Parenting through a PhD (or 5 ways not to go completely insane)

PhD students are an interesting cohort. At our university the average age of a PhD student is 36, which means you can safely bet that most students have some family responsibilities – either to a spouse, elderly parents, animals or children.

Parenting is challenging for PhD students because, in addition to the caring work that you have to do, there is huge potential for WORRY and GUILT. Children get sick, they fall over at school, get stung by bees, have problems with their playmates, stick coins so far up their nose that they have to have their stomachs pumped (true – and don’t ask).

Added to this, parents must constantly have one eye on the future consequences of the actions they take today. In fact, you name an activity – usually a fun one – and there will be some expert out there who can tell you how bad it will be for your child and how much it will screw them up as an adult. You can’t win – but you can try, so here’s my top five tips for parenting through a PhD:

1) See the positives of daycare

My son was 8 months old when I started my Masters degree and 7 years old when I finished my PhD. The poor little guy is probably the only kid at his school who knows that doctors don’t just look after sick people. I was able to do this because of Day Care, which some people will tell you is evil. Well – not in my experience I have to say.

As Hilary Clinton said: it takes a village to raise a child. I’m no child raising expert – but daycare people who bought up my son with me were. They patiently taught my son to eat with a spoon, drink from a cup, go to the toilet and dress himself, amongst many other things. They also helped him learn to manage his feelings, talk about them and make friends with others. As a result I think in many ways my son is more emotionally mature at 8 than I was at 18.

Daycare professionals helped me be a better parent.  They gave me advice about toilet training, sleep issues and any number of funny rashes. When I was feeling like I was doing a crap job, they reassured me that everything was ok and that my son wouldn’t turn into a serial killer. Oh – and they didn’t have a television there, which leads me to point two

2) Get yourself a Tivo / PVR or IQ

Someone very wise and funny once called the TV an off switch for children. Certainly large amounts of my Masters and PhD were written using the electronic baby sitter. I’m not proud, but that’s the way it was, no point in denying it.

I did assuage my guilt about TV time by forcing the poor child to watch mainly educational programs. Rather than spend a fortune on DVDs, we bought a TiVo so we could control what he watched. Before he could read this worked well because he couldn’t even turn it on without me. Now of course he can delete all my ‘Grand Designs’ and replace them with ‘Scooby Doo’…

3) Reach out to other PhD parents

It’s great to make friends with other PhD students who have kids if it’s possible. If you are lucky and your kids like each other there is potential for play dates and sleepovers. It’s probably good for your kid to see that other kids have to put up with a PhD in their lives. Even if you only strike up workplace friendships, the benefits of a therapeutic moan with someone who knows what you are going through cannot be over estimated!

4) Be proud of what you do

I tried not to be apologetic about the time that the PhD took away from my family. I felt like this would send all kinds of bad messages to both partner and child. Whenever I would have to say ‘no’ to doing something on PhD related grounds I would explain to my son that the PhD was important to the whole family, not just me. I was studying to make a difference to our future; a PhD meant a better job, a roof over his head, food in his mouth and other fun stuff.

I made sure to show him how much I liked PhD study. Some weekends I would take him into my office and work for an hour or two; setting him up on his own desk with some ‘work’ for my PhD so he felt like he was helping. Then we would go out for cake and explore the campus while talking about what uni is like and why it is a great place to be. He still remembers these fun times and wants to do his own PhD  – which will be about volcanos

5) Sometimes it’s better just to give up

My son was 3 when the chicken pox vaccine came out. I trotted off to the doctors as soon as possible, only to be told that they were out of stock for two weeks. That very day the creche posted a sign saying that a child had been diagnosed with it.

Too late.

