you note to a very uptight Capricorn who has a weird obsession with rules to express my appreciation for something they did.”
SEE YOU IN MY INBOX!!!!
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Back in June I wrote about how my relationship with time has changed since I transitioned into self-employment. Reflecting further on this topic, something that’s worth highlighting is how much self-employment revealed the kinds of temporal conditions that I need for productive work. For years at my previous salaried position, I despaired over how difficult it was for me to move forward on many projects. On an intellectual level, I knew that working five days a week on-site in an office that faced constant interruptions and where I was often forced to put out fires of others’ making probably had something to do with feeling like I could never get anything done. My previous position basically had me working in on-call circumstances while expecting me to accomplish deep cognitive work–the exact kind of work that is not conducive for an environment with constant interruptions. But it really took working for myself–where I could control many of the external disruptions–to realize that I wasn’t broken and incapable of doing deep work. I can do a lot of deep work when I am not constantly battling interruptions.
Here is the other thing that I’ve had to unlearn, and it’s hard because even a committed socialist like me has a lot of internalized capitalism: I’ve had to let go of the idea of the 40-hour work week as a proxy for “productivity.” As I laid out in the last post, running a business means not just doing the work that gets you paid (i.e., billable work for clients), but lots and lots of unpaid work you need to do to keep the business running.
There is emerging research and self-reported anecdotes from knowledge workers showing that most individuals engaged in cognitive work have an upper limit to how many “productive” hours they have in a given day. In other words, most people are not only not actually working a “productive” 40 hours a week, most of them cognitively cannot perform deep work for more than 3-5 hours a day, even with ideal circumstances. Trying to do 40 hours of paid client work a week on a regular basis is a fast path to burnout, because then you would have to spend many more hours on top of 40 weekly in order to handle non-billable tasks. For example, AIIP advises allocating between 30-50% of your working hours for the overhead work of running your business.
Indeed, my own meticulous time-tracking I’ve undertaken since transitioning to self-employment underscores that there is a maximum limit to how much work I can do while ensuring I don’t accidentally replicate the cognitive exhaustion (and resentment, and anger, and lack of time for involvement in hobbies) that I routinely experienced in my previous salaried role. This has been super eye-opening. Since self-employed people love to compare numbers, I thought it would be helpful to break down what my average working time looks like, measured across six months. As with all self-employed stuff, assume the usual caveats, disclaimers, and gentle reminders that my numbers may not look like other’s numbers. I feel pretty self-conscious about sharing these numbers. I don’t know if it’s survivor guilt that I’m not grinding as hard as I used to, but I also know that my health and well-being is phenomenally much better right now since I can determine my own working pace.
I use Moxie1 for time-tracking all of my paid work, and much of my unpaid work. I exported all of my time tracking data from April 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024. Here are some of the major highlights of that time period:
I maintained a heavy workload with an ongoing major client, a second new major client, and engagements with several one-time client projects (speaking engagements, workshops, teaching, etc)
In March I was still recovering from being hospitalized for appendicitis and my father passing away, but was slowly getting back to normal work capacity
In April I traveled to Florida to see extended family
In May I had my interval appendectomy
Over the summer I finished my service on the National Archives Freedom of Information Advisory Committee and was elected to the Society of American Archivists Council
In late summer, my mom was hospitalized multiples times due to a post-surgery infection and I provided significant support to her and my stepfather
I attended the Society of American Archivists (August) and Council of State Archivists (September) annual meetings
I had some other minor health and household things come up that while not catastrophic, were generally annoying and took time and energy to deal with that I would have rather used on literally anything else
For those of you who like things visually represented, here’s a pie chart:
In some ways, the volunteer work is a bit underreported, because this represents only major current ongoing service commitments, such as my Society of American Archivists Council work, and some of my previous ongoing service work was counted under unpaid business dev/admin work. I strongly expect that this number is going to increase in the future, given that I only just started my Council role a few weeks before the end date of these numbers. Until I was elected to Council, I used to count professional service/volunteer work as part of my general unpaid overhead work, but given the major time commitment of being an SAA Council member, that’s why I recently designated SAA Council work as a totally separate time-tracking category.
Are you curious about how the 162 hours of unpaid overhead/business development/administrative work shakes out? I have those numbers as well!
