I read this great article on Study Hacks recently, it’s called Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do and is part of a series he’s doing. In one, he was looking for people who love what they do and I marked it to come back to because that’s me – I love what I do.
Then I came back to the article, and realized that it wasn’t. Grad school has been getting me down, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and a failure at basically everything I do. I’ve given up responding to email. In fact, a lot of the time I’ve stopped even reading it. I’ve been exploring this in my posts about progress and re-equilibrating the balance of my life.
Then, two things happened. The first is that on Sunday I had an hour an a half improving an 11 year old’s skiing. Note – improving, not teaching. Note – not a 4 year old. We skied as much as possible, and I gave her tips on the lift. It was fun! Sunday ski instructing had become this obligation around my neck, a reason why I can’t plan anything at the weekend. I’d started to wonder if I’d fallen out of love with skiing. But that lesson made me realize that I’d just wasn’t in love with teaching 4-year-olds. Which is not surprising!
Late that night (or early the following morning), I submitted my first paper. And this weight lifted, and graduation seemed that much closer. Because now I just have to write one more paper and finish this course I’m taking and I can be done!
Perspective is so important. From the point of view of teaching 4-year-olds, ski instructing is (to me) not fun. From the alternative perspective, it’s awesome. Taking that one step towards graduation of submitting my first paper, makes the end seem so much closer.
How do you define progress? As a grad student, the weeks I spend reading papers and thinking don’t feel like progress – it’s the week, or day, or hour, when things start to come together that does.
In going back to training, it’s not the gradual improvements in fitness and energy. It’s when I can train for two hours straight and still get up the following morning and go to the gym. It’s fitting into jeans a size smaller.
In programming – lines of code, is progress. A feature, it progress. Passing test cases, is progress. A new idea is not, so much. Ideas are many – implementation is key.
Maybe that’s why I wish I got to code more.
In training, “progress” makes the things that make progress happen seem easier. Seeing results makes me more motivated to stop work and go kickboxing. Having more energy makes it physically easier to get up and go, too.
In grad school, having made “progress”, the act of going back and enabling more feels like stopping. But weeks of reading, and thinking, and failing, make progress happen. Time to better recognize that, I think.
I say this as someone who just spent half an hour hiding in the bathroom in tears, so take what follows with a pinch of salt. I’m not giving up quite yet.
Today, my supervisor told me my work made no contribution. I admit, that I haven’t exactly defined in my own head what my contribution is, but given the interest in my work from a couple of companies, the people I talk to, the requests for talks, and the traffic stats for my website I thought it was clear that I’d made something that was potentially useful. I thought that would imply a contribution.
Perhaps the reality is that I have not made a contribution to computer science. I’ve taken stuff that already existed, and arranged it in a different way. My innovation lies in the combination, not the creation, of technology.
However, if we look at the people who are innovating they’re innovating at the edge. Facebook innovates in technology, but their greatest innovations are in the social aspect. Apple innovates where hardware meets great design (fascinating post on the design of the iPhone and the upcoming Apple Tablet). Google innovates where technology meets utility. Google docs, for example, innovates in Javascript but the biggest game changer is being able to work on your documents online, from anywhere, with anyone. Whilst Google came from academic research, the thing that made them the big player they are in technology today was AdSense, not the content of the seminal paper that started the search engine. Google is a great example of what I’m talking about. Everything they innovate seems to bring some new innovation that’s not just technical. Even speeding up searches – whilst I don’t notice that my single search takes less time, the search API is infrastructure underling things like Google Squared, so I will notice when a square takes much less time to generate.
This disconnect between real world and university is frustrating me. In design, there’s the ideal that something can be both beautiful and functional (see Don Norman’s TED talk and his post about teapots). In creating software, my ideal is something that is both interesting and useful. As a compromise, I’ll take useful. The university ideal is interesting.
I was confident because I thought I’d hit the interesting and useful jackpot. I’ve read so many papers about Twitter, the bar seemed low, I thought it would be easy even. Papers proposing the addition of semantics (I never saw the point of this, the power of Twitter is it’s simplicity), making simplistic errors like saying you could only @ someone if you followed them. Papers proposing a system of vast complexity in order to facilitate how people used instant messenger asynchronously or their status to send a message… and then Facebook came and blew that idea away by just inviting people to set their status and then displaying it in a stream friends can dip in and out of.
This search for interesting above utility has the potential to spawn research that’s like trying to find the fastest way to ski on old-fashioned straight skis. What’s the point in that? If you goal is to ski as fast as possible, you need to get a pair of parabolics and learn how to master the parabolic technique. This research has a very limited audience. It is not where I want to be.
