Category Archives: Strategy

I tried an experiment last week in order to try and see whether anticipating problems would help me be more productive. One morning, I felt unusually tired, so I wrote a short list of what to do if I started having trouble working:

• 30 minute nap
• shower
• 15 minute walk

It actually really helped. Later that afternoon, I looked at my list and decided to take a short nap. Not only was the nap effective, but when I hit a wall, I was able to quickly evaluate my options, make a decision, and address the problem with a minimum of stewing.

Since then, in the front of my calendar,  I’ve been keeping a running tally of ways to address typical problems I face when writing. My mission: to avoid getting sucked into hours of playing computer games. I was truly embarrassed the other day by throbbing wrists in yoga class that I was 100% certain related to mouse clicks. I just got a massage, which included a lengthy session on my forearms, and I’m determined not to waste that money or treatment by exacerbating the problem immediately after attempting to fix it.

I usually play computer games when I’m restless. So here’s my restless list:

• dance party (an extremely effective method my friend Rebecca & I came up with while writing papers in college)
• read dissertation-related book
• deep breathing exercise
• empty dishwasher/advance laundry
• organize magazines
• write a blog post (just thought of that one!)

I know organizing magazines isn’t everyone’s idea of a great time, but we have quite a stack of unread magazines right now that it soothes my mind to put in chronological order. The Future Mister Doctor helpfully disorders them on a fairly regular basis, thus giving me a completely non-urgent, non-stressful project that can be accomplished in less than ten minutes.

And here’s the FEAR list:

• read dissertation-related book
• deep breathing exercise
• exercise
• design an elaborate reward for the end of the day’s work
• try to focus on inviting yourself to write and explore, rather than demand yourself to succeed (a technique I learned in yoga)

As you can see, there is some overlap in the lists. But the point is not originality, the point is simple, effective ways to get the off-track Future Doctor back on task. For me, a written contingency plan has been very helpful.

Ooh, just thought of another list–the maddening e-mail from an advisor list:

• call and/or immediately forward e-mail to members of dissertation support group
• read the Dinosaur Comic entitled “kant was the one who thought genius meant originality, but kant thought a lot of things” (The title alone reminds one that every smart person has a bunch of idiotic ideas, too–just consider Plato on the theater. Then T-Rex starts talking about a “Power Punch Bear.”)
• watch Die Hard (where the hero takes every form of psychological and physical abuse, and yet triumphs) or something in the Shooter/Taken genre, where Marky Mark/Liam Neelson gets mad and then kills everyone. Any Bourne movie would work too.

. . . is the title of one of my favorite Promise Ring songs. But it’s also the state in which many of us get the most work done.

You can’t exactly maintain a sense of urgency for eight years. At the same time, watching The Future Doctor Anderson revise each chapter in 48 hours in the final push to finish her dissertation was completely awe-inspiring. And then I, who took 3 full months to revise my first chapter, revised Chapter 4 in less than two weeks. When graduation gets near, you can do amazing things!

But wouldn’t it have been great if we could have been that fast earlier? How can that be accomplished?

• Some people apply to conferences with yet-to-be-written papers. If they get in, this forces them to get a solid draft of something by the time they give their talk.
• For me, what kicked me into high gear even more than graduation was the thought of my upcoming four-day stay in a luxurious-looking hotel in Napa Valley. We’re going there for a wedding. I’ve never been, and the thought of the restaurants (French Laundry! I’ve been dreaming of you!) and the wineries just makes me want to have accomplished something. I cannot work in Villagio Palacio Hotel of Grandeur, or whatever it’s called. I need to be treating myself to a hot rock massage in celebration of my dissertating accomplishments! I need to be telling other wedding guests that I’ve finished my dissertation as I sip (okay, guzzle) local wine. Whee!
• My husband has two busy seasons in his work. His business has a seemingly natural flow to it, heating up for September, slowing down for the holidays, getting crazy in March and then relaxing through summer. Maybe it’s possible to arbitrarily designate two busy months of the year, when you’re going to knock something out or die trying. Especially if you follow that busy period with a small break–perhaps a holiday, or just a couple weeks of taking it easier.
• Sometimes a big life change (pregnancy, the start of a new job, funding running out) can be used as motivation to finish up quickly. Or maybe even a particular birthday looming ominously.
• A writing group deadline, where you have one or two chances per semester to turn in work, could be very helpful. If your date to share is not flexible, you’ll probably crank something out just to avoid looking like a fool in front of your colleagues.