Brendan came out in lots and lots of spots. Naturally this happened right before a major milestone presentation, so I was stressed out. But Brendan felt terrible – all he wanted to do was sit on my lap and watch ‘Toy Story’ repeatedly for three days. I tried to read, but after the first day I went into some kind of stupor. It’s hard to read Heidegger and listen to Buzz Lightyear argue with Woody, so I just gave up. I sat there and cuddled him for 3 days and you know what – it was kind of beautiful. When I went back to study I was quite refreshed.

I only have one child as you can probably tell, so other people probably have many more coping strategies than I do – I would love to hear them.

The loneliness of the long distance thesis writer

A friend of mine tells the story of her first day as a PhD student with equal parts amusement and horror. One day she had a busy life as an academic, working with a wide range of students and colleagues, the next she was a PhD student who just had to hand in a thesis in a couple of years. The lack of structure triggered something of an identity crisis.

She realised that she was having a crisis when she stood in front of the mirror that first day and literally didn’t know what to wear. Should she ‘dress down’ and become more ‘studenty’? Or continue to dress like her professional self? In the end she trotted off to uni determined to take her cue from the PhD students she was sure to meet.

Imagine her surprise when she fronted up only to find out she had no office to work in. Even stranger still, no one at the university could tell her who her fellow students were, or where they might be found. One person suggested that she might find some at the library. She wandered the halls in confusion until the staff at the faculty desk suggested that perhaps she might like to work at home.

Of course, my friend was not the kind of person to put up with this state of affairs and set about building community herself, but that’s a whole other story for another post. The point I want to make here is that undertaking PhD study can be very strange and very lonely.

It’s not until they are gone that you realise how important classmates are. Even if you didn’t get on with everyone, your classmates were an anchor in the vast sea of the university. For one thing,  they helped you in little ways: usually someone would tell you if class was cancelled or if the lecturer had offered an extension. If you want to have a beer after a Friday class, there was usually a bunch of people heading to the pub. At the pub you could indulge in some therapeutic moaning about the boring lectures and difficult assignments.

When you are a PhD student this sense of community can be tenuous. Of course, some of you lucky readers will work in the bench sciences and have a ready made community of people working on the same or similar projects. You might land in a large open plan office – which is becoming a popular way for Australian Universities, who are cognizant of the problems of isolation, to house the PhD student cohort. Some of you reach out on twitter, facebook and even this blog to find others like you. But being around people is only part of the solution to the loneliness of the thesis writer.

The thing that surprised me most about PhD study is how powerful the sense of being alone can be.  Many times it felt like no one cared about my thesis but me. As I wrote in my post on PhD rage, while my PhD was of great importance to me, to others it was just something I was doing with my time. On dark days, the days when I stopped believing in it, the whole thing would seem a bit pointless. As an aside, this is one of the many reasons why supervisors are so important – as back up believers!

Even on the up days I could still feel estranged from others. Sometimes I felt like I was bursting at the seams with fascinating insights I was dying to talk about. But it was terribly difficult to get anyone, other than my supervisors, to take more than a casual interest in them. Some people really did engage of course – and they have my grateful thanks. My sister, my office mate, my Actor network theory group all took the time to have a conversation about what I was finding out and – more important – do some wondering about it with me. Their interest seemed, in some strange way, to validate and give meaning to my PhD student existence.

We shouldn’t dismiss these feelings of loneliness and alienation in ourselves as ‘just whining’ because they can have real consequences. Barbara Lovitts writes about them when she explores the shockingly high attrition rate amongst American PhD students in her book ‘Leaving the Ivory tower’.

In her interviews with non completors, Lovitts was struck by how often people blamed themselves for their inability to finish a PhD – rather than, for instance, their supervisor or the university. There was a tendency for students to turn these feelings of alienation into feelings of inadequacy. Part of the reason students leave their studies, Lovitts claims, is ‘pluralistic ignorance’: a failure to recognise that the students all around them are having similar feelings and problems, partly because there is not much contact between students or opportunity to air the feelings.

