Recipe for Happy Indexing—PSP

Place, Space, and Pace: Essential Ingredients in Staying Happy while Indexing.

A felicitous partnership (between indexer and project) needs agreement or compromise in three areas: Place— Geography and housing; Space—Personal comfort level; and Pace—Lifestyle and time sense.

If the indexer approaches each new project with the following three factors in equilibrium, then he or she should be able to maintain a calm mind and relaxed body during the indexing work. If not, unhappiness, errors, and generation frustration may emerge. While the following may seem obvious, focusing on these three important, basic areas affecting the entire relationship may prevent future problems.

Place
If you hate a rainy environment but you live and work in Seattle, then there’s a good chance this will affect starting work on a new index, particularly in the wintertime. Climatic comfort level is another area where the indexer may have problems. For instance, if your office is on the second floor of an old house, with no air-conditioning, where the indoor temperature reaches the lower 90’s in the summer, then summoning the energy to keep going on an index, particularly a boring one, in the afternoon may be impossible.

Space
An important but often not well recognized facet of human behavior is called proxemics or personal space. Each different ethnic group or culture has different levels of what they define as personal space. Males and females have different definitions of personal space. Personal space is like an invisible bubble or shield that grows or shrinks depending on the situation. Keep just outside the bubble and people are comfortable; intrude and there is an immediate sense of awkwardness.

The French have a much smaller bubble than Americans. The Germans, on the other hand, prefer a space bubble about six inches larger than Americans. Arabian concepts of personal space are more like the French and smaller than Westerners. Typically these differences can affect business or diplomatic situations. To read more about proxemics, see a book by Hall, E. T. (1966). The Hidden Dimension. New York: Doubleday.

When someone invades your personal space, the tendency is not only to feel uncomfortable, but also to back up, sometimes resulting in a kind of dance where one party moves forward and the other backwards. Lacking a wireless keyboard and mouse, this could be trouble.

How does this affect indexing work? Well, if you have family, do they at times intrude on your personal space while working? In a personal relationship, the existence of differing personal space comfort zones may be subtle and manifest itself in ways not clearly related to a space bubble. When concentrating on a difficult passage in a book, looking hard for clear index terms, your personal space may even extend outside of the office area.

Pace
This is the important factor of how you like to live your life, that is, your preferred life style, approach to time and sleeping patterns. If you’re an owl, who rarely gets going before 9:00 AM but are faced with a short deadline on a book and other factors make it impossible to work after noon on the last day, then your personal Pace may make it difficult to concentrate to the degree necessary to get work done in a quality fashion.

All these patterns and others may seem insignificant in the first blush of involvement with the indexing profession, but for a long and happy relationship, it is worth taking a serious look at PSP factors. Decide how you will handle these issues before getting into projects rather than after problems develop.