In this analogy, University is like the ESF (Ecole du Ski Français), an institution so steeped and stifled by unionization and protectionism they will take you, on your parabolic skis, and teach you to ski upright with your legs jammed together, rendering it impossible to take advantage of the parabolic edges.
I need to be skiing parabolically. I want to be heading to what I think is important – usefulness, and interesting. But if I have to compromise, I’d sooner be working on making better hairbands (useful, but not that interesting), than making better straight skis (interesting, but not useful). This means that I want to be at the edge of Computer Science, not in the middle of it. Because that’s where I think the innovation is. Perhaps grad school is not the place for me as a result of this.
Yes, what a terrible time to realize this.
In any situation, there are options. What are mine?
Give up, drop out.
Work harder to determine a “contribution” I can claim to make.
Lately, things have been somewhat chaotic. I don’t like it. It makes me stressed, overwhelmed, and unproductive.
Credit: flikr / kevindooley
On Saturday, Treena and I headed out of town for breakfast and a chat. We caught up, and I was talking about how I had just hit this point where I was so overwhelmed I was having a hard time being productive. I’m trying to get a grip; I’ve managed to delegate something that was causing me a giant headache and I’ve been trying to do more things that make me happy rather than I feel I should do (this means I’ve finally caught up on this season of Ugly Betty – love that show).
Credit flikr / flashcurd
However, it’s not enough. At the end of the semester… I think the picture below captures it. It’s like when the snow melts and everything you’ve done all semester needs to be done and final. There’s a cascade of stress, as anything that takes longer than anticipated slides into everything else…
Credit: flikr / mint imperial
Treena tells me (I’m paraphrasing here):
In production, you always schedule at 80% of capacity just in case.
I try to say that I do, it’s just more has gone wrong than the 20% allocated for. Maybe I’m right – I mean, over 4 hours a week spent on physio at the start of term… there’s 20% right there. Having to remark a whole assignment? That’s 20% and it’s happened twice.
Then later, I think about it some more, and realize – I don’t know what my capacity is anymore. Some weeks I’ll work 80 hours and be OK with that. Last week I didn’t achieve anywhere near that (I tried to, but I was having terrible problems focusing). I’ve hit the point where my cup is overflowing – and not in a good way.
Credit: flikr / 96dpi
So Treena is right – I’ve not been scheduling at 80% of capacity. The fact that I don’t even know what my capacity is anymore, tells me I’ve really screwed things up – I’ve sprinted and crashed. I need to be doing 50 hours every week, not 80 hours one week and 20 the next. I shouldn’t be at the point where what needs to happen this week makes me want to curl into a ball and cry.
Credit: flikr / hufse
It’s probably too late for this semester. If I can get through this week, it’s over. For next semester, what can I do to learn what my 80% is and schedule for that?
Working Saturdays – don’t do it. Saturday lunchtime labs screw up my whole weekend, they’ve often overran as well as assignments have been due on Sundays and I feel compelled to stay longer to help.
TA-ing period. No TA-ing in French (it’s much more stressful for me), and if I TA at all it will be a “proper” CS course as the obligatory courses for non-CS students are much harder.
Delegate before it’s panicking me. I arranged for someone to take charge of something last week that I probably should have arranged a month ago.
Better sleep schedule. I was up early for the first chunk of the semester, but then I work late into the evening and it spills over to the following day when I sleep late… need to avoid this and keep on a more regular schedule – especially since the morning is often my most productive time.
Do things that make me happy. Read more novels. Go do things I enjoy. Spend time with my boyfriend. I’m 24 – it’s too young to do nothing but work.
Email. Takes too much time. Unsubscribe from everything I can. This will include Twitter notifications. I should make a custom Twitter landing page indicating that I don’t check the notifications and that I mostly follow back people who talk to me, so send me an @ message saying hello. Once the end of the semester is over (no more panicked emails from students) I should be able to check it just once a day. Try and move to inbox zero.
Courses. Take a course that I enjoy and am interested in. This semester’s course was one I had to take, which definitely made me less motivated. That kind of workload in something I’m more passionate about would not be as big a problem. Spend more time at the beginning of the semester going to a few courses and picking the one that I will enjoy most – this will pay off later.
Some tasks get bigger the longer you put them off. Last week, I spent several hours trying to clear my email. On my desk, there’s a pile of paper 6 inches high. At this point, they become so large I need to set aside a lot of time to deal with them. This makes them much more intimidating, and I put them off even longer… it’s a vicious cycle. Try not to get into it in the first place.
This is everything I can think of for now, but as I try to find my 80% no doubt more will come up. How about you? How do you find your 80%?
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