So what can you do? I suppose I can only encourage people to talk about the feelings with others and look for opportunities to engage. Luckily, in many universities there are plenty of possibilities: peer writing circles, workshops, online courses,  lunchtime seminars and all the rest. Even if you don’t think you need to participate, the social contact could be seen as an end in itself – and it will help you to work out that PhD dress code

Thanks to @pedagogyofpop for suggesting this week’s topic

Confirmation – not as big a deal as you think it is?

Just like the Catholic Church, academia asks PhD students to present themselves for confirmation after a certain amount of membership time has passed. Unlike the Catholics, academics don’t do the smells and bells thing, or demand that you take on a new name. Instead, after about a year of Research Degree study, you will be asked to show that you have ‘the right stuff’ to continue in your studies.

Confirmation can take various forms depending on your discipline and university rules. It might be called ‘program approval’ – or some other obscure managerial name, but it’s a significant milestone anyway. Some students will have to write a substantial piece of the literature review and a thorough outline of methods; others will have pilot studies or artifacts to present.

Despite these differences, most students will have to do some sort of public presentation after which they will be judged by a panel of academics as good enough to continue – or not.

It’s at this point, in the Australian system at least, that you can be asked to leave – or be downgraded to Masters, so it’s not the easiest time for many students. @thetokenlefty (who is doing confirmation one week from now) summed up the feeling perfectly this week when he told me that he is ‘shitting bricks’ at the thought of it. So I thought I would write this top five for him – and any others who have yet to pass through the confirmation process.

1) It’s about the questions (except when it isn’t)

A confirmation presentation is basically a chance for you to demonstrate you have research questions and have some idea of how you might answer them. You probably have more than one question – that’s ok, but try, if you can, to know your ‘hierarchy of concerns’. What is the most important question to answer? Do your questions depend on each other, ie: is there one that has to be answered before the others?

For a minority of students, such as those in creative arts and design, the questions are not really known in advance. In project based disciplines research questions tend to arise out of and follow the work. Your job is to show that this process is happening – probably by talking through some of the preliminary work you have done and what questions it has raised so far. Instead of demonstrating a hierarchy of concern you could talk about the fruitful directions you intend to continue to explore

2) Show the audience why the research is interesting

Constructing good research questions is a subtle art, so the academics wont be expecting the questions to be phrased perfectly. However your questions should be should be big enough and complex enough that a thesis is the ‘answer’. Spend your time convincing the audience that the questions you have are interesting and worth asking – and that you are the right person to answer them. For the creative project based types the emphasis will be on demonstrating reflection on the practice and what it means, not just a recitation of what you have done.

3) Skip lightly through the literature

The temptation at this moment is to retreat into showing the ‘teacher’ (your panel) that you have been a good student by telling them everything you have read over the last year. Let’s face it – this is going to be pretty boring for everyone.

What the academics will be looking for is how well you use the literature – not whether you have a complete collection of it. Think of yourself as a curator – not an archivist. The panel will want to know: 1) can you identify ‘good’ from ‘mediocre’ work and 2) can you talk about it properly.

Focus on the key writers, practitioners or studies and know this material well – mention the rest during question time if it comes up. This way you appear effortlessly erudite rather than anxious and defensive.

4) Ask for help

At the same time that you need to present a ‘doable’ project with interesting questions and good reasons for carrying it out, too much confidence can be your undoing. It’s natural at this stage to have gaps and unknown areas.

Some academics might take an overly confident presentation as a sign that you have failed to see these gaps and will get worried. Or they might just think you are a young whipper snapper who needs to be taken down a peg or two. Either way you need to reassure them that you are thinking deeply, so throw them a bone. As you go through your work, highlight one or two areas you are unsure about and ask for help and ideas.

5) Keep calm and carry on

Remember that the academics sitting on your panel have done a PhD too. They are not expecting a finished piece of research – just promising beginnings.

Best of luck @tokenlefty – but you wont need it! Anyone else got advice on confirmation they would like to share?