Memory Rising Overhead/Biz Dev/Admin/Service
Duration (hh:mm:ss)
2024 Accounting and Admin
35:24:44
2024 Business Development
44:20:28
2024 Professional Development
21:20:01
2024 Professional Service
19:07:19
New Deal podcast
42:06:16
Grand Total
162:18:48
April 1-September 30, 2024 hours tracked for business development/overhead/admin
Here’s a little explanation of what’s in each category:
Accounting and administration:
Updating my bookkeeping and receipts in Quickbooks
Calculating quarterly estimated taxes
Reviewing what tasks/projects I have to do over the next week/month
Attending mostly virtual and sometimes IRL networking coffees/meetups
Professional development:
Attending webinars
Meetings with a mentor
Identifying grants/fellowships I may be eligible for
Professional service:
Media interviews
FOIA Advisory Committee meetings
ALA/SLI National Climate Action Strategy for Libraries
Society of Ohio Archivists newsletter column
New Deal podcast:
This is not yet off the ground but it’s a huge goal to launch it in the first half of 2025. Until I a) establish that it’s a project I want to commit to long-term and b) find a funding model for its longevity, I’m counting it as part of my business overhead until I can justify breaking it out into its own category.
Disclosure: this is a free trial affiliate link that gives me a small payment if you try out Moxie. I’m not paid by the company, I’m just a big fan of the software. It’s not perfect, but it meets most of my time tracking/scheduling/project management/proposal drafting needs, and I’ve been using it almost since I started working for myself. ↩︎
Since leaving salaried employment to work for myself, my relationship to time has transformed in ways that are good, bad, and not ugly, but undeniably….weird. The math of salaried employment is relatively straightforward: you trade a relatively consistent amount of your time for financial compensation (which is also why people who routinely work beyond the hours of a normal work week, or take work home with them after their normal office hours, are effectively participating in undermining their own salary).
But when you are self-employed, the math of time and money totally changes. You are no longer earning a dependable, predictable monthly salary. You are bringing in variable amounts of money depending on what you have negotiated with a variety of clients. And unless you have figured out a way to totally standardize every aspect of your business and have a predictable way to bring in a reliable number of reliable clients…the reality is that your monthly revenue is likely to fluctuate. That’s just the nature of running a solo business.
Within the small business world, there is a lot of emphasis on selling your services based on value or as a package, not based on hours/hourly pricing. But the reality is that no matter how you price your work, there are hours being factored in at some point in the equation that translate into the revenue you bring in. If you write a book and then sell it, those hours at the front end will hopefully transform into a book contract, advance, and if you’re really lucky, maybe even royalties if you earn out your advance. If you pitch a consulting or research contract to a client and then they agree to do business with you, then the hours come afterwards to deliver the work so you get paid. Even if you don’t price per hour, savvy business owners have a general sense of how much time something should take, so they don’t accept or negotiate prices that would not bring in enough revenue to pay their bills.
This is where the opportunity cost of time comes in for self-employed people and why it has fundamentally changed my relationship to time and money. Before I entered the wild west of self-employment, I worked for fifteen years in academic libraries as a salaried worker. I commuted on-site five days a week to work normal business hours, with only a few exceptions like the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic and my sabbatical. My monthly paycheck was the same regardless of what was happening at work. If I was on vacation or out sick, was helping to organize a conference or had a rare lull between service commitments, whether the archive was super busy or super quiet, I received the same paycheck each month, and it only changed on an annual basis when either a promotion or union-mandated pay increase and benefits election amounts were used to adjust my salary.
Now, my self-employment math means that there are typically a certain number of hours I need to work every month, with an average hourly rate of X, to ensure I am bringing in enough revenue so that I can:
b) pay my business operating expenses (website hosting fees, Zoom license, etc, and also closely track these expenses with receipts and bookkeeping since IRS-approved business expenses reduce your taxable income), and
c) pay myself a reliable amount so I can cover my living expenses, fund my retirement, and also enjoy life.
When you are a salaried academic librarian and asked to do volunteer service work, the cost-benefit analysis is typically “Do I want to do this work? And will it benefit my career somehow?” Obviously, salaried people have to run some calculations based on whether they have workplace support and energetic bandwidth to do service. For academic librarians in a tenure-track system that counts service towards promotion and tenure, these decisions do have some degree of indirect economic consequences. But in general, most academic librarians’ salaries are not directly and immediately impacted by performing service work. When I worked in academic libraries, my salary did not change depending on whether I was chairing a conference program committee or faculty executive committee (a ton of ongoing work stretching out over months or years) versus a lighter weight commitment such as performing peer review of an article (a one time commitment of a few hours).
In contrast, now that I’m self-employed, there is also another question I have to ask, which is whether I can quite literally afford to do uncompensated service work (or, even work that is poorly paid). This is where opportunity cost comes in. Opportunity cost is an economic term that means when you make a choice, you lose out on the benefits from not making a different choice. When I choose to take on service work, there is an opportunity cost of not otherwise using those hours for work that pays me. In other words, if I know that I can generally allocate X hours a month for revenue-generating work, allocating some of those hours for work that will not result in direct monthly revenue generation means that I am choosing to forego potential additional monthly revenue.
