Fellowship at the Overlook Hotel

Wanted:

Winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel.  Duties include upkeep and minor repairs.  Perks include large amounts of free time.  Perfect for ABDs.

I’ve previously noted some of the ways that works of fiction (such as Candide, The Lord of the Rings, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) are related to graduate school and the job market.  Settling down to watch a scary movie on Halloween night, however, I found what may be the best dramatization I’ve seen about working on one’s dissertation (especially when on fellowship): The Shining.  For example:

As a graduate student there were many times when my wife would come home from work and ask me how my work went during her time away.  Typically, I would respond to this with some vague statement intended to disguise the fact that I had gotten up at 10, read things on the internet, taken a shower at 12:30, eaten lunch, opened a document to work on, read other things on the internet, taken a nap, and then read some things on the internet until she got home.  If she ever called during the day and needed me to bring something to her, the disruption to my “work” had the potential to frustrate me to no end.  It wasn’t so much that I was working but that I had the potential to work and may actually start doing so at any moment.  Any interruption was thus an interruption of my potential to actually accomplish something.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

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Floundering on fellowship

I have been on fellowship for the ’08-9 academic year.  Aside from various revisions and completing other projects, I have two major tasks during this time: getting a job and finishing my dissertation.

The completion of task number one leaves me with a single major task for the current semester.  Unfortunately, I have been clinically diagnosed as a procrastinator per the DSM-IV* definition of the term under the “Work Disorders” heading:

The problem, my doctor tells me, is that I don’t have enough work to do.  While this seems counter-intuitive, I have found that my most productive periods have been when I am extremely busy with other things.  I need to become a structured procrastinator, which is defined as “shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact.”  An illustration may be helpful:

The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Thus, while some may see starting a blog in the midst of dissertation writing to be counterproductive, I am actually trying to use my wasted time more wisely.  And if the blog becomes a chore, I may find myself working on my dissertation to avoid it!

*For those who cannot find this disorder in the DSM-IV, you probably checked the book when you should have checked your gut.

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