A visit from the Procrastination Fairy

I put out two papers to top journals containing my thesis results early this year. Both editors want to publish, but are demanding significant changes before that happens. It’s all to the good of course, there’s a reason they are top journals, but I am finding the process of revisiting these articles incredibly hard work.

In fact, it would be fair to say that Procrastination Fairy has sprinkled me with her Can’t Be Bothered dust in a big way.

This kind of revision is a profoundly unpleasant activity. The problem with a peer review, if properly applied, is that it leads to DOUBT. To some extent I have lost confidence in the work and started to second guess myself. As a consequence, the whole time I have the documents open I have an uncomfortable sense of failure.

It’s easy – far too easy – just not to open the documents in the first place.

There’s lots of advice out there on the subject of procrastination – in fact one can do some really good procrastinating just spending time reading the advice. It was while doing this that I came across a great article on procrastination in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki, an extended review on an academic book on the topic of procrastination called  “The thief of time” .

Surowiecki uses the work in this book to argue that procrastination can be seen as the “quintessential modern problem”. Academics, Surowiecki claims, are prone to procrastination, perhaps because of the largely ‘self directed’ nature of our work. I’m not sure this is the only reason, but procrastination is certainly the key lament I hear in my work shops with PhD students and at pleasantly procrastinaterly coffees with colleagues.

The problem with procrastination is that it doesn’t help much to tell yourself that procrastination is a stupid thing to do. We all know that the unpleasant sensations which arise from putting off an unpleasant (or boring) task can be as bad, even worse, than actually doing the task you avoiding in the first place.

So what to do? Well, a couple of lines in Surowiecki’s article jumped out at me as suggesting a way forward, the first one was this: “procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible”

Ouch! Maybe that one is a little too close to the bone…

Another line which might suggest a more fruitful way forward was this: “… when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.”

This precisely explains my problem with revising the papers. Every day I tell myself that I will start that revision tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes the urge to delay is just as strong as ever. When my dilemma is put this way the answer is obvious – I need outside pressure to counteract the inner urge to put off the job.

I suppose this is why the imposition of deadlines on PhD students is ultimately a good thing. Creating your own deadlines within candidature and agreeing on them with your supervisors is good strategy for overcoming the urge to delay writing. A deadline is not the only kind of outside pressure available to you: living on a student income gets pretty intolerable after a couple of years when you think about it.

But deadlines are not the whole solution of course. The curious nature of procrastination was captured well in this line: “… we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing”

The truth of this struck deeply. I am currently doing research which involves reading policy documents from every other university and putting their key points in a matrix. A more excruciatingly boring research task I can barely think of – yet I will happily do it rather than open and start revising those damn papers.

Maybe the way to overcome this is to focus more on my feelings about the work – not just on the rational reasons why the work must be done. I need a way to start feeling a sense of anticipation, instead of dread; a way to ignite that spark of interest and curiosity in the work itself so I want to open those files.

Visualising can help here. I could try closing my eyes and imagining that elusive state of ‘flow’, the state of being at one with the work of writing, which is pleasurable in and of itself. Now I’m trying to summon up the glow of accomplishment I will feel when the job is finished… nope – that’s not working either.

The final thought of Surowieckis I want to share is the most powerful: procrastination may stem from the nature of identity. We could: “think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control”.

In other words, everyone is made up of ‘multiple selves’ who want different things. My ‘want to get published in an A* journal’ self is in constant struggle with my other selves: my ‘want to have coffee’, ‘want to read twitter’, ‘want to write for the blog’, and my ‘want to empty my email inbox’ selves – just to name a few.

To my mind this explanation makes perfect sense. My ‘want to get published in an A* self’ will always be at a disadvantage compared those selves who have more intrinsically interesting – and easy to satisfy – desires. The trick then is to think of what kind of bargain I can make with my ‘want to have coffee’ self which will enable me to open those files…

I might think about that while I have go and have a coffee.

