In a tweet yesterday I wrote:

IRB submitted for some really cool new work with a colleague in my office/group.

Reminding myself that research projects are like a marathon with several sprint sections built in. It is important to not get too excited about finishing the first uphill sprint.

— Aaron Kessler (@kessler_aaron) November 29, 2018

At the time I was excited to have just submitted IRB for a new project. Writing the document and getting the required signatures took several hours of work spread over a week or two. That work came after developing the project idea with my colleague and spending a couple hours doing some prep work. The thought/feeling I was having at the time, which resulted in the tweet, was how happy I was this part of the work was done. Those of us who conduct educational research know how ridiculous that is because I haven’t actually started with the “research”. (You can’t until you get IRB approval!) (Note: I do believe that if you take IRB seriously you have done a lot of work necessary to set a research project on a path to success and believe we have done that in this case!)

Anyhow, I was thinking how long a process research can be and how tedious the various steps in that process feel. When you finally overcome one of them you feel like you have accomplished something. Then you look at the whole roadmap of a project and realize: “man I have a long LONG way to go”!

Thus, my tweet comparing me submitting my IRB forms for approval with completing the first uphill portion of a marathon. Upon reflecting on this metaphor, I realized I had missed something important. Educational researchers almost never have just one project underway at a time. The best of us, which I am not (although I hope to one day be), have multiple projects in various stages of development or implementation at a time. The best I could come up with for the marathon metaphor would be to suggest that I just finished the first uphill portion of the run while also dictating a novel (writing papers), trying to capture the run with a gopro attached to a selfie-stick (collecting other data), tweeting my split times so my “community” can keep up with my progress (Cough – Cough – writing this blog), and providing coaching to the people running next to me (teaching).

I realize multitasking is a required part of our job, it just makes me wonder how successful we can truly be at running the marathon?