coldhearted scientist وداد

1/ Today it took me about six hours to read a long article and write a few words in each of three texts I am working on. I was being slow but I like this and not rushing gets me further in the end. I did not put on timers but I was aware of the sun moving in its path, and making patterns.

2/ It occurred to me that my virulent reaction to the Boiceans has to do with their insistence on the complete sufficiency of Boice to prove that everything is all right. The system works, we are in a meritocracy, and anything bad that happens is the result of insufficient Boiceanism.

3/ If I ever write my academic advice book it will not be from the point of view of most of these — how to make tenure at a research institution (the easiest places to get tenure), and it will not go to the other extreme which is to focus so much on structural barriers that one cannot break free. It will be about dealing with those structural barriers.

4/ What I so dislike is in academics is the hurling of instructions that do not fit, that might fit someone but do not fit every interlocutor, the refusal to discuss anything from any other point of view, and the inability to realize there is any outside to their bubble. People who do that have just got to be bad at research and teaching, really, even if their statistics indicate otherwise.

5/ I was one of the subjects Neil Fiore studied for The Now Habit. Everyone else was seeing Fiore for writing problems and they were amazed to hear me talk about why I did not have writing problems: I was already doing the things Fiore recommended, without knowing about him. So they sent me to Fiore because they thought we would enjoy talking together. This led me to solidify my own theories further.

6/ I then read the first edition of The Compleat Academic which is still a very good book. It isn’t self-help, it is a career guide, and I actually should have contacted these authors when I got lost and there was no Internet and nobody would say anything except to obey Boice — who, even if you like him, does not cover everything.

7/ I digress, though. I wrote this post because of my sudden insight: I think the desperate citing and re-citing of Boice is a symptom of the desire for everything to be all right and also for a mechanism guaranteed to control things. If you just follow these instructions you will succeed; if you do not succeed it is that you did not follow instructions; ergo, what happened to you will never happen to me.

8/ The other great insight I have just had is that, if you are like me and you are good at starting things, at not putting them off, and you enjoy work and can be very efficient when this is needed, then all the exhortations about saving time, “cutting corners” and so on are counterproductive. All the effort one is supposed to put toward figuring out what not to do and where to cut takes time and energy from just working, and seem like strategies for putting things off, i.e., for procrastination. 

9/ Once I was having an anxiety attack about my annual report, because it was not going to be very good and I did not want to experience the feelings I might have looking at it. But it had to be done, so I asked a smart friend for advice. She said: give yourself enough time. It is an hour’s task and the advice was to start on time, planning for an hour, but not to schedule anything for the next three hours, so that if the report were hard to write and took more time, I would have it. Give yourself enough time was subversive, but also excellent advice.

10/ I guess you can tell I am from the beach; I like to relax. I do time things because I look at the sky and watch the tide, but I do not like to have bells ringing or sands running out. In graduate school nervous people from the East kept saying I looked too well to be intelligent but I did as well as they.

Axé.