5 ways to know you have the right thesis topic

It surprises many people who haven’t done a PhD that it can be hard to know what your topic really is.

When you first start a PhD your ideas can shift around a lot; it may seem like from week to week you change your mind. Over time you would hope this situation would settle down, but I meet many people who have two or more topics struggling to be in the same thesis, right up to the last minute.

I call this the Incredible Hulk Complex: too much man, too little shirt (your poor thesis text is the shirt in this metaphor by the way).

I am no stranger to the Incredible Hulk complex. I originally got into a PhD program proposing that I would investigate the use of genetic algorithms in architectural design. I ended up looking at how architects use gesture as they are designing together.

It was hard to let go of all the interests that I had but, to paraphrase what a wise man once wrote, there can be only One Topic. Only one Topic can rule them all, find them, bring them all and in the darkness bind them. My supervisor gets the credit for convincing me to do work on gesture – and he has my undying thanks.

How do you know when you have the One Topic? Here’s how I knew:

1) I found there was substantial work in the area already

This may run counter to the idea that a thesis has to be an ‘original contribution to knowledge’, but there’s doable original and too original. If some work in the area exists already you have something to hold onto, examine and critique if necessary.

When I decided to look at gesture I naively thought there wouldn’t be much work on it – how wrong was I! There was about 200 years of research in the area of gesture already. I found this demoralising until I realised that only about 3 people had looked at architects and none had looked at education – a nice little gap was still left for me to squeeze into.

2) I thought it was fascinating

Gesture is a compulsive thing – you can’t help doing it. When you think about it as you do it, it becomes really hard to talk. Give it a try and you’ll see what I mean. Did you know that even blind people gesture? They gesture when they are on the phone – to other blind people! If we gesture to communicate with others, why would blind people need do it?

Obviously I still find gesture mysterious and fascinating, even after three years of looking at it. This curiosity and desire to know kept me going. When all else looked bleak and I was slamming doors in my house in a fit of PhD rage I could always return to and draw from this well of curiosity. I really don’t think I could have finished without this thirst to know -  I know that sounds dorky, but that’s how it was.

3) Other people said “wow – what a great topic” when I told them

Apart from one of the mothers at my son’s school who said with genuine disbelief “What the hell would you want to study that for!?” everyone else I talked to about my topic found it interesting. Especially (and this is the most important thing) all the architecture academics in my faculty, my home university and at conferences I went to.

Since academics found it interesting they would remember that I was doing it and send me articles. Lots of people would come to my seminars when I had work to present. I got a lot of help from others, I think because they genuinely wanted to know what I would find out.

4) It wasn’t too hot

Genetic algorithms in architecture used to be HOT. Who remembers that now? God – so early 2000′s… Gesture however is timeless. Others may dispute my findings, build on my work, dismiss it, but it will always be part of the discourse.

Of course, it is impossible for every topic to be timeless. Scientists in particular know it is highly unlikely their work will be relevant for more than 3 years. If it can’t be timeless it is good to work in a field that has the potential develop further, so you can still be a part of it as it moves on.

5) It had clear limits

This point relates back to point one. Since there was work in the field already there were pre-existing boundaries to the work I could do and stay ‘original’. Since I decided to focus on a location (gesture in architectural education) there was a lot that didn’t have to make it in to the thesis. The topic acted like a sieve which only certain things passed through.

How did you know you had the right topic – or are you still slightly green and hulky?

Oh – and thanks to @iambuttons for suggesting this week’s top 5!

So you want to get some money to do research…

It’s scholarship season in Australia at the moment. Many unis have the end of October as the cut off date for applying for an APA, the full living stipend paid by the Federal government. Well, you wouldn’t want to try to actually live on it – unless living on the smell of an oily rag for 3 years is your kind of fun… But I digress.

