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.

reminder of some earlier advice

Today I was revising a proposal that I had made to a publisher about something. There was lots of good feedback on the first draft, but the relevant point here is that I was advised to add a paragraph talking myself up.

This is very useful advice for graduate students, made here before but always worth repeating: job applications and publisher proposals are almost opposite situations in this respect.

Any job application made to an academic department that has an air of cockiness about it is likely to be tossed in the trash can very early in the process. Established members of a university department don’t want to deal with some troublemaking blowhard who plans to come in and act like a big shot right away before even learning their way around. The rule of the game is that in cover letters and interviews you have to be polite, and even being a little bit deferential won’t kill you.

With publishers it’s really quite different. They don’t really care if you act cocky, because they’re never going to have to see you in the office, and all your dealings with them are governed by strict contractual provisions anyway. In fact, they almost always prefer to see a bit of pride in your attitude. Why should they invest thousands of dollars in producing and publishing your book if you’re going to be meek and self-deprecating about it rather than out there in the world, pushing it a bit? It makes good logical sense that they would see things this way.

In short: universities tend to hate self-promoters, while publishers tend to love them.

I remember reading this same advice somewhere before I ever published a book. And behold! The advice was right on target. Which doesn’t always happen.

don’t let adjectives do your thinking for you

A few months ago there was a discussion on this blog and some nearby blogs about ways of looking for weak arguments. I was mostly repeating some good ideas I had read elsewhere about this.

There was the interesting commenter on a Brian Leiter post (I wish I had copied and pasted the comment at the time) about how any time a philosophy author says “obviously,” usually the point is not so obvious, and you can write an interesting article simply by showing that the alternative is not obviously wrong, but may in fact be the stone cold truth.

Daniel Dennett once made the nice point that he tells his students that rhetorical questions often cover failures to make an argument, and should be challenged. I never liked using rhetorical questions much anyway; they somehow seem a touch passive-aggressive. But since reading that I’ve made an effort never to use them at all, because I think Dennett’s point is basically correct.

My own favorite rule of thumb is that anything in scare quotes often represents the author trying to use the term in quotes literally while also using that gesture of irony to pretend that they’re not quite using it.

Another rule occurs to me now, which is that quite often people try to let their adjectives do their thinking for them. I’ve often cited “armchair philosophy” as a particularly egregious example of this technique. Consider what’s going on here. There is actually quite an interesting philosophical debate to be had about the virtues and vices of a priori argumentation. But the adjective “armchair” tries to land-grab without a fight by merely asserting that a priori philosophical work gets us nowhere, and in that sense it’s really just an insulting name for a conclusion that the speaker happens not to like. This can be rhetorically advantageous, since it gives the impression of a fait accompli, while expending no energy on any actual philosophical work. But in a classic case of the return of the repressed, those who denigrate armchair thinking usually offer up doctrines that are utterly riddled with a priori assumptions, and often very weak ones at that.

More generally, imagine that you’re reading a review of some philosophical book and the reviewer describes it as “lame neo-Platonism,” or something like that. (Real-life examples are usually more complicated.) Again, this can be rhetorically useful— and I don’t think rhetoric ever means “mere rhetoric,” by the way. But what is happening here is that the reviewer has probably not proven that the book is “lame,” nor done the work of showing that the book in question is “neo-” anything. It’s a simple attempt to put the book in question on the defensive without having done the work required to that end.

This is related to my dislike for the phrase “bad poetry” when used to describe works such as those of the late Heidegger. It’s true enough that some of the material of the late Heidegger seems to meet that description. But people who are quick to throw around the phrase “bad poetry” are usually not people who will praise anything as good poetry, at least not in a philosophical context. They tend to be people who think that literature has no genuine cognitive value at all, and on that point I think they are greatly mistaken. The mistake of holding that either truth is discursive propositional truth or it’s a poetry slam free-for-all is, roughly, the same mistake as Meno’s Paradox: either you know something or you don’t. But here I side with Socrates.

early adulthood

There’s a long and fascinating story in the NY Times today about THE PERIOD BETWEEN AGES 18-30 that will be highly relevant for many of you. Get a cup of coffee and sit down for a long read.

