"Check your underpants daily."
That is my newest piece of advice for anyone trying to become/remain productive in graduate school or a postdoctoral position. It will not be quick advice as it will need some amount of explaining.
Which I will do now.
Some of you may have had similar mothers, but when I was a child my mother always stressed to me the importance of leaving the house wearing undergarments that were fresh, clean, and not in a state of disrepair. The fear I was supposed to internalize was that I might get into an accident, and be discovered by others (e.g., ambulance attendants, emergency room physicians, passersby at the accident scene) to be wearing dirty and/or tattered drawers. You must (in case your mother never imparted to you this warning) understand that this was the tragedy--to be revealed to be wearing soiled or inadequate unmentionables: not getting into a bad, possibly fatal accident.
The lesson I extract from this for my newest advice is that sometimes anticipatory shame must serve as a motivation for something one should strive to do anyway. So, I know that I should want to make constant and timely progress towards my various tasks--finishing my dissertation summary for an award application, starting my pilot chapter revision, continuing with my data cleaning and analyses, etc. etc.--solely because I am a serious and conscientious scholar.
But there are days when that is not enough.
And on those days, what gets me and keeps me moving is the idea that on my way home from my office I may get into a terrible accident. At some later date when my distraught spouse, friends, colleagues, and professional mentors try to reconstruct the projects I was working on at the time of my tragedy, I do NOT want them to discover that I hadn't accomplished a dagg-on thing. No, my projects may not be "complete" as most normal folks understand the term. But I will have coherent notes of my thought processes of the projects that were in the earliest stages of development. If I said the day before that I would get to points G, H, I, and K on a certain project, at the time of my accident I will have at least fully achieved H with a clear indication of making a dent in I and K. There will be a computer trail of documents worked and analyses run and relevant searches googled.
My "underpants" will be found to be acceptable.
And my mother will be so proud (if somewhat saddened by my untimely demise...)
Posted by perry032 at March 2, 2007 07:08 PM