Grant proposal writing is a vital skill for any researcher, so I hope this post will be of interest to  people writing all sorts of grants or doing post doc applications.

I want to state upfront that although I was successful at getting a living stipend to do my PhD, I have never won a competitive grant. I have to rely mostly on published work in the area and the advice of others to come up with suggestions. Unfortunately much of the advice on the subject is dispensed to research students in the form of lists, which I find frustrating.

As I have said a few times now in this blog, the problem with a list is that it can be hard to turn into actions. Consider the following list of advice on writing successful grant applications which I compiled as I researched a recent talk on the topic:

Pick interesting problems
Clearly define your aims and objectives
Show you have read some of ‘the literature’
Make sure your project is feasible
Demonstrate you are the best person to do the job
Outline your methodology
Provide references
Address the budget

On the face of it these sound like eminently sensible things to do – but how do you go about doing them? For instance, what is an ‘interesting topic’? How much of ‘the literature’ do you have to include? What does ‘feasible’ mean when you don’t know what the outcomes will be?

Let’s take a step back for a moment and think about the problem of the grant application in a non listy way. Since academics generally are the ones who make decisions about how to award research money,  perhaps a better understanding of how academics make decisions can help us to write better grant applications?

Unfortunately there is very little research in the area of academic decision making. One notable exception is a book which I reviewed recently: “How professors think” by Michele Lamont. Lamont studied the decision making processes amongst 80 humanities academics who were tasked with awarding prestigious grants and scholarships. Her thesis is that, while academics might recognise excellence in slightly different ways, awarding grants decisions are a matter of ‘satisfying’ – or reaching the optimal solution, given a set of constraints.

What are these constraints? Some of them might surprise you. The initial shortlisting process was usually carried out by other, less experienced readers who served as ‘gatekeepers’. Once a proposal made it past this stage, the decisions by the panel were affected by a range of quite mundane things – such as the order that the grants are presented to the panelists, how much time was allowed to make decisions, who on the panel was most persuasive, who the other applicants are and what they are proposing.

All of the panelists Lamont interviewed took their responsibility seriously. They wanted to be sure the work proposed would get done.Most agreed that it was important for a grant application to be authentic: it should stem out of a deep and abiding interest in the topic at hand, no matter how obscure.

Now it is dangerous, of course, to generalise from qualitative research, but I think Lamont’s observations could carry across to the science disciplines and beyond. Although we vary in our disciplinary approaches, in some basic ways academics are similar. As researchers we are curiosity driven. We want to find stuff out – and argue about it. Piquing an academic’s curiosity is sure a way to get attention.

So I propose an alternative set of success strategies, based on some of Lamont’s observations:

Remember the panelists have to read a lot of proposals in a short time. There’s also a chance your proposal may get read initially by someone with a limited grasp on the field.  Your task is to explain the originality, significance and feasibility of the project and the appropriateness of the methods as concisely and clearly as possible. Therefore the first paragraph is vitally important and should convey what is new about the project and provoke excitement and interest in the reader.

Authenticity is important. Be honest about what the contribution will really be. If you are interested in the history of kitchen utensils because they tell us about how we have changed the way we eat over time – then just say so. Don’t try and pretend it has some kind of sustainability agenda because you think that’s ‘what gets funded’.

Remember that the panelists feel a deep sense of responsibility to make the right decision and not waste money. So include any and all information which will show that you are the right person for the job. If you worked as a dishwasher through college and developed your fascination with utensils by washing thousands upon thousands of them, perhaps it might be worth including this somehow?

Finally: think about resubmitting if you fail. The reason you failed may not be that your ideas were ‘bad’ or the method was wrong – it may simply have been that on that particular day you didn’t make the cut because someone else had a more interesting project than you did.

Do you have more suggestions? As always, I’d love to hear them.

Top five ways to avoid death by email

Email is one of contemporary life’s contradictions: at the same time a wonderful invention and a sure and steady productivity killer. A lot of people say the trick with email is to only do it at specific times, but I disagree. If, like me, you are a full blown email addict and need your hit, time management strategies simply aren’t going to cut it.

