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Learning Theory and Organizational Methods: College vs Cubicle

50 minutes on, 10 off.

This is classic learning theory. Most human brains can tolerate two or three repetitions of 50 minutes of focused, active learning followed by 10 minutes of walking around, push ups, checking email, or getting water. I like to track my learning at school with toggl. I have experimented with many internet activity tracking tools, but toggl seems to work the best. I like that I can press the start button and see the clock begin. Toggl also provides utility in the work place. I have a dual screen setup, so the timer one one screen reminds me that I am clocked in and need to work on one project at a time. Nonetheless, I have retired to 50 on, 10 off cycle for cubicle life. After my first few weeks as an intern at Organic Valley, I realize that distractions, new projects, and unexpected tasks prevent even 30 minutes of uninterrupted work.

Daily Schedule/To Remember Schedule Method.

It’s hard to find a rhythm in college, so one needs organizational tools that complement a mutable lifestyle. Cal Newport’s method is the one that I have found to be the most suitable. It requires that you define a rough schedule in the morning for about ten minutes. On the left side of an 8 1/5 x 11 or any scrap piece of paper you write, “Schedule” and on the right, “To Remember.” I like to record mine in a moleskin. You follow the schedule during the day and capture any to-dos in the “To Remember” column. The next morning, you add whatever you didn’t complete from the previous and the new to-dos to the “schedule.” Rinse and repeat. This works well in the office. It prevents the scattering of forces that often happens when emails come in and one starts working on five things at once. When the mental multitasking urges begin to simmer, one can refer to the “Schedule” and get back on track. The main difference between college and work is that to-dos or problem sets are called “action items.” I think this is funny for some reason. Probably because action seems to be the last thing anyone is doing in an office. I like this method and will continue to utilize it.

Memory Palace

This is a method of memorizing information that provides little utility in the office. There are no exams, so there is little need to memorize things. The memory palace theory of learning is one of the earliest methods of memorization, used before things were compulsively recorded in ink. It involves first visualizing a familiar spacial location and a path within the location. It could be a palace, or a childhood home, or a familiar street. If you want to remember a grocery list, for example, you begin in the first place, hence the expression “in the the first place” and you imagine the item in a crazy, lewd, outlandish situation. Suppose the first item is socks. You create in your mind’s eye a pile of socks the size of a car, the rotting smell of clothes taken from a gym locker you’re cleaning out after two months, and even some of the socks are crawling around, like maggots. That’s an image you probably won’t forget. The whole point is to take the banal and turn it into a memorable image. Anyway, the time this is useful in the office place is when you need to memorize a speech, otherwise it’s useless.

Powwow

Every month at Organic Valley’s headquarters, there is a P&W, which stands for Powwow, an event that circles around CEO George Siemon’s “State of the co-op” talk that updates everyone on the happenings of the co-op and the organic market in general. The P&W is an hour and half long and gathers about 500 employees down into cafe for the event. This month, I was also on the agenda. I spoke for a half hour on the enterprises and practices of my family’s farm and  outlined Generation Organic, the project I am working on this summer and have been involved in since 2008. This month, the news was that Organic Valley projects a 13% growth rate for the year, which would put gross sales around $7 million.  Organic Valley is growing very quickly, perhaps a little too quickly for some, as a few parts of the business end at the HQ need to be optimized. In a nut shell, there are cases of work overlap.  As the company grows, it will have to streamline and become more efficient.
I am working on a bunch of projects. Today, we laid out the framework for a video contest for our Gen-O farmers.  We want our farmers to make a fun, original video about their farm, a day of chores, or something that makes their situation different than other farms.  It would act as a marketing tool for co-op and as a chance for our young Gen-O farmers to get some publicity about their farm.  We want to offer a really cool first prize, something like a SLR digital camera or a Flipcam to create a large enough incentive for our farmers to make a video.  The videos will be 2 to 4 minutes long. Transparency is a hot button topic in the food world, so what many companies are doing, namely Organic Valley and Stony Field, is creating bios and videos about their farmers to really connect eaters with their food, to demonstrate that there are real family farms providing for the company.  When total transparency becomes the norm, Organic Valley will be ahead of the curve.
Last February, I was accepted to attend the TEDx “Changing the way we eat” conference in New York City.  They just put out a request to attendees from last year asking them to submit applications to become a speaker for the 2012 conference.  They want the speaker to highlight a project they are started or are involved in that has caused an impact on the way that a community eats.  I am going to apply to be a speaker, citing the Generation Organic “KNow your farmer, own your food, drive your future” bus tour from Fall 2010 as a project that caused the impact they desire.  The Gen-O bus tour was a two week trip around the Northeast with stops mostly at college campuses to talk with students about the importance of knowing where their food comes from and knows who grows their food.  We made over 8.2 million media impressions, so I think it stands a chance at winning the contents, especially with the “truck farmer” that spoke last year.
Speaking of the bus tour, we are moving forward with the West Coast Bus Tour that is happening this fall.  It leaves Wisconsin on September 28th and ends at the Bioneers conference on October 17th.  The tour dovetails with Cornell’s Fall Break, so I will be on the last 7 or 8 days of bus. This works out nicely as I am one of the speakers at Bioneers on Friday October XX. Generation Organic is gaining traction every day, and I get so excited to go into work I can hardly stand it.