That trade-off is one I’m willing to make, especially since I have a lifelong orientation to service, and since no business spends its time solely on billable client contracted projects anyway (in order to run a business, you also have to set aside time for non-billable work like marketing, bookkeeping, etc). My career has been immeasurably helped at every stage by those who volunteered their time to help me, and I consider it a reciprocal obligation to the universe to pay back that help as much as I can afford to do so.1 But this trade-off now that I am self-employed is calculated far differently than when I was salaried.
One of the ways in which running this calculation has become pretty weird is that I find myself increasingly having to decline requests for unpaid and underpaid work that I would have been much more likely to say yes to when I was salaried. This is awkward and weird because I really like being helpful (and I think I have a reputation in my profession for this?), and I can tell some people are offended when I say no, or tell them I can only accommodate their request if the stipend is increased. Something I wish more people understood is that stipends might be lagniappe for someone who is already salaried, but most stipends for unclear service work commitments or talks do not come close to the actual compensation needed to do this work well if you aren’t salaried.
Time and money are both forms of currency, but they function differently. Money is a renewable resource, but time is not. I can do all sorts of things to change how my revenue is replenished–increase my rates, bring on more clients, invest profits from my business somewhere, cut expenses, etc. Because time is a non-renewable resource, this requires me to be incredibly discerning in how I use it. Even if I bring in assistance or remove various commitments, I cannot invent more time in my week or month. I have the exact same number of hours each week and each month that you do. I love self-employment, and I know that if I don’t use my most precious finite resource, time, as responsibly as possible, my business will not have staying power.
I’m running for SAA Council this year, and am fully cognizant that if I am elected, it will likely artificially depress my earning capacity over the next few years since it is a major time commitment without compensation. I do not think it is an accident that I am the only non-university person running for Council, since university-based archivists typically have the highest rates of support for service work. If I am elected, I apologize in advance to those I’ll be serving with for how much of a stickler I will be for not wasting time. Now you know why. ↩︎
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I usually write my media highlights roundups in late January/early February of each year. But in late January/early February of this year, I was hospitalized for 10 nights with a burst appendix, and then my elderly father was also admitted to the same hospital following a fall. He passed away shortly after his surgery. 2023 was already an intense year to begin with, given my transition to self-employment and my father’s declining health and move from assisted living to skilled nursing. But there were lots of other intense things happening behind the scenes, many of which I have deliberately guarded with privacy and various boundaries, and the media I consumed was part of helping me process the unceasing march of intense issues.
Since this annual media roundup is coming so late, and because I am (joyfully!) less committed to trying to shoehorn my life into the Gregorian calendar these days (chalk it up to aging, being part of a Quaker–Jewish household, or my own interest in following the rhythms of nature more than state-sanctioned timekeeping), I’m going to include not just the best of what I read/watched/listened to in 2023, but also the first part of 2024, since much of what I’m consuming right now is similar to what I was consuming over the last year. I am finally getting my interval appendectomy in a few days, and hopefully much of my media consumption over the next stretch of the calendar will be comfort viewing as I recover from surgery.
One other less visible aspect of my life that has decidedly shaped my media consumption for the last several months is that I have intentionally dialed my social media use way, way back. I have a lot of reasons for this that are incredibly personal, that my friends are encouraged to ask me about, and that perhaps one day I’ll feel equipped to discuss publicly. More and more, I’m feeling that my rejection of algorithmically-driven social media is an extension of my commitment to the Quaker peace testimony and my long-held skepticism towards social media, which I feel often accelerates the normalization and rhetoric of violence.
(ps – if you want more regular recommendations, especially related to climate change, labor, and cultural heritage, my monthly business newsletter has a recommendations section)
Business development
The Deliberate Freelancer (podcast, Melanie Padgett Powers) – Hands down one of the best self-employment podcasts out there. I like how Melanie is down to earth, and manages to be motivational and assertive without slipping into cliched girlboss nonsense. Without a doubt, this has probably been the single most helpful media resource I’ve used on my self-employment journey.
The Self-Employed Life (book, Jeffrey Shaw) – I really like how this book breaks down self-employment into three major areas, of personal development, business development, and daily habits. Shaw uses a lot of ecosystem metaphors, which I appreciate.
The Good Enough Job (book, Simone Stolzoff) – One of the things I really like about Simone’s book is the recognition that some of us really like to work, but that finding a job that is a good fit for the work we want to do is a challenge because, lol, late stage capitalism. This is a great book that interviews lots of thoughtful working people about their jobs and making a living (including librarian Fobazi Ettarh!)
Hard times
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (book, Lori Gottlieb) – A therapist talks about going to therapy for herself. I have sought out and benefited from therapy periodically long before reading this book, but reading it was a good reminder to bring it closer to the top of my tool box.
