" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

INT/EXT. CAR/ SOUTHWEST HIGHWAY — DAY.

You sit in the driver’s seat. You’ve pulled off to the shoul­der. The pas­sen­ger door is open and Doubt has left the car and sits cross-legged in the dirt, arms folded.

Me
Hey Doubt. I’m sorry I ignored you, I’m ready to lis­ten to you now.

Doubt
It’s about time, GAWD! Okay, lis­ten: I don’t even know why we’re still going. You’re going to fail at this thing. It’s going to happen.

Me
Okay. That’s harsh.

Doubt
Well, sorry to say, it’s the truth, I’m just try­ing to pre­pare you.

Me
What good does that do?

Doubt
Give up! Then it’s like rip­ping off a bandaid. You’ll show every­one that you’re really not that great and well, once every­one knows that, you can go on with­out wor­ry­ing that peo­ple might find you out. Don’t tell them you suck, just show them already. GET. IT. OVER-WITH!

Me
Hmm, you know what Doubt? I hear you. But, if it’s so inevitable, why don’t we just keep going and see what happens.

Doubt
But you’re going to fail.

Me
So. I’ll either fail now or fail later. If I’m des­tined to fail, I’m not ready to stop just yet. I don’t want to sit with you in that ditch, wait­ing to die. We’ll get to the inevitable fail­ure soon. In the mean­time, let’s just keep going for a while.

Doubt stands up, dusts her­self off -

Doubt
All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Me
Noted. Now just get in the fuck­ing car already so we can go.

Dis­claimer: Apolo­gies to those of you who are not Doc­tor Who fans. If you have love for British sci­ence fic­tion that runs the gamut of cheesy to OMG!AWESOME! you should check out the lat­est reboot(s) of Doc­tor Who. It’s on Net­flix and at your local pub­lic library.

So my increas­ingly opin­ion­ated, stub­born, and won­der­ful 2.5 year old daugh­ter is sleep­ing errat­i­cally. Some days she takes her reg­u­larly sched­uled “epic nap” of 3.5 hours, and other days she doesn’t nap at all. This, my friends, is a big prob­lem. I do ALL OF MY WORK when she sleeps. Her naps equal time. No time means no work. No work means I don’t fin­ish my dis­ser­ta­tion. Not fin­ish­ing means I wasted the past 7.5 years on a caf­feine– and whiskey-filled dante-esque descent into mad­ness with­out pay­off. So it’s time to shake up my rou­tine and squeeze more time out of my day, which is not easy when writ­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion, tak­ing care of a tod­dler, and man­ag­ing my brain so I can keep an even keel through all of it.

The only real rem­edy to this new time cri­sis — besides get­ting my own TARDIS — is to chip some time out of the rest of my day. For many of us, this can seem impos­si­ble. So I’ve devel­oped a strat­egy. I’m not sure how it’s going to pan out, but I have to do some­thing and if you have any fur­ther advice, please share.

Here’s my strat­egy so far:

1. I work one week­end day. My work­week, prior to Nap Break­down 2012, was pretty reg­u­lar. Up by 7, at the gym by 9:30, work for a few hours, then spend time with fam­ily. My evenings and week­ends were free from dis­ser­ta­tion work and I felt like I had a pretty good bal­ance. Now that my work time dur­ing the week is out of whack, I feel like I’m cheat­ing on my dis­ser­ta­tion when I’m doing other stuff. This is not good. It makes me anx­ious and irri­ta­ble when I’m not work­ing and hur­ried and dis­ap­pointed when I do finally get to work. So the week is now my col­lect­ing time for my week­end day. I write when I can, read when I can, and col­lect enough stuff so my Sat­ur­day or Sun­day has all of the ingre­di­ents for a pro­duc­tive writ­ing day.

2. YMCA Child­watch. I’ve men­tioned the YMCA before, but let me just extol it’s virtues here again. I was a mem­ber of the Brook­lyn Y and their Child­watch pro­gram was fan­tas­tic. They gave you two hours of free babysit­ting while you worked out, or, like I did some­days, read qui­etly in a cor­ner. The Down­town Berke­ley YMCA unfor­tu­nately charges for their child watch, but it’s still SO worth it! The staff are highly trained, incred­i­bly nice, and there are plenty of them. My kid has a blast every time she goes. Three days a week, I work­out, two days a week, I sit on the sofa in the lobby to work. That’s an extra four hours of work in my week, and if the kid actu­ally naps that day, I’m way ahead of the game.