What you need is a system.

A 10 minute conversation with my brother in law @mnot early last year turned my email life around. @mnot is pretty smart; someone (whom he he didn’t even know) even wrote a wikipedia page about him. I wish I had had this conversation while I was doing my PhD, so I thought I should share it with you.

1. Doing email is like doing the dishes

The thing @mnot told me is that I needed to develop a new attitude to email. It is a task more like housework than letter writing. Now productivity writers claim that it is wrong to open your email at all before you start on a task, but this doesn’t work for me. Having a full and unattended to inbox is like a dirty kitchen – it’s hard to cook when there’s a mess.

Once I realised this I cultivated two modes of email attention, which I call ‘passing through’ and ‘eating the frogs’. In the passing through mode I aim to handle each new email as lightly as possible move on. If a mail needs more than 2 minutes to read and respond to it gets filed for later attention. This kind of mail is a ‘frog’, which has to be eaten at some point.

The passing through mode is like giving the kitchen what my mother called ‘a surface clean’. Email can be dealt with continuously – even as soon as it comes in – without bogging you down. You can eat the frogs later – at a time which is convenient.

2. It’s about what you do, not who you know

Of course the key to the passing through mode is an easy filing system, primarily so you don’t lose track of what you have dealt with and what is left to do. Previously I had an email filing system related to projects and to people. This meant I had a deep and wide folder structure; it took so long to file anything I wouldn’t bother half the time, so my inbox was always pages long.

@mnot encouraged me to spend time considering what I actually do in my job and develop folders based on this. I ended up with 5 folders instead of 19: ‘candidates’ (for my correspondence with and about PhD students); ‘teaching’; ‘research’; ‘projects’ and ‘admin’. Filing takes less thought now. If I need to find something from a specific person I use the search function on a folder – heaps quicker than scanning by eye.

I created a 5th called ‘pending’ for the frogs.

3. Eat the frogs

The pending folder is my ‘to do list’ – which I can choose to enter at a convenient time and start to eat the frogs. The trick with the pending folder is to visit it at least once a day and pick off what you can in the time you have set aside. Slowly but surely, longer term tasks will be dealt with and filed elsewhere. Of course new ones will be constantly added. Accept that the pending folder, unlike your inbox, will always have stuff in it.

4. Use your electronic calendar

There are two main reasons a mail takes more than 2 minutes and becomes a frog. Either I have to think about it and write a longer mail, or there are actions arising out of the mail. The frogs I have to think about sit in the pending folder for as long as it takes; for the action orientated frogs I use my calendar.

I’ve had an electronic calendar of some sort or other for years and years, but never really used it. When I started being a thesis whisperer (ie: gainfully employed) people started to use it to book me to speak, or consult and I started to respect its power. Now I use it to write notes to my future self about actions arising from emails. I plant the notes on the days I plan to do that task or get back to someone about something. Then I can delete or file the frog.

5. Develop a terse, yet friendly email style

Many people don’t know how to write effective emails. This probably a topic for another time, but I think it’s worth mentioning here that emails should be as brief as possible. Try to say what you want from the person, or would like them to do, within the first line or two. I usually write quite abrupt emails. This is contrary to my urge to be polite, but I write for a living and only have so many words per day to spend on emails. As a compromise I tend to use smileys and exclamation marks at times, to give a sense of a person behind the words.

So that’s all there is to it grasshoppers. Of course there are some days I have to spend more time on email than I would like, but at least the task is simplified. My system works for me and @mnot – what works for you?

Ambivalence – can it help you with your PhD?

Early this week I read an interesting article by Shirley Wang in the Wall Street Journal on ambivalence. It got me thinking again about the personal qualities one needs to cultivate while doing a PhD. Apparently some people tend to ambivalent states of mind more easily than others. The central claim in Wang’s article, based on various bits of psychological research, is that a tendency towards high levels of ambivalence – the state of having mixed feelings – can have profound effects on your life and career path.

