Grad Hacker

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Let me be straight with you, I like the idea of routines. I like the idea of having a life where I know that at this time, I’m working, and at that time, Im not working, letting me thus “not work” guilt free. Fixed schedules seem to allow avoiding two deadly grad school traps: 1) the distracted i’m-at-work-but-wasting-time-pretending-to-work trap and 2) the i’m-at-home-and-feeling-guilty-about-not-being-at-work effect. In fact, some parts of my life are all about routine. I eat the same dinner and breakfast almost every day of the week that I’m home. No joke. But I have a lot of trouble following a prescribed work/play routine consistently.

Thus, I have e a predicament: I can’t seem to follow fixed work schedules, but I hate those two grad school ills more than tax-dollar funded corporate bonuses.

What’s a nerd to do?

First, we should ask why I can’t follow a fixed schedule: a legitimate question. I can boil it down to two main reasons: 1) I don’t want to go home when I have momentum. 2) I like variety. Let’s discuss each.

Momentum

Momentum is key in my work. I’m in the natural sciences and a lot of key results come from seeing a pattern in data, supposing that it is a result of some physical principle (modeling the data), and doing, if necessary, further experiments to see whether your model is right. For idiots like me, this is tricky work. If you miss a pattern in the data or think you see something, which later turns out to be a mirage, it could cost you weeks, months, or years of work. The cold truth is, there’s not much you can do about this. It’s how science works. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong, but hopefully you’re right more than you’re wrong.

So what do I do when I have a new idea, think I see a new pattern, or think I see how an old hypothesis is wrong at 8:00pm on a Tuesday night? Do I watch some TV and say I’ll get to it in the morning? It’s certainly an option. I’ll definitely be enthusiastic about getting to work on my new ideas in the morning. But I could also forget a lot of the subtlety in my ideas by that time. I have a lot of sympathy towards the idea that a fixed, limited work schedule preserves creativity, focus, and energy by not trying to do work at all waking hours. But if I think I have a decent idea, or if things start to go my way, previous reasons for not working late begin to melt away; that is, energy, enthusiasm, and focus are easy to come by when you think you’re on to something. So in times like these I clear my desk, get scratch paper or my computer out and play with the ideas.

This is what I mean by preserving momentum.

Variety

What’s there to say about variety other than that it kicks ass? Work can get repetitive and boring and variety is the cure for it. Specifically in terms of work schedule variety, I mean: sometimes going in early and leaving early, sometimes working at night, sometimes taking a break in the afternoon and coming back, sometimes working morning to night and taking the next morning off, you get the idea.

Problems

But that can cause problems: adopting a work schedule with “variety” quickly leads to an “I work whenever the hell I feel like it” schedule, which leads to the two grad student ills I described above. How? First, “I need variety” can often mean sitting at your desk and browsing the internet all day. Then doing the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, until the week goes by and you start to feel bad about not having done anything. Second, with a variety schedule you have no clear boundaries between when you’re “supposed to” work and not work, so you can easily start to feel guilty about not working during your play time, which is a miserable, horrible place to be.

Solution

I’m not clear I have a good solution but I’ll suggest some ideas and let you list your brilliant ideas in the comments.

Simply count your hours of honest work. I know this isn’t a sexy idea, it’s old school, it’s not what bloggers say, but there is simply no substitute for doing work, and if you want to make sure you do a certain amount of work each day, while still maintaining the freshness of different schedules, you can just try to make sure you hit your goal each day; plain and simple. You don’t have to be anal, just make sure you’re getting roughly x hours of honest, uninterrupted work in a day. I know there are all these timer widgets and online things that time your work, but simply remembering you’re at some number and have to reach another number by the end of the day is usually good enough; you’ll know if for the past few days you’ve basically been doing diddly squat. Of course, this may be okay if a break is what you need, but you should be aware.

Don’t go overboard.  That is, don’t change your schedule from a sane, practical work schedule too much. At least, unless you feel you have a really good handle on avoiding the grad student ills of distracted work and guilty play. For example, I’ve learned that if I have a huge break in the middle of the day and try to go back and work in the evening, my chances of failure are high, so I usually just switch between morning and evening schedules as well as super-sized-days and half-sized days.

Such is what I’ve been doing lately, and although I’m not sure whether it’s made me more “productive” in the sense of “output” I don’t care, because it has served it’s real purpose, which is that it has let me enjoy work more, it has made work feel more fresh, and it’s kept my energy and enthusiasm up. Hopefully this will last.