Life is in the Transitions (book, Bruce Feiler) – I think I got this recommendation from a cohort group for arts entrepreneurs I was in during late 2023, and I am immensely grateful to have read it before my appendix burst and my dad died. Bruce’s book talks about how life is essentially a series of lifequakes, or events that completely derail one’s life, and what people do to navigate through them. One of the things I kept thinking about while I was in the hospital, and then when I was at home with this horrible abscess drain and dealing with my Dad’s end of life logistics was how surreal everything felt. I remembered Bruce had written in his book about how it’s not uncommon for a lot of people to experience multiple crises at once, and just remembering that little fragment of the book helped make my incredibly weird shitshow feel somehow… kind of normal?
Everything Happens for a Reason (book, Kate Bowler) – I read this book after I was discharged from the hospital and I devoured it. Kate is a Mennonite who has specialized in the academic study of prosperity gospel strains of evangelical Christianity, and who wrote about the experience of being diagnosed with late stage cancer while also mothering a young child. I was in such raw emotional and physical pain earlier this year, and for a time only felt like I could consume content from other people who had been through it. I think I might have found this book when googling “things to never say to someone who has been through a crisis” because I needed validation for how fucking sick I was of people saying “Please let me know how I can help!” (hint: never ever ever say this to someone going through a life-altering crisis, seriously, don’t do it. It puts the onus back on the person who is going through some shit to basically assign you homework, which as it turns out, some people won’t do even if you’re honest with them about what you need! If you actually want to show you care, then drop off a lasagna, or Venmo them $100, or send them flowers, or cat memes. Basically do anything except say “Let me know how I can help!” which is possibly the most useless phrase in the English language. I will always be grateful to the people who just did something rather than giving me yet another message I felt obligated to respond to during a crisis.)
Climate change
The Ministry for the Future (book, Kim Stanley Robinson) – Kim Stanley Robinson’s most recent climate change novel weaves together the stories of several major and minor characters experiencing heat waves, drought, extractive colonialism, and international climate change policy making. Much like KSR’s previous novel New York 2140 (one of my favorite reads of 2022) the story ends on a cautiously hopeful – and musical – note.
The Great Displacement (book, Jake Bittle) – This book on how climate change is reshaping where Americans live and work is an accessible introduction for anyone new to the concepts of managed retreat and voluntary buyouts.
The Wild Wild West of Climate Modeling (podcast episode) – I learned about climate change data analytics firms while attending Columbia University’s Managed Retreat conference. Although these firms have quite a bit of variation, most of them combine public and private data sources and attempt to quantify long-term risk and predicted increase in value for specific locations. The finance and insurance industries are quite literally making immense investments in these firms to guide their decision making. Yet because they are wildly unregulated, there is potential for these tools to exacerbate issues like climate gentrification. This podcast episode was an incredibly clear explanation of the importance and implications of these new data firms.
Quaker life
Thee Quaker Podcast (podcast) – This is a terrific new podcast that is so lovingly produced and an incredible pleasure to listen to. The hosts take you through all aspects of Quaker history, theology, and practice, from famous Quakers like Bayard Rustin and James Naylor, to clips from vocal ministry at meetings for worship, to things like the story of a Quaker military chaplain. Over the last year I had to spend several hours migrating my Quaker meeting’s website to a new platform, and Thee Quaker Podcast was a frequent companion during that process.
Jewish diaspora
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (book, Michael Chabon) – I started reading this around New Years and finished it on the second night of Passover. This is a detective noir book set in an alternate universe in which a significant contingent of the European Jewish diaspora settled in part of Alaska (loosely based on a real-life unrealized proposal from FDR’s administration) and is facing a new period of potential displacement. It was a haunting book, particularly given current events around Israel and Palestine, and Jewish safety.
“Piecing for Cover” (article, Ayelet Waldman) – Waldman’s article in the New Yorker about the stress of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, and using quilting as a stress response when you feel helpless to change things, really hit home for me. Sewing has often been my own stress response (I sewed curtains the day after the 2004 George W. Bush election), and I have been quilting a lot over the last several months in response to news near and far.
The Ezra Klein show (podcast) – Ezra Klein’s podcast has been a favorite of mine for some time now, and he is an incredibly curious, skilled, and empathetic interviewer. Since October 7, he has done a number of episodes on Israel and Palestine featuring a range of perspectives from Palestinians and Israelis. I am deeply grateful for how his podcast has been a shining example of sensitive discourse and listening to perspectives that are often dismissed around a topic that all too often has more heat than light.
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It’s been about eight months since I took the leap to self-employment and building my business. In reality, the transition started much earlier, because it took months of planning and laying the groundwork to follow through on such a major decision. With the end of the year coming up, and today as the anniversary of my LLC registration, I’m reflecting a lot on the major behind the scenes work it took to take the leap.
