If I had a time machine

When students ask what they can do to improve their grades at the end of the semester, I often think, “Invent a time machine, go back to the beginning of the semester, and start [coming to class, proofreading your work, studying for exams, etc.].” Now, in my second year of a new job, a year away from pre-tenure review, it feels like this is the semester that I would choose to return to if things do not go the way I want in the tenure process. With a paper under review, several papers I need to lightly revise and send out, and new projects in the early stages, this is a pivotal moment for my success in the coming years, even as the semester quickly melts away and, as usual, I haven’t completed nearly as much on these endeavors as I had hoped.

I have, however, made one change that I hope will pay off in the future. I installed LeechBlock on my web browser to ward off my Major Procrastination Disorder and keep time from getting away from me. In a few years, I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Next time I’ll brush them longer

After a recent exam in which many of my students failed, I asked them to write a brief statement reflecting on what they could do differently before the next exam. The most common response by far was that they would study longer before the next exam. I don’t want to discourage students from studying, but I thought that this situation required an addendum to Anti-Procrastination Metaphor #2. As you probably don’t recall, this metaphor involves students brushing their teeth:

Imagine two people visit the dentist for a cleaning and are told to return in six months.  The first person brushes her teeth for two minutes twice a day (four total minutes per day) every day for six months, spending 12 total hours brushing her teeth between dentist appointments.  The second person does not brush her teeth at all for five months and 29 days but spends 12 hours brushing her teeth on the day before her dentist appointment.  Which person’s teeth would you rather have?

To this I would add:

After visiting the dentist and finding that her teeth were, in fact, covered in plaque and cavities, the second person vows to brush her teeth for 24 hours in the days immediately preceding her next dentist appointment while the first person continues to brush her teeth for two minutes twice a day. Which person’s teeth would you rather have? Why doesn’t doubling the amount of time spent brushing her teeth get the second person’s teeth as clean as the first person’s?

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On Major Procrastination Disorder in 1751

Although it had not yet been recognized by psychiatrists (or graduate students), this article from Scatterplot indicates that Major Procrastination Disorder was present in 1751. I think it is time to add a “Nothing is New” category. Other entries: snark and technology, wasting time with media, and wireless reading devices.

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Summer doldrums

Many academics likely see summer as a time to get to work on the things they really want to be doing during the academic year. Freed of students and committees, they turn to research, course prep, and reading Important Books. Each summer, I look forward to being able to focus on those things. Each summer I fail.

This failure makes me feel bad about how little I am actually accomplishing, which leads to lethargy, which leads to accomplishing even less. Although the title seems appropriate, my experience in the summer is, in fact, the exact opposite of the problem faced by the protagonist in “Summertime Blues,” who is forced to work so much that he misses out on summertime fun.

I miss out on summertime fun because of how much I don’t work.

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How often do you brush your teeth?

At the beginning of the month I shared an anti-procrastination metaphor that I picked up somewhere along the way.  In discussions with students since, however, I’ve found myself drawing on my recent dentist appointments (years without dental insurance cannot be reversed overnight).  It is likely more applicable to students’ daily lives than my previous example.

Imagine two people visit the dentist for a cleaning and are told to return in six months.  The first person brushes her teeth for two minutes twice a day (four total minutes per day) every day for six months, spending 12 total hours brushing her teeth between dentist appointments.  The second person does not brush her teeth at all for five months and 29 days but spends 12 hours brushing her teeth on the day before her dentist appointment.  Which person’s teeth would you rather have?

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Anti-procrastination metaphor #1

While I have an issue with chronic procrastination myself, this does not prevent me from encouraging my students to avoid procrastination in their own lives.  The result has been an effort to find metaphors that will encourage them to consider what would happen if they applied their academic work ethic to other areas of their lives.  (I am pretty sure that I borrowed the metaphor below from somebody else.)

Imagine that you have an infection and go to a doctor for treatment.  The doctor prescribes a daily medication and tells you to return in four weeks for reassessment.  Do you take the medication daily or wait until three weeks and six days have passed before downing the entire bottle of medication?

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Encouraging procrastination

Sometimes, a spike in blog traffic has a clear explanation, such as a link from a much larger blog or a video that people like to pass around (ending up in some strange locations).  Other times, there will be a day with many more views than those around it.  For these days I would like to say thank you to the graduate student who happens upon this blog and spends an entire morning or afternoon clicking links to my musings on the job market or the transition to faculty life and, from there, clicking links to the pages that I cite.  It is you, the student who chooses to read this blog instead of studying for comprehensive exams, working on your dissertation, or taking a nap that makes this endeavor worthwhile.

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Punching the clock

Last semester I worked an average of 47.72 hours per week (50.34 hours when not counting weeks that included breaks of some sort).  Although I did not keep track of my work habits during graduate school, I am pretty confident that I have shattered all personal records for academic productivity.  This total included an average of 41.88 hours in my office and 5.84 hours at home (damn those MWF classes!).  On a typical day I arrived at my office around 7:30 and left around 4:30, with most of my work at home coming on weekends.

One of the joys of academic life is the flexibility to work when you want.  Given my problems with procrastination, this flexibility has also allowed me to go long periods of time without doing much work of any sort.  When working on my dissertation at home last year, this posed some problems.  As a result, I told myself that when I had my own office I would take full advantage of the opportunity afforded by a space with no couch on which to nap.  Now that I’ve had my own office for over six months, I can report that conforming to a regular work schedule has allowed me to be productive without constantly worrying about what else I have to do.  When I go home for the day, I am generally done working for the evening.

Of course, I could be doing more.  I reported last semester, for example, that nearly all of my time was taken up by my teaching duties.  I could have placed five or ten hours of research on top of my other work but this would have also caused me to not be home in time to help my wife prepare for dinner or to give up an hour of mental relaxation while watching TV in the evening.  At this point, all signs indicate that I can earn tenure by completing most of my research duties in the summer and winter breaks and focus on teaching and service when class is in session.  As I learned over winter break when preparing my ASA submission, however, I need to approach research with the same rigid schedule.  Some people may become academics to avoid punching the clock.  For me it is essential.

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A blessing and a curse

As an elementary and high school student I developed a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to complete assignments.  At various times I considered starting earlier, but I decided against the extra effort since I was able to get As and A-minuses when starting things at the last minute.  In college I had to work harder to maintain good grades but I still left paper writing until the last minute, typically making an outline two days before a deadline and writing the paper the evening before the deadline, priding myself on the fact that I never had to stay up all night working.

These tactics worked.  My high school and undergraduate GPAs were the same and I got into grad school, where I ran into problems.  As you probably know, writing a course paper in graduate school takes a lot more work than writing a five-page undergraduate paper.  Obviously, I couldn’t start the day before a deadline, but despite my good intentions to start working on papers early in the semester, I ended up waiting until a few weeks remained.  A few times I even stayed up all night.

Then came the dissertation, which was obviously unlike anything I’d previously written.  After setting deadlines for each chapter with my advisor, I found myself using my grad school paper-writing tactics with each one.  This time, I missed a few deadlines.  Thankfully, my advisor understood how to motivate me and the chapters eventually got done, then revised, and then submitted to my committee members.  When I originally set the “complete draft” deadline I was sure that I would be able to meet it.  In retrospect, however, the fact that I met this deadline without substantially changing my poor writing habits is surprising.  Until now, my ability to do “okay” writing in a short period of time has been both a blessing and a curse.  As I’ve gotten older, though, the “blessing” aspect has been largely supplanted by the “curse” aspect.  Sine I’ll soon be working toward tenure it seems that a change in work habits may be in order.

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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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