"Many of the junior faculty, post-docs and grad students I work with have difficulty juggling tasks. As one junior faculty member put it: “When I focus on one project, the rest of my life seems to fall apart. But if I scatter my energy, I don’t get anything finished.
“I’m keeping up with my teaching and my departmental duties but none of my papers are moving forward. It is my second year on the tenure track and I still haven’t gotten articles out from my dissertation.”
Do you have this type of difficulty?" . . .
1 comment:
This was a totally serendipitous posting for me to read today, because JUST this afternoon, I had a meeting with a professor I'm doing research with and we were talking about this exact same thing. I was saying that I was trying to figure out a linear progression for a model of how pain causes spiritual growth, but the more I read, the more things became more "circular" in my head. I loved what this guy said: "
Get things down on paper first. Then rearrange, adjust, and tweak. Right now, I have three clients in the humanities who keep getting stuck on the outlines of their dissertations. As they plan the sequence of their arguments, they get stuck because every theory and every argument can be connected in a multitude of ways. There is no perfect order, I tell them. In life, things are not linear and don’t follow a single sequence. Complex ideas are truly connected in a multitude of logical ways. Write first, I suggest. Work with the outline you’ve got and, as you’re writing, if you find that things come up in a different way, then take that path. Don’t worry about whether it is the “right” path, or even the “best” path. Get it down on paper. Then assess."
I just think this advice is really going to help me, because until I read it, I was kind of frozen with all this research in front of me going "Which way do I GO with all this???" So thanks, Sean!!! :)
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