When I was knee deep in navigating my career transition, I was (and remain) constantly hungry for stories of how people made their own major career shifts. Over the last couple years I’ve received more advice and wisdom from strangers, acquaintances, and friends than I could ever possibly pay back, so I want to share a little bit here about how it went (and is still going) for me. Life is too short to stay in a job that’s making you miserable, but sometimes when you’re in the middle of the misery it’s difficult to even see an exit strategy.
In order to take the leap, I had to talk to a lot of people, and then I had to listen. A lot. And I also had to start listening to sources of information I had never really listened to before.
Over the last two years as I knew I needed a change, I talked to people who had left academic libraries altogether. I talked to interviewers during job interviews for new roles. I talked to people who had moved back and forth between employee and freelancer roles. I talked to friends who were laid off from salaried roles who unexpectedly became self-employed and loved it. I talked to friends who voluntarily left salaried roles to deliberately become self-employed and loved it. I talked to formerly self-employed people who decided it wasn’t for them and went back to salaried roles. I talked to retired people. I talked to people in my network who ended up becoming some of my first clients. I talked to self-employed librarians/archivists/museum people who had been doing it a long time who helped me see what the day to day would look like (and every single good, bad, and ugly thing they told me about all happened within the first six months I went out on my own).
I talked to my friends in group chats. I talked to my friends over phone calls. I talked to my friends over beers. I talked to my friends over ice cream. I talked to my friends so much I got to a point where I felt sheepish about continuing to talk about it. I talked to my parents (my dad told me that one of the best jobs he’d ever had had started out as a part-time consulting gig when he was between jobs). I talked to my cousin, who is like my sister. I talked to a therapist. I talked to a career coach. I (silently) talked to God every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM at my Quaker meeting. I talked to a clearness committee at my Quaker meeting. I talked to my financial advisor. I talked to my husband so incessantly that at one point he bought me a shirt on Valentines Day that said QUIT YOUR JOB.
I had to talk to a lot of people because my brain had to see that it was possible, that I was not trapped, that I wouldn’t be ruining my life forever if I left a tenured and unionized faculty librarian role for something else, and that I not only could but maybe should try something new. I had to listen to the stories of tons of other people, see where their paths could inform or inspire or caution my own. I talked, and asked, and then I listened, over and over. But then I also had to talk with myself, and I had to listen to not just my head but ultimately to my body and my gut and my heart in a way I was not used to doing.
I’ve mentioned before that teaching the CalRBS seminar on Archives and Climate Change was a real turning point for me. But part of how I knew intrinsically – almost immediately – that it was a turning point and not a fluke was because of how I physically felt during and after teaching the seminar. I knew this was exactly how I was supposed to feel, by doing the work I am supposed to be doing, and that I needed to figure out how to shift my working life towards that as much as possible. There were some days my face began to feel sore because I was smiling so much, because it was so powerful and it felt so right to be in community with other librarians and archivists who cared about this issue just as much as myself. Nothing in my previous job made me feel that way – in fact, often the opposite.
For the last couple of years in my previous role, I had often tried to describe how I was feeling with a series of pretty grim metaphors – like I was dropped into a forest with no map, or that I was running a marathon where the route kept changing, or that I was on the Titanic and I was the only one who could see the iceberg ahead. But when I started figuring out how to make a business work and how to chart my exit strategy, the metaphor that came to me was that it felt like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle (I like jigsaw puzzles, though I don’t do them as often as I’d like). There are multiple paths to putting together something big and unwieldy, and it can be a lot of fun along the way.
The other physical signal that really confirmed for me that I had made the right choice was that when I gave notice at my prior role, my long-term sleep issues immediately improved. I recently read that our bodies often start preparing for major transitions long before our brain/rational mind catches up. Looking back on this, I think when I finally gave notice, it must have been such a flood of relief for the rest of my being to finally feel heard and respected and honored for the things it had been trying to tell me for a very long time. Since leaving academia, I have increasingly learned to rely on my gut and the way things make me feel in terms of business decision making.
When you are in the middle of making a transition and talking to a million people about how they did it, there can be a point where you cross the threshold from information gathering to reassurance seeking. Ultimately, a lot of people can open the doors for you, but only you can walk through. The single best piece of advice I got from everyone I talked to was my cousin. She said something to the effect of, “Would you rather bet on an institution that is making you miserable, or would you rather bet on yourself?”
I’m about to embark on a major new professional transition: working full-time for my new business, Memory Rising. Memory Rising provides research, consulting, and archival services for cultural and humanities institutions and other organizations, with expertise on climate change, environmental and labor movements, and Ohio Valley regional history.
