When to change

I was thinking about a potential client who had told me basically "I don't have time to change my process or my relationship with my work."

I suppose that there are times when you just have to push through with what you know and what you can do, rather than trying to improve the way you go about things.
Obviously, if things are going well, there's little motivation to change. And if you need to finish something by tomorrow, or even by next week, you probably ought to continue striving within your current skill set. But the farther in the future your deadline, the better the opportunity to try to improve your process.

Maybe that's the almost the same as saying that we should be striving to improve ourselves as we go through life. After all, if your time frame for your project is six months or a year, that's a long time in which to insist that you can make no gains, especially if you're having trouble making gains at present.

Whatever difficulties we face, we always stand to make our life better if we can improve our abilities to deal with different situations.

This feels like obvious platitudes to me, I suppose. And yet, it's not really something you hear all that often.

Part of the issue at hand is how to evaluate the time in which it is possible to make changes. The more optimistic you are about your ability to change yourself, the more likely you are to try to make changes. I'm pretty optimistic about our ability to change.

What problems do people have with their dissertations?

Apparently, about half of the people who start dissertation programs don't finish. It's not new research, but I'm trying to compile my own list of problems--my own perspective--to guide my efforts.

Also, I just like classifying stuff.
Generally I would break the world of problems up as follows:
1. psychological -- mental habits or emotional issues that interfere with writing
2. physiological/medical
3. personal/non-academic--stuff like having to support yourself, care for family, etc.
4. interpersonal/academic --problems with the faculty committee
5. theoretical -- a poorly thought-out study can be very difficult to work on
6. practical/academic -- a well-thought out study can present practical limitations that prevent completion--being over-ambitious can be a problem here.

Off the top of my head that about covers it. I think it probable that most dissertation writers may have more than one of these problems.

Being able to understand the problems can be useful in making a plan to get done with the dissertation.

What problems are you having?

Knowing when not to talk

I've always appreciated silence. I've always appreciated people who know when to talk, and when not to. Conversation need not be simply a constant chatter.
Conversation could be about listening to each other and giving a level of information appropriate to what has been asked. Or what is desired.

Thinking about it now, I wonder whether that is not one of the crucial measures of what makes a conversation work: that the two interlocutors give each other a good amount of information and conversation. I know that my most frustrating conversations are those where I cannot get a good amount from the other person--whether too much or too little.

I had a professor once who said "If you're brilliant, dare to be brief."
I've also heard it suggested that silence can be mistaken for wisdom. At the least, if you don't talk much, you create fewer opportunities to say something stupid. Which is, of course, balanced by the reduction in opportunities to say something wise.

Sometimes it's important to be able to speak and speak well. And to speak with confidence. Feedback is important; communicating and creating connections is important.

In this, too, balance is crucial. We have to know when to talk and when not to talk.

Balance (I've been here before)

There's a fine line that we wish to walk--between persistence and adaptation, between the new and the old, between rigidity and flexibility.

It seems to me that one of the most difficult things to accomplish in life is finding that balance between the alternatives.

Life doesn't present us with black and white at all times. Sure, some decisions are clear; we know we want one and not the other.
But so many things are not: where is the clear line to draw in many of our day to day decisions? Caution vs. decision; due diligence vs. impulse Our interpersonal interactions are rarely clear cut.

Finding the balance point between the two alternatives is a trick that I'm still working on. If you have any insight, I'd love to hear it.

little did I think...

..when I posted on Friday that I had opened the flood gates by missing a day of blog posting. But obviously I had--perhaps because I had taken my time to recognize my failure I was more willing to let that failure compound. At least such as the failure was.

Well, we all have failures sometimes. Perfection is elusive.
One important question is what we do following a...well, I don't really want to call them "failures", because the word carries such negative connotations that it becomes its own weight. Such re-labeling bothers me a little, because I believe there is importance in calling a spade a spade: we have to call 'em the way we see 'em in order to be honest. And we have to be able to recognize that we may not have gotten the results that we wanted.

At the same time, there's no use crying over spilled milk. We have to be able to move past the results we didn't want in order to get the results we do want. If we let a failure stop us, then we are stuck with the results of a failure. If, instead, we look at that failure as a set of results that were not the results we wanted, then we can see that event--that failure, if you must use such language--as a step in the process of moving towards your goals.

Opening the flood gates

Once you have changed a pattern, change can come more quickly and easily.
I was thinking, as I opened this post, about how I had missed a day after blogging everyday for some forty days in a row, and how only two days later I missed posting again. When we're trying to create a habit that is challenging--for example writing something on our dissertation or other writing project everyday--and we fail to maintain a high standard we have kept for ourselves (or at least a standard that is strict, like to do something every day)--it then becomes easy to let it slip. Once the gates of "It's OK that I didn't do it" have been opened, they are hard to close again. Harder, perhaps, because the strict purity we had sought has been violated, and once violated, purity is hard to find recover.

It is, I think, a losing state of mind to let the lost purity keep you from the continued striving. Or maybe that's better stated that the focus on the lost purity itself is the cause of giving up the effort. It becomes the excuse for failure. It's easier, on some levels, to spend your time blaming yourself for the lost purity and lamenting it, than it is to get moving again.

But if you let the little failures keep you from pushing forward, then how difficult it is to find success! After all, is it not crucial for success that you press on? I wonder whether the difference between long-term success and long-term failure is nothing more than the response to the minor setbacks along the way.

It's easier to do the work than to think about it

A friend of mine wrote me that yesterday in reference to some projects she had in hand. It's not always true, but there is a real nugget of truth in it.

It surely depends on the work, to some extent. But when the work has to be done, it seems like it's better to take care of business than to deal with the ramifications of not doing it.

Whatever the difficulty of a work project that you have already chosen to undertake, if you have chosen to do it and are not seeking some alternative course of action, then to sit down to it and persevere through it's difficulties seems like the only course of action that can hold off the negative self-criticism that often accompanies unfinished business.

One thing about this realization is that, if you're in the pattern of letting fear of work stop you from working, no matter how much you can see the truth of this claim, it's easy to forget it and procrastinate. Fear of work is so much more visceral than this realization that doing the work actually is the most effective way of reducing the fear.