Here’s my favorite punch line from the article:

“Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. ‘In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,’ Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. ‘The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.'”

Cogburn on aging and writing

He has SOME GOOD POINTS here. (Note: I’m not sending you there to read about how Jon’s working me into his APA paper; that’s simply how I happened to run across his post.)

Something in the air this summer seems to be giving people a harder time working than usual. Around 80% of my friends have been complaining about an unproductive summer, including three of the most productive writers I know.

Jon outlines his own problems in that post. For each of my friends they are different. I’d say my own remaining (or even increasing) problems are these:

1. Saying yes to too many things, at a time when there are more opportunities than there used to be. I never used to understand how certain people in the profession could be such bums as not to respond to mail, but I’m starting to get a taste of why. Sometimes you simply forget, believe it or not. Get to a certain volume of mail, and you will start to forget to respond to a certain percentage of it, including some very nice mail. I’m understanding now why people actually need secretaries, and that it’s not just a frivolous ornament to have someone keeping things organized for you.

2. Days start to feel shorter than they used to. Even five years ago it often felt like a day was a magic bag into which I could stuff an insane number of accomplishments. Of course, one could never do that every day, and with age you pay a much bigger price for such days in terms of recovery time. So at the moment, I’m inclined to endorse Jon’s slow-and-steady tortoise approach, which is all the more relevant for those with kids (an issue I don’t have at this point).

Still, I’ve never had so many friends way behind where they want to be as the end of the summer approaches. There must be some sort of general torpor in the air.

Gratton on advisors

Here you can find Peter’s own ULTRA-CLEAN DISSERTATION ADVENTURE STORY (also at DePaul, like me, though after my time).

I didn’t have it quite that easy. Like my friend quoted last night, I was more than a bit disturbed by the various subtleties of interpersonal dynamics that can unfold in a graduate program. But I think Gratton’s model, not mine, is the one you should try to emulate. (Then again, the reason you’re reading my advice posts is probably because it’s not as easy a stage for you as it was for Gratton, who was always a marvel of precocious organizational skills and easy rapport with his professors.)

Also, I think my friend is similar to me in that she actually will finish, she’s just disturbed by a number of the horrible sideshows that are occurring en route to the finish line.

But then there’s the kind of student to which Peter obliquely refers: the alibi builders. You can tell after a few years that they have no intention of ever finishing. It becomes “I had a fight with my professor” this, and “my committee is giving me problems” that.

This type and the Gratton type are not the only two types. Most people fall in the middle, as I did myself. But if you act as if it’s just a driver’s license (Peter really believed it, but I eventually had to pretend it to myself) you’re liable to feel much healthier.

one other good insight

Here’s one other interesting thing my friend says:

“I never experienced the odd mixture of condescension and respect that I have in academia.”

Well said. I’m not sure any commentary by me can improve on that, so I’ll leave the remark there for readers to ponder.

follow-up on the last post

The previous post was actually meant to take off from my friend’s situation and give more general advice. But she was unconvinced by a couple of parts of it, so here’s a brief follow-up:

1. My friend wonders, understandably and politely, if the “abusive relationship” analogy was influenced by the fact that she is a woman. But I can honestly say that I was thinking of men who linger in abusive relationships when I wrote that part.I hope she’ll just trust me here: the images in my mind were of male friends who have grovelled in mistreatment for ages. It happens, believe me.

2. Here’s another thing she said: “To say that’s it’s basically like getting a driver’s license is a good way to think about it, but you and I know that’s just not how it works, and the responsibility for the psychic undermining that often takes place needs to be better addressed by departments, not just at the individual level.”

I should have been clearer. I’m not saying that’s how it works; I’m saying that you should pretend that that’s how it works as a way of finishing and moving on.