Memory Rising will offer services such as:
Conducting research on archives, public policy, and environmental issues
Working with cultural heritage institutions on climate change action and adaptation
Providing archival services to environmental, labor, and Ohio Valley organizations that need the guidance of a professional archivist to steward their own archives and historical memory
You can find more on the Memory Rising website and also sign up for a periodic newsletter.
My major professional goal for some time has been to shift climate change to the primary focus of my career in archives and libraries. Until now, it has mainly existed on the margins of my job as an archivist/records manager in academic libraries. Teaching the California Rare Books School seminar and writing A Green New Deal for Archives (coming out soon!) became major turning points in giving me a glimpse of a working life focused on climate change, and I felt an increasing sense of urgency to find a way to make this shift.
I started building Memory Rising a few months ago, as I received more consulting and teaching requests related to climate change. I also have a deep commitment to environmental and labor movements, and my home of Cincinnati/the Ohio River watershed, which is why Memory Rising will also serve those communities with the skills I’ve honed as a working archivist for the last 15 years. I’m thrilled that enough behind the scenes activity has come together to make my professional goals a reality. I am leaving my current role at the University of Cincinnati at the end of April to fully dedicate myself to the work that brings me the most meaning and purpose.
In the coming months, I’ll share more about Memory Rising’s work, and will remain a very active presence within archives and libraries communities, as well as branching out into new communities (I recently joined the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, and have learned a ton!). At some point, I’ll also share my story of what it’s been like to transition from working in academic libraries to starting my own business.
I talked to so many people over the last year as I figured out how to make this leap. I am enormously grateful to the kindness and wisdom of old friends, generous colleagues, and new acquaintances who helped me chart out a way to scale up the work that is so necessary for the continuity of archives and cultural memory in the face of climate change. I’m beyond excited about making this new change. Also, if I’m being completely honest as a risk-averse person, I’m slightly terrified of this leap, but the time is right to do it. Climate change remains as urgent an issue as ever, and our profession needs as much help making the transition as quickly as possible. I hope that my path will cross with yours soon as we build a better world that all of us deserve.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Life on the left in 2003 was often an experience of being in the wilderness and yet it was also a much more populated place than any of the war propagandists from that time period ever would admit. I know because I was a teenage anti-war protester who protested the invasion of Iraq on a weekly basis in Cincinnati with a small group every Friday afternoon on my college campus, and because I went to DC at least once (maybe twice?) to protest the war.
I joined a group called Coalition to Prevent War with Iraq, and after the invasion we changed our name to Coalition for Peace with Iraq. For a time, I was so scared that the government would bring back the draft and that it would apply to women that I compiled a folder with my notes from the meetings I attended, articles, flyers, and news clippings so I could document my commitment to being anti-war and receive conscientious objector status.
In retrospect, it was an intensely archival act carried out long before I had any inkling of what an archivist was. I held on to that folder even as my fears of being drafted ebbed, but I have only recently returned to looking through it. It now serves as evidence of my own witness against the collective gaslighting invocation of “weapons of mass destruction,” built upon a tapestry of lies that resulted in the deaths, injuries, and permanent trauma to countless Iraqis and thousands of military service members.
One of the protests in DC required fundraising to hire the bus to drive from Cincinnati to the capital. I got up in my west side church and gave a little speech asking for donations so our group could ride to DC and protest the coming war in Iraq. Today I am a Quaker, but back then I was raised in a different denomination, and I wasn’t exactly sure of the reception I’d receive. And while several people donated, what I remember most clearly was the middle aged guy who accosted me before coffee hour to tell me that I was wrong, and that the Iraqis would welcome our liberation. And then I went to this big protest in DC, it was so big that the streets were filled for blocks, and I came home and looked for any coverage in the national newspapers at our local library branch and there was nothing. Or maybe there was a small clip on page six, I don’t remember. But I knew I was part of an immense crowd people protesting the war in the nation’s capital, and yet everyone in power pretended that everyone else was just fine with the coming war. And this weekend, when the 20th anniversary is upon us, once again I can barely find any examination or retrospectives in popular media of what was committed in America’s name.
When I sat down to write some of my reflections about how the seeds planted during my anti-war teenage experiences have shaped my politics and work on climate change, what came out was raw and incandescent with fury and grief, to the point where I’m not sure if and how to share it publicly. Perhaps one day I will. For now, I want to share more from my files to show that a lot of us tried very hard 20 years ago to resist the war.
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Like 2021, 2022 was also a tough and weird year. I didn’t finish as many books as I would have liked. Maybe 2023 will be better.