Every month at Organic Valley’s headquarters, there is a P&W, which stands for Powwow, an event that circles around CEO George Siemon’s “State of the co-op” talk that updates everyone on the happenings of the co-op and the organic market in general. The P&W is an hour and half long and gathers about 500 employees down into cafe for the event. This month, I was also on the agenda. I spoke for a half hour on the enterprises and practices of my family’s farm and  outlined Generation Organic, the project I am working on this summer and have been involved in since 2008. This month, the news was that Organic Valley projects a 13% growth rate for the year, which would put gross sales around $7 million.  Organic Valley is growing very quickly, perhaps a little too quickly for some, as a few parts of the business end at the HQ need to be optimized. In a nut shell, there are cases of work overlap.  As the company grows, it will have to streamline and become more efficient.

I am working on a bunch of projects. Today, we laid out the framework for a video contest for our Gen-O farmers.  We want our farmers to make a fun, original video about their farm, a day of chores, or something that makes their situation different than other farms.  It would act as a marketing tool for co-op and as a chance for our young Gen-O farmers to get some publicity about their farm.  We want to offer a really cool first prize, something like a SLR digital camera or a Flipcam to create a large enough incentive for our farmers to make a video.  The videos will be 2 to 4 minutes long. Transparency is a hot button topic in the food world, so what many companies are doing, namely Organic Valley and Stony Field, is creating bios and videos about their farmers to really connect eaters with their food, to demonstrate that there are real family farms providing for the company.  When total transparency becomes the norm, Organic Valley will be ahead of the curve.

Last February, I was accepted to attend the TEDx “Changing the way we eat” conference in New York City.  They just put out a request to attendees from last year asking them to submit applications to become a speaker for the 2012 conference.  They want the speaker to highlight a project they are started or are involved in that has caused an impact on the way that a community eats.  I am going to apply to be a speaker, citing the Generation Organic “Know your farmer, own your food, drive your future” bus tour from Fall 2010 as a project that caused the impact they desire.  The Gen-O bus tour was a two week trip around the Northeast with stops mostly at college campuses to talk with students about the importance of knowing where their food comes from and knows who grows their food.  We made over 8.2 million media impressions, so I think it stands a chance at winning the contents, especially with the “truck farmer” that spoke last year.

Speaking of the bus tour, we are moving forward with the West Coast Bus Tour for this fall.  It leaves Wisconsin on September 28th and ends at the Bioneers conference on October 17th.  The tour dovetails with Cornell’s Fall Break, so I will be on the last 7 or 8 days of bus. This works out nicely as I am one of the speakers at Bioneers on Friday, October 16. Generation Organic is gaining traction every day, and I get so excited to go into work I can hardly stand it.

