One afternoon this summer, I found myself running in the rain. It started soon after I did, thoroughly soaking me before I turned around. I like running because it gives me time to reflect, but running in the rain is not a particular pleasant experience. How did I end up out here with soggy shoes, barely able to see through spotty glasses? The short answer is because I didn’t plan to.
Self-Help or Self-Sabotage?
I have enjoyed a lot of self-help books and podcasts, such as the OG Seven Habits by Steven Covey. I think that many people have good things to say about time management, self-leadership, etc. One of the most helpful things I have taken away from these resources is the importance of reflection and intentionality. Choosing goals, ordering activities, and assessing progress are all important in reaching meaningful accomplishments.
However, this can easily be taken too far and result in a never-ending cycle of goal-setting and planning. These meta activities which were once meant to support the achievement of career and life goals actually parasitize the time and energy required to make progress. At worst this can become self-reinforcing when a lack of progress motivates more assessment, reflection, goal-setting, and planning. Thus, planning becomes the end in-and-of itself and self-help becomes self-sabotage.
Making Progress
I fell into this cycle during my PhD program. I spent many hours creating spreadsheets to help me plan and assess progress towards goals. I looked for project management resources and online courses. I learned about Gantt charts and tried to make them in R (spoilers: you can, but why?). And so a year passed in which the only measure of progress was a growing list of papers in my Zotero library. Only when deadlines started carrying consequences did I prioritize progress and finish the bulk of my dissertation work in about six months.
My final dissertation project was the biggest piece and consisted of a large meta-analysis. In a couple months I screened nearly 5000 abstracts and 500 documents, then coded several dozen variables for 150 of those documents. If you have done a meta-analysis then you would know that a meta-analysis with 150 documents (and 450 effect sizes) often takes teams of researchers and students the same or longer amount of time to complete. The only reason why I was able to work long hours efficiently for so long is because the progress was tangible and exciting. The progress was itself motivating.
At this point, you might say that I did make significant progress during my stalled out year - it just wasn’t visible. And yes, it is true that I learned a lot and practiced important skills - in hindsight, I was making some progress. Nevertheless, I consistently failed to reach self-set goals and the effort I spent setting those goals and tinkering with my behavior was truly wasted. When I finally made progress, it was not because I budgeted time, journaled, set goals, gamified common tasks, etc. These things would have stalled my progress and killed my motivation. I only knew that I had a sound plan and that I was making progress. Thus, it was relatively easy to get up early and work late.
When Progress is Not Apparent
Unfortunately, visible progress is not always possible. Sometimes you need to work without knowing when or where it will end. This was certainly true for me in the first few years of my PhD when I did not know what I would do for my dissertation. The best thing I have found to do is to develop small, clearly-defined tasks that overlap and share categories with larger goals. For me, some examples of such tasks include browsing the lastest journal issues or writing a blog post like this one.1 Progress can then be defined as completing these tasks on some periodic basis.
When I was stalled out that one year developing a plan for my dissertation, I should have defined progress as writing summaries or short topical papers with the papers I was reading. Instead of two years or so of haphazard work defined by anxious uncertainty, I would have quickly developed my interests and my capacity to pursue them. I could have started writing my dissertation manuscript with dozens of pages already written on key topics. As a general rule, I don’t have regrets2 but one of the few I do have is not using this time more effectively.
Running
Completing a marathon is an aspiration of mine. I do not know when I will, but I would like to in the next few years. I also aspire to live a long, productive life and to be as fit as my Grampa who could outwalk his grandkids in his 80s. I could plan and track progress towards completing a marathon, but I cannot plan and tinker my way into health. Speaking from personal experience, it is difficult to develop an exercise habit when you constantly change exercise programs or types.
I ran in the rain that summer day because I didn’t plan to. I had developed the habit of going for a run when I had a free hour in the afternoon. I did not have a plan on which days I would run or at what time. Neither did I complicate my running with gear (just running shoes and earbuds) or routes (just a convenient loop) or target times (just go). These things are not bad and might be really helpful in reaching specific goals. But if they are preventing you from getting time and miles, then they need to go. It really is true that the perfect can be the enemy of the good.
Footnotes
For me, blogging is a way to exercise my writing skills and to pay back the many blog posts that I have found helpful or interesting.↩︎
Regrets don’t make sense to me. We are the people we are because of what we have done and experienced. If I had the ability to act on my regrets, changing my past accordingly, then I wouldn’t be the person I am today to regret it. The better question to me is what can I learn, how can I change in light of what I know now? Hopefully, others can also benefit from my experiences, and thus have fewer regrets themselves.↩︎