graduate student mail

Here’s part of a nice email from a graduate student from earlier today:

“I have enjoyed reading your advice on writing, especially since I tend towards the perfectionism you describe. I was wondering if you might do a post on time-management and discipline. To be precise, what does a work day look like to you? If one wants to be prolific scholar what does their workday, in your view, have to look like? According to Peter Boettke, an economist at GMU who studied under the Nobel prize-winning economist James Buchanan, Buchanan told him to ‘Keep your ass in the chair. If you work 6:00 am to 6:00 pm, you will outwork all other academics around you.’ If I overlooked your view on this topic in the blog archives please direct me to it. I look forward to hearing from you.”

As stated on this blog in the past, the perfectionistic revision method used to be mine as well. I gradually forced myself to drop it because it simply didn’t work. (It certainly worked for Flaubert, T.S. Eliot, and others, though, so I won’t claim my advice is universally applicable.)

A side note first… The more I look back, the more I think I learned from military history, in particular from the campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant. The most salient feature of Grant’s military style is that he wasn’t a perfectionist at all. His idea was that you keep moving in order to keep the initiative, and that you always think of what you’re going to do rather than what others are going to do to you. Instead of holding territory he would attack the enemy force; instead of sticking around to mop up all resistance, he would keep moving forward; instead of sticking close to supply lines he would cut his army off from them and live off the land. It was the late 1990’s when I was reading General Grant and lots about General Grant, and in retrospect I think these ideas really soaked into me, translated into writing productivity terms. In short, good things happen whenever you keep your momentum going.

But to get back to the literal content of the email…

I like that advice “‘Keep your ass in the chair. If you work 6:00 am to 6:00 pm, you will outwork all other academics around you.” That’s definitely true, and William James also said that if you simply work hard every day, then by the time you’re in middle age you’ll surely be one of the competent ones of your generation.

However, I think that in order to “keep your ass in the chair,” it’s good to have a reason for doing so; it will make it easier to sit there. When I did that at age 27, it didn’t always yield fruit. The reason it’s easy to sit there now (or rather, easier; it’s never completely easy) is because I make a habit of agreeing to almost every project someone sends my way. I suppose I have a sort of morbid fear that starting to say “no” to things is the beginning of a gradual slide into senility, whereas saying “yes” to everything is the intellectual equivalent of forcing myself to go to the gym.

My correspondent asks me to describe a typical work day. The answer is that I probably don’t have a typical day, but do have a typical month. My typical month involves wanting to finish off a handful of projects so that I can move on to new ones. Usually the order in which I knock off those projects is decided by which ones have the earliest deadlines. Currently, my next project due is the lecture for Beirut next weekend, then the Meillassoux book, then the Metzinger article (was supposed to be July, but the collection was delayed for a few months so I pushed it back), and then I have those lectures in Los Angeles, then two things due in late December, and after that the next two book contracts loom.

It might look like a high-stress level of commitments, but the point is that I’ve built up to that speed gradually. You start off doing small intermittent things, and if those work out well it emboldens you to do a few more, and then a few more, and eventually maybe it gets to the point where you have three books and about ten articles due in the next twelve months and it’s no longer the least bit scary. Why? Because writing one thing is no longer like slowly polishing a magic talisman for me. Instead of trusting the Muses, I now trust my outlines. If the outline contains everything I have to say about a given topic, then the Muses will generally follow, and it becomes surprisingly easy to write a good article in a weekend (assuming you know what you want to say ahead of time.)

One thing about this sort of program is that you do have to make social sacrifices. I’m not going to have much fun on the next 5 weekends, for example, since I have a book due towards mid-October and I want it to be good. At times you have to be able to ignore all humans for five straight weekends, perhaps a couple of times per year; in itself that’s unpleasant, but if you have the result in mind then it becomes much easier.

So, is there a typical version of one of these weekend days? Yes. It’s important to strike early in the morning, because if you kill time all morning and don’t write the first word until past noon, you’ll start to feel anxiety. It’s good to move quickly very early in the morning, because nothing helps your morale like having written, say, 5 pages by 9 AM, which is not hard to do if you have a good outline and mute your internal critic a bit. The inner critic should be invited for a visit at the end, not the beginning.

But perhaps the key is not to be demoralized if you’re slow and self-defeating now. Often it can be a good sign if you’re like that early, because it can be a symptom of conscientiousness, whereas at a young age it is often the overly polished pupils who get things done easily, while people with real vocations for thinking are often slow-ripening fruit. (I didn’t say always, I said often.)

And the other point always worth recalling… As Levi put it, “The more you write, the more you will write.” I just went and looked at the records. Of my last 25 publications to appear in print, I was asked by other people to do 23 of them. The only two where I sat by myself and said “I think I want to write about X” without anyone pushing me were Prince of Networks, and the Levinas article in Philosophy Today which was written because I said “hey, I want to go to that Levinas conference in Bulgaria,” and wrote a paper that was accepted, and eventually reworked it into an article. The other 23 were all cases of some editor or publisher contacting me and asking if I would be interested in a certain project. In percentage terms, that means that 92% of my recent publications were driven by invitations from outside, only 8% by cold and furious inner discipline. The same is surely true of people like Žižek.

No one was inviting me to do anything until about five years ago, and now I have all I can handle. That’s just something that can happen if you’ve pushed yourself to do a few projects you really care about, and people take a liking to them and want to get you involved doing other things.

It’s now 1 AM here and this probably isn’t the most cogent advice post I’ve ever written, but the weekend is looking so crowded that it might not have been written for a long time to come if I hadn’t done it on the fly right now.