Also, 2022 will be the last year that I track what I read in WorldCat. Now that it doesn’t log the date you add an item to a list, its usefulness for me is much diminished. I’m currently giving a friend’s deployment of BookWyrm a try, and I might just need to stop overthinking things and log what I read in Excel.
Previous highlights posts (also, I’ve been doing this for five years???):
Warmth (book, Daniel Sherrell) – Sherrell’s memoir of being a climate organizer and navigating his own climate emotions is the generational cry (quite literally) in the climate change wilderness I’ve been waiting for. This book was such a gift for processing my own climate rage and grief, something that I long ago accepted will never go away but that I need to handle with care and attention like an old injury.
Grapes of Wrath (book, John Steinbeck) – I somehow managed to get through my whole life without reading Grapes of Wrath or watching the movie. Last summer was finally the right time to read it since I was writing A Green New Deal for Archives and preparing for a trip to California. I knew the general contours of the novel, but I didn’t quite appreciate just how deep the environmental and labor themes ran. The structure of Grapes, with chapters that step away from the main narrative to go down a little historical side trail and back, remind me of Moby-Dick, one of my favorite books. I came down with a severe case of COVID towards the end of reading this, and sobbed my way through the final chapters while I was in the middle of a feverish insomniac spell.
Glimpses of the future
Parable of the Sower (book, Octavia Butler) – I had put off reading this for years, mostly because I was too scared it’d give me a panic attack. The ways in which the world falls apart through civil society breakdown, the election of a demagogue, and climate apocalypse was uncomfortably plausible, and now I understand why so many people consider Octavia Butler to be a prophetic voice. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t stoke my inner prepper a little bit (and I did get my ham radio license a few months after reading it). Parable definitely made me think about what I’d need to do to survive the unthinkable.
New York 2140 (book, Kim Stanley Robinson) – This is the first KSR novel I’ve ever read (I’m about halfway through his Ministry for the Future), and I found it ultimately quite optimistic. Much of New York City may be flooded, but it still exists, which is a profoundly reassuring prospect. What KSR lacks in character development, he more than makes up for in painting an incredibly vivid urban geography. And what I appreciated the most about New York 2140 was just how… whimsical it was. There is so much devastation, but people still have cranky committee meetings, they still drink wine, they still have music. Life goes on.
How we spend our time
Daily Rituals: Women at work (book, Mason Currey) – This book was a sequel (I read the first in 2021), and it made up for the lack of women in the first book. I am a very ritual and habit oriented person, and I really enjoy reading about how other people approach the same.
Four Thousand Weeks (book, Oliver Burkeman) – This was an approachable philosophical book about time and chilling out about the amount we have left. I think if you enjoy Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing you’d probably like this one too.
I’m in the final stretch of writing A Green New Deal for Archives, an upcoming publication in the Council on Library and Information Resources Pocket Burgundy series. The anticipated publication date is spring 2023.
The purpose of this publication is to articulate two major threats to US archives: climate change and a destabilized workforce. I review the historical precedent for major public support for archival work, and sketch out the beginnings of public policy for archives to ensure their future viability and relevance in our uncertain future. Archives are a public good, and this publication will argue that therefore archives need significant public investment for their continuity and survival.
I’m sharing a preview of Section 1 below. I’ll be joining the DLF Climate Justice group on Tuesday, November 15 at 10:30 EST to discuss my work so far and get some preliminary feedback. I hope you can join! If you need the Zoom link, or if you can’t make it but want to share thoughts anyway, please feel free to contact me.
Last week I taught “Archives and Climate Change” for California Rare Book School. I was very excited to teach the course, and it wildly exceeded all of my expectations for the week. I was profoundly lucky to have an incredible group of thirteen students who came to the course from various professional and personal experiences. The success of the week is very much to their credit, thanks to their enthusiasm for active participation, eagerness to share with each other, and openness to learning from each other. I’ll share in a later post what a transformative experience it was for me, especially at this point in my career, but I want to spend this post reflecting on the actual teaching logistics of the course.
This was my first time teaching anything for more than a couple hours, and I knew it would be additionally challenging given the online format. I am glad that the course was offered online, since I felt this would widen the possible pool of students and allow people to participate who may not be able to take the time or expense to leave home for a week. And of course, given my own concern about the emissions levels of professional development, teaching a course online was an obvious choice.
CalRBS asked me to finish the syllabus a month before the course began, and I was glad to start prepping it much earlier than that, since it helped me organize my thinking around the main subject areas of the course early on. It was super important to me that participants had a solid foundation of the science and policy of climate change. It was equally important that they learn about climate emotions and climate grief: based on my own personal experience, you cannot do climate work for the long haul unless you recognize and care for your own emotions. I front-loaded the course with these two areas (spread across two days), so that by the time we moved into talking about the impact of climate change on cultural heritage generally and archives specifically, everyone had both the foundational science and emotional tools to fully engage with the content.
