Day Twenty-four: Beautiful Mind

My favorite part of a project is the point where you have enough data to roll around it…and it all starts to make sense. Right now I am sitting at my in-law’s giant dining room table surrounded by quotes, photos, and half-made frameworks and I love it! Whenever I stumble on to that “Ah-ha moment” during a project I wonder if this is how mathematicians and scientists feel when they make a major breakthrough.

I am a huge fan of messy analysis, mainly because I am a huge fan of messy anything. For me messy analysis means getting everything out on paper, building forts of foam core, and making both physical and theoretical models. The biggest challenge with messy analysis…well other than I am pretty sure it’s giving my mother-in-law a panic attack, is that it’s hard to share. My team is located in Boston and Chicago which makes it difficult to really have a war room. We Skype constantly, but that is just not the same as breathing in the data together. It is easy enough to peel off sections of data and have both halves of the team working on separate things, but it leads to missing critical connections between themes.

I have heard of programs that help teams create virtual project spaces, and had a client who used second life for sales meetings. I have also considered using programs like evernote or online card sorting tools, but for some reason staring at a screen just doesn’t seem like it will offer up the same effect as being buried in little pieces of paper.

I personally like to use excel to organize notes and photos, then use Indesign’s data merge function to create note cards which list the participant’s name and note number, the note, quote, or photo, and a key theme. This way both teams are using the same tools. We can start to sort the notes and make sense of the data in a very physical way, but can still easily communicate with each other, even if it means going back to the original excel file.

Also, I would like to profusely apologize for the lameness of yesterday’s post. Christmas was amazing! I had an awesome time hanging out with the NY fam, and spent a good chunk of the day on the phone with the IL fam.

Here were some of the highlights

Our five year-old cousin got a science kit for secret Santa and went ballistic…he ran around screaming “I GOT SCIIIIIIIENCEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!”

We do Christmas trivia every year, this year one of the prizes was mini-bottles…I was in it to win it!

We put the gingerbread house outside yesterday to make room for the roast beast and it has now become a housing project for the neighborhood squirrels. I love watching them sit on the roof and take apart the chimney. Libby is going nuts trying to protect the real house from the squirrels.

We opened presents at midnight on Christmas morning which we have been doing for the last few years. This year Allison and I had a gift from my grandma waiting for us. My grandma sent us miniature battery operated camping lanterns with a note saying that maybe we can strap them to ourselves when we run at night or use them to decorate the Christmas tree next year. Next year’s tree theme: a vey LL Bean Christmas.

And for the low-points

Allison fell down the stairs in what she describes as the opposite of the Elf escalator scene…

And when I ran to Walgreens to get her an knee brace the cashier asked me for my AARP card.

I hope y’all had an amazing holiday and are looking forward to a super-charged new year! Bring it on 2012!