While a tendency to ambivalence might be a disadvantage in some circumstances, such as in quick decision making, high ambivalence be taken as a sign of emotional and intellectual maturity. Children are less ambivalent and tend to see the world in black and white – as full of polar opposites. For example, a child may view the eating of vegetables with disdain because they don’t taste great, but an adult will probably eat the vegetables, even if they don’t like the taste, because of the health benefits. In other words – an adult has learnt to see vegetables in more complex ways. As the Wang puts it:

“Ambivalent people … tend to systematically evaluate all sides of an argument before coming to a decision. They scrutinize carefully the evidence that is presented to them, making lists of pros and cons, and rejecting overly simplified information”

The key message I took away from the article for the thesis writing business is that ambivalent people show a higher tolerance for uncertainty. This might be a distinct advantage in the whole PhD game, because it is an endeavour fraught with uncertainty.

Uncertainty can manifest in different ways, depending on your discipline.

At a recent Science Communicators mixer event I had a long discussion with a young scientist who was contemplating leaving her PhD study. She told me what had attracted her to science in the first place was the certainty of it all, but post graduate work was not what she expected: “In my undergraduate years when I would mix x with y and you get result z” she said, “But now when I do my experiments I don’t even know whether z is there or not. I can’t stand it. I just want some clear answers”.

This dilemma may seem strange to non scientists, who tend to see science as the most black and white of all the disciplines. But makes sense when you consider how training in the sciences operates and what expectations are generated as a result.

In undergraduate lab classes, students tend to replicate known experiments – ones that the lecturers know ‘work’ (produce reliable and predictable results). However, in a quest for new knowledge, new experiments have to be designed. It can be difficult to know when these experiments have actually worked: whether the results that are being looked at are actually results, or merely an artifact of the process.

Learning to be a scientist entails learning to get used to this constant ambivalent condition and systematically working for reliable results. If you are interested, this theme is dealt with well in the film “Naturally Obsessed: the making of a scientist” which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago.

In the humanities uncertainty tends to be more visible. In areas like sociology, history, cultural studies and so on students are taught to argue persuasively for a position. There are no ‘right or wrong’ in most cases – it is the ability to make the argument that matters. Part of the process of this argumentation might be to point out differing opinions, so having mixed feelings about your topic can be a clear advantage.

However, this doesn’t mean that tolerating ambiguity and different points of view isn’t hard for these students. Some people in the humanities can come to have very fixed world views and deeply held political convictions. This can be a slippery slope; as a professor at my Alma Mater used to put it: “Some people don’t recognise there’s a difference between doing a PhD and changing the world”. In other words there is a danger of losing sight of the primacy of the argument, in favour of the position that is being taken.

I occasionally see a different kind of uncertainty in the creative arts and design students; this one has to do with identity. Many of these students are practitioners, sometimes of long standing and more used to making stuff than writing about it.

Taking on the posture of researcher – one who makes meaning through writing as well as actions – can feel un-natural and may, at times, conflict with an artistic impulse to create. Suspending an artistic identity for while and taking on a writerly self can be just as unsettling and difficult. In addition the status of the work can become uncertain: it is no longer ‘just art’ or ‘just design’ but also ‘research’. Many students come out of this process deeply changed. Change can be a desirable thing, but, as any therapist will tell you, change provokes mixed feelings which can be hard to live with.

Learning to live with ambivalence can be difficult – more so if you are the type of person who craves stability and clear cut boundaries. I now find myself in the curious position of being ambivalent about ambivalence because the inability to make decisions can be as damaging as any of the issues I have outlined above. So, as usual, I find I have no clear cut answers and yet more questions! How might ambivalence be advantageous to you? When might it be a problem?