It’s hard to have a sense of urgency, though, when you really don’t know how long things are going to take. You don’t want to punish yourself for taking longer to write a book than you expected–hey, you’ve never done it before. That sense of urgency can quickly turn into a sense of failure if one isn’t careful. My therapist used to ask me what would happen if I took a semester longer to graduate. I guess she was trying to give me perspective, and show me that 3 months here or there wasn’t the end of the world. But it’s all too easy to get used to that lack of urgency, and be unproductive because of it.

“We should stop looking for experts and start looking for analogues. It’s a big world: chances are someone has solved your problem already. And she might be an anteater.”

So say Dan & Chip Heath in the November issue of Fast Company. The Heaths accuse Ph.D.s of becoming “domain experts” who lack perspective on the major problems of their field . Yet “problems that are difficult in one domain may be trivial to solve from the perspective of a different domain.”

Luciano Passuello at the Litemind blog recently posted about the same thing, quoting pyschologist Abraham Maslow as saying “To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”

Passuello takes a different tack to solving the problem of narrow-minded expertise; he suggests talking to “regular people” who don’t know the rules of your domain. They don’t see the boundaries of your field.

I know that I sometimes dislike talking with non-experts about my dissertation–I assume that the conversation will be boring for them. That might sound self-effacing, but actually, there’s a fair bit of snobbery in that assumption. I’m deciding in advance that the other person will not have anything of value to contribute to the conversation. In fact, when people ask me about my work, I see my answer as an (unwelcome) opportunity to deliver a mini-lecture, instead of imagining any kind of exchange.

Here’s a little experiment for all of us experts to try: genuinely explaining a challenge we are facing in our research to a non-expert. Or maybe to an anteater.

I’ve been reading about time boxing this morning. Time boxing is essentially budgeting your day not in terms of what you want to accomplish, but in terms of the amount of time you want to spend on a task. So you could budget 30 minutes per day for e-mail or 60 seconds for sit-ups. Time boxing seems to be particularly effective for small tasks that can build into overwhelming to-do lists and for intimidating projects that can be de-scarified by chunking them into small bits.

One of the intriguing strategies related to time boxing that I have never tried is to budget a very small amount of time for something you’ve been procrastinating–say, 30 seconds to begin writing a book review. The idea is that once you’ve made a small start,  it will be easier to keep going.

Freeelance web designer Bryan Connor’s post, To-do Lists & Priorities, contains very helpful information on time boxing, and following his links will lead to more time boxing insights. For tips on time boxing your dissertation, see The Clockwork Muse; Zerubavel does not use the term time boxing, but that’s essentially what the book is about.

One time boxing-ish strategy that I recently employed involves spending the last fifteen minutes of my work day cleaning up my desk. I re-file anything that has a home, go through my mail, and start addressing any to-dos that have been jotted down on scrap paper. If I have more time, I answer a few e-mails. The benefits of this fifteen-minute time box include:

1. having a nice transition time between working and not-working.
2. knowing there’s nothing urgent that needs to be done before tomorrow morning.
3. accomplishing a few small errands that could easily be neglected and build up into a long, stressful to-do list.
4. beginning each work day with a clean workspace and thus a feeling of calm.

I was recently discussing with the Future Doctor Anderson what has been working for her lately in terms of daycare. Her daughter is two years old now, and so she’s had time to do some experimenting with her schedule. Here’s what’s working for her right now:

1. She really likes her daycare provider. The peace of mind that comes from knowing her child is *happy* to be spending time at daycare really helps her make the most of her child-free time.
2. The daycare is located outside of her home. This is a big one, and as a former baby-sitter I can verify it. If someone else is taking care of your kid, but they can walk through your door at any moment to ask you a question, or your kid gets mad because she knows you’re ignoring her, or you can hear your child crying . . . it’s pretty hard to concentrate. Heck, I can hardly tolerate the Future Mister Doctor within 50 feet of me when I’m trying to dissertate.
3. She gets up earlier than her child to get some quiet time first thing in the day. According to the Future Doctor Anderson, she is more focused while it’s quiet and her brain is fresh. Not only that, but during her “Mom” time, she feels calmer and more relaxed knowing that she has already accomplished something on the dissertation already that day.