Developing the syllabus was helpful for organizing the basic thematic structure of the class, but I still had to figure out how to organize each particular day. Given that folks have spent 2.5 years on Zoom, and given that I had 20 contact hours for the course, I did not want a course that felt like it dragged. There were a few topics I knew I wanted to cover that would be primarily lecture-based. However, I know that I personally do not learn best from lectures, and neither do many others. I reached out to some of my instructional librarian colleagues at UC for advice, and spent a lot of time reading about classroom assessment techniques and active learning. I also drew on activities I’ve used in various social justice settings, especially those focused on facilitating discussions and building relationships within small groups. Several years ago I attended a climate grief workshop at a Quaker conference that was based on the work of Joanna Macy, and her co-authored book Active Hope was an enormously helpful resource for the week.
Some things I did in the service of setting expectations up front:
I deliberately chose not to record class sessions (except for one super technical afternoon of demonstrating ArcGIS online). I posted PowerPoint decks and course materials (Google Jamboards, Zoom chat logs) at the end of each day in our course folder. I strongly believe recording things by default without a strong pedagogical reason for doing so is a form of surveillance, and that unrecorded spaces allow people to share more freely and with greater candor (especially important given the course’s emphasis on group discussions and sharing).
To that end, I also created a pretty stringent privacy policy for the course, which you can read about in the syllabus.
I asked people to generally turn their cameras on for any group discussions. I assumed that if a camera was turned off, someone had stepped away or needed some offline time to gather themselves.
I held office hours before/after each day, and regularly invited all students to attend for any concerns they had.
I left the Zoom room open during the 90-minute lunch period for anyone who wanted to chat with each other. I usually took this time to make some adjustments to the afternoon portion of the course. Most of these lunch periods were fairly quiet, but towards the end of the week some people would come back from lunch a few minutes early to chat with each other.
What I lack in pedagogical training, I (hope) I make up for in abundant enthusiasm and doing my best to read the room so I can tweak things on the fly based on what it seems like people are resonating with. As a result, I built in a lot of activities and group discussions to keep the energy levels going, and allow the students to bond with and learn from each other. Sometimes this took the form of sending students off into “pair and share” discussions, other times it was in small group (3-4 people) breakout rooms. One of the interesting things about CalRBS is that students apply for the course(s) they want to take with their CV and an application statement. The instructors make the admissions decisions, so I knew there would be students coming in with a wide variety of knowledge and experience I simply don’t have. It was important to me to make an environment rich for learning from everyone, rather than an outdated model in which the instructor is assumed to contain all the knowledge. At a certain point in the week, I thought “I feel more like a facilitator helping the students learn as much from each other as they learn from me, the instructor.” This was a really good feeling!
Maybe my first sign that the course would go well was that I was mildly surprised the first day (which was the most lecture heavy) there was so much chatting going on in the Zoom chat box – to the point where there was a request to download and save the chat to our course’s folder with all the other course materials since there were so many resources/links being shared by students. I happily did so that day (and the rest of the week) after putting it to a vote to make sure everyone was okay with it. When my husband (who facilitates a lot of online groups through his volunteer work) asked about the first day and I mentioned how active the chat was, he said “Oh that’s a very good sign!”
The syllabus is embedded below, but since it doesn’t really convey the depth of what each particular day looked like, this is a very brief sample of some of the activities we did:
Every morning we did a round robin of reactions to the day’s readings. This took about 30-40 minutes, but it was well worth the time. It often signaled to me what might be worth adjusting or cultivating more attention to in the afternoon part of the course. The students often built on what someone else said, or helped draw out new connections.
I really like Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Climate Action Venn Diagram exercise. On Day 2, we watched the video on her website. Each student then had 10 minutes to fill out their Venn Diagram. Then I sent pairs of students into their own breakout room where they had 20 minutes to interview each other about their Venn Diagram (I sent out an alert message at 10 minutes reminding them to switch turns).
We used breakout rooms and Google Jamboards pretty regularly throughout the week. On Day 4, we had a “choose your own adventure” breakout room/Jamboard activity. Before lunch, students nominated which topics they wanted to discuss with each other (our focus was on what archival practices could be made more environmentally sustainable). In the afternoon, they selected whichever breakout room they wanted and each room created its own Jamboard. Afterwards, we came back to discuss and review the Jamboards in the group.
On Day 5, I expanded the final portion based on student feedback to be something akin to a show and tell/talent show/barn raising as a way to close out the week. Each student had 8 minutes, and could share their ArcGIS StoryMap, their climate venn diagram, or any other project they had been working on/were contemplating in the future.
Here’s the syllabus. Feel free to contact me with any questions! I hope to teach the course again in the future.