Week One – On To It

Organic Valley is a company I have been familiar with since 2001, when was 13, after they started buying and marketing milk from our farm. In 2008, I began marketing activities with the co-op. I represented them as farmer-ambassador and went to consumer events and trade-shows to talk about my farm, the cooperative model of business, and the ideology of Organic Valley. After internalizing dozens of talking points and having various types of media training, I possess considerable knowledge of the how the co-op works. So, upon beginning my internship, I had a significant advantage as I already understand the co-op spirit and ideals. I understood entering the project though, that the day to day running the coop would be different and would surprise me as someone who had a considerable connection with the coop from the “farmer’s side”. I have been surprised, admittedly, at how much work the employees complete to make sure that things look like they’re going smoothly from the farmer’s end. In the world of marketing, some opportunities present themselves far in advance, giving employees lots of time to prepare. Others fall on the doorstep and demand that the marketing department scramble to ensure Organic Valley’s presence.

What I am doing
I have been tasked with running something a little bigger than a simple marketing project. This is not how to get consumers to know the coop, this is not to increase the brand value. I am working on the Generation Organic program. This is Organic Valley’s initiative to usher in the next generation of young farmers. Gen-O provides current OV farmers and the sons and daughters of OV farmers with resources to educate themselves in the real world market of organic food, leadership and professional development, and a network of young farmers to connect with. However, this is not a living project that I had placed in my lap with no prior knowledge. In 2008 I joined the leadership team of Gen-O as a representative from the East Coast. Since then, we have organized three regional meetings and launched a bus tour around the Northeast with other Gen-Os. Since March, I have been acting as the East Coast Regional Director. For a rather new program, it has gained lots of recognition within the coop as a viable marketing tool as well as a way to bring new leadership to the coop. The problem with Gen-O is that while the leadership has been officially placed with the young farmers from around the country, the organizing has been left to HQ staff, which are generally overburdened with other jobs.

As an intern already with considerable knowledge of the program, and with 8 hours a day to devote to moving this projects within Gen-O ahead, I feel only motivation and optimism to draw from my past and the resources of the co-op to move the program ahead. Currently, I have a few main projects. The Gen-O West Coast Bus Tour, the Gen-O Newsletter, and a grant proposal for Gen-O to receive more funding over the next three years. The bus tour will take place this fall, after my internship ends, but I will be on the tour and speaking at a conference where the tour makes a stop. Although I am excited for the what the tour will bring, I do not look forward to organizing it. Not because it will be hard, simply because it will be a kind of organizing that might not be a wise use of my time, from my point of view. But these are only my expectations, and expectations don’t usually turn out as one predicts. The Gen-O newsletter will be getting people to write about what they are doing on the their farms, what sorts of news things are happening in their area, and what interesting projects they are taking on. I look at it as a way for Gen-Os to get some exposure of their own, and for others in the coop to see that Gen-O is really cool. The grant proposal is something that has needed to happen for a long time. Gen-O was plopped into the hands of young farmers busy with their own farms or high education. It needs concrete direction, and having a staff member at the HQ is the way to move things like this forward. Gen-O needs some starter fuel before it can burn on its own.

There are 14,000 organic farms in the United States, and 1,636 of are members of the Organic Valley cooperative. Undertaking the project to train and prepare the next farmer-leaders for an organization that leads more than 10 percent of the nation’s organic farms is intimidating. But the nature of the mission garners only support, both within Organic Valley and in the organic market place. I have a cubicle (with a window, apparently a luxury in cubicle world), a computer, and resources to make these things happen. I have been part of Gen-O for a while, so it is exciting to see these things taking place as a result of my knowledge and hard work. It is a bit unconventional, but I think that I am going to make a really good impact during my time here. The first week has gone by, and I am receiving praise from my supervisors on my hard work and willingness to move projects forward. The mistakes I have made so far have not been huge, and mostly are basic Outlook skills. My motto is act first, seek forgiveness later. I have been acting quite a bit, and it looks like people mostly like to see someone who is eager to push things forward. I am excited to continue working, I find my work truly enjoyable, only feeling eustress in the office. I can’t wait to see the things I can say I changed after my 9 weeks has concluded.

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