She’s also right that it often happens at a departmental level, so that changing individual advisors just isn’t enough.

3. “Really. It just seems to me that if it’s just a matter of not getting caught up in ‘weaving a crisis story’ in order to get to work on what’s important, then why all these posts by several folks about trolls, grey vampires and minotaurs in academia? Somethin’ ain’t right, and I really don’t think it’s a matter of ‘self-inflicted wounds.'”

There are definite constellations of nasty, dangerous people. K-Punk’s figure of the “troll master” is the most dangerous of all at the graduate school level. These sorts of people drastically distort the psychological space in a Department (though they are often strangely powerless outside it; I can think of at least three good examples, but for obvious professional reasons can’t name them here).

Here what was meant to be the point of my last post… It’s not all in your mind. University professors have plenty of psychological issues, and they do often play them out with students. However, students often make it much worse for themselves. It’s better to look at the situation in purely practical, problem-solving terms, because there probably isn’t much you can do to reform a department, and certainly not to reform the psyche of an individual Minotaur.

one woman’s struggle with The Minotaur

A friend sends a link to HER RECENT POST on a Minotaur encounter in connection with her own Ph.D. work.

Just a few quick comments on this, in case they’re of use to others…

It’s difficult, but very important, not to let your advisor or committee members define your feelings about your own work. Some are sadists; some are clueless; more often, they simply disagree with you. This problem is not unique to doctoral committees. Try sending an article manuscript to certain journals, where one referee says it’s a brilliant article and should be published as is, while the other says it’s a piece of garbage. These things happen, and they can even happen in cases where both referees are perfectly sincere.

The problem is that graduate school tends to be a kind of psychological acting out of adolescence. Graduate students can often have a bit of a masochistic streak, and sometimes feel secretly more impressed by the advisor/committee members who show contempt rather than support for their work, just as some people are only attracted to members of the opposite sex who are vicious and demeaning toward them.

My general view of life is that the majority of our wounds are self-inflicted wounds. We stick with bad advisors. We stay in jobs we hate and gripe bitterly about them rather than looking for a new job. We wallow in hopelessly damaged relationships for years. We bizarrely gravitate toward those who insult us rather than those who support us, whether out of some decadent taste for punishment or some wish to reverse the past, or whatever is going on in these cases.

People tend to fear success more than they fear failure. If you simply make an effort to be conscious of this, it becomes a lot easier to escape it. One of the major American philosophers (I think it was Emerson, but it may have been James) says that we generally know which situations are good and harmful for us, but “an imprudent curiosity” makes us want to experiment with the bad situations. Simply don’t do it.. Think of yourself as a simple, healthy animal that wants to choose the clean food and avoid the dirty food.

As for advisors/committee members, either you can change them or you can’t. It’s a purely practical calculation that needs to be made according to factors on the ground that you can know better than others. But even if you can’t change them, the amount of direct pain they are capable of causing you is but a grain of sand in comparison with the time and emotional energy you will waste weaving a crisis story around your dealings with them. Remember, the Ph.D. is essentially a driver’s license; it’s not supposed to be psychoanalysis.

That said, I hate the Minotaur in this story.

work done for the day

As a general rule I set work quotas for myself each day. But my usual habit is to keep on working past the quota.

While in Paris, of course, I’ve taken a different approach. Once the quota is reached (and I set challenging but reasonable ones), I forbid myself to work any longer.

One reason is to stay mentally fresh. The other reason is to avoid the frustration of being in Paris and sitting and working all day, which would be absurd.

But this system is probably worth applying even at home. I seem to recall Darwin refusing to work past noon on any given day (he’d work hard in the mornings), and Philip Glass has spoken of “training the Muse to come calling at my hours,” to such an extent that he refuses even to write down musical ideas that occur to him at other times than, whatever his work hours are… 6-11 AM, something like that.

At any rate, I’ve hit my quota for the day, and now it’s time for fun.