3. Get­ting up ear­lier. This is the cra­zi­est habit I’m try­ing to form. Wak­ing up two hours early. That’s right, I’ve been wak­ing up at 5am all week. Now there are a few of you who do this and I used to think you had a meta­bolic imbal­ance or you were witches or some­thing. Need­less to say: I get it now. Wak­ing up before the world is the best Cheat Code out there. The only prob­lem? Actu­ally get­ting your ass out of bed. My “Just go back to sleep voice” — who I sus­pect is my lit­tle hater in dis­guise, is a per­sis­tent bas­tard. “You don’t have to do this,” it says, “You’re so tired. Just sleep a lit­tle longer.” So my con­scious voice has to scream, “SIT UP! WASH YOUR FACE! HAVE SOME COFFEE!” and it’s worked so far. I feel accom­plished before the day starts giv­ing me free­dom to not think about my dis­ser­ta­tion when doing all of life’s other stuff.

So how do you squeeze more time out of your day?

This is a oldie, but oh-so-relevant goodie. Jay Smooth — one of my favorite video blog­gers and founder of WBAI’s Under­ground Rail­road, the longest run­ning hip hop show in New York — breaks down the Lit­tle Hater.

The Lit­tle Hater is the voice of doubt in your head and there’s some­thing about his pars­ing the logic of the Lit­tle Hater that weak­ens it for me and gives me an out from the hater spiral.

Since I moved to Cal­i­for­nia, I haven’t blogged at all and my work on my dis­ser­ta­tion has fallen off a bit. Need­less to say, my Lit­tle Hater was in over­drive. Here it is in a nutshell:

• It tells me that my ideas aren’t worth anything.
• That all praise received in the past was a prod­uct of trick­ing said prais­ers into think­ing I was more tal­ented than I am. (Never mind that pulling off that kind of trick­ery would make me a witch in pos­ses­sion of mag­i­cal pow­ers that should enable me to fin­ish my dis­ser­ta­tion. #AccioDis­ser­ta­tion!)
• And lastly, My Lit­tle Hater is a revi­sion­ist mofo. It goes back to sparks of insight and tells me “that was a dumb idea, what were you think­ing?” I lit­er­ally have to write notes to myself that say, “This is still a good idea, stick with it” just to shut my Lit­tle Hater up.

So I’m tak­ing a stand with my Lit­tle Hater and say­ing, “Not today.” How about you? What’s your lit­tle hater like?

Note: If you like this video, Jay Smooth started post­ing Ill Doc­trine again with reg­u­lar­ity for AnimalNewYork.com.

See Also: The Bal­lad of the Lit­tle Hater

I started writ­ing this post in an empty apart­ment. My hus­band got a job in Cal­i­for­nia and so the last few weeks were busy with prepa­ra­tions, both mate­r­ial and emo­tional, for the “big move” West. Mov­ing takes up emo­tional space: when you’re not fill­ing out change of address forms and can­cel­ing util­i­ties, you’re run­ning “the list” through your head and expect­edly, my dis­ser­ta­tion has slowed to a crawl. Big life changes are always a chal­lenge when work­ing on a the­sis or dis­ser­ta­tion, but they don’t have to be fatal for your project.

Here are some steps to keep up with your dis­ser­ta­tion dur­ing major life events:

1) Don’t over­promise. We went to Oak­land to house-hunt and when I returned I thought three weeks was suf­fi­cient time to com­plete my next chap­ter. This, in a nut­shell, was wildly opti­mistic. We had movers and pack­ers come and hav­ing never expe­ri­enced this before, I thought my job was done — that what­ever we had to do in the three weeks before our move was mar­ginal, leav­ing plenty of time for writ­ing. Ridicu­lous! I barely scraped together a 4 page out­line for my final writ­ing group meet­ing. Les­son? Don’t do this. If you’re mov­ing, give your­self a month before and a month after to get back into the swing of things, and if you can help it, don’t promise ANYTHING.

2) Check in. When going through a move, you don’t have to aban­don your work, at least, not alto­gether. It helps me to check in with my work, as a reminder. I make it a point to write a 200 word abstract on my cur­rent chap­ter as a writ­ing exer­cise. I keep that abstract in it’s own scrivener page and check in to read it as often as I can. When I do read the abstract, I jot down a few notes and ques­tions in the same doc­u­ment so I have a record of my thoughts. This coun­ter­acts a major hin­drance to writ­ing: momen­tum loss. If I’m away from work too long, I for­get what I was work­ing on. And when I for­get, I grow increas­ingly anx­ious about where to go next because I don’t remem­ber where I was going when I started. Check­ing in keeps your head in the game.

3) Meet with your com­mit­tee and/or writ­ing group. I met with two com­mit­tee mem­bers before I left New York and they gave great feed­back for next steps. I also pre­sented a 4-page out­line to my writ­ing group for feed­back on next steps, clar­ity, and orga­ni­za­tion. I recorded all meet­ings and once we’re set­tled, first thing on my “To-Do List” is to tran­scribe those meet­ing notes. I will then form those notes into a to-do list that I will use to get started again.

4) Be easy on your­self. If you’re any­thing like me, you’re scared to death of tak­ing too much time away from your dis­ser­ta­tion, for fear of los­ing “it.” But lis­ten, a move is a BFD and incred­i­bly stress­ful, so get a new shower cur­tain and wel­come mat, the work will always be there.