I was just on Andrew Keen’s show “Keen On” to talk about Speaking of Race.
You can watch it here.
Month: January 2022
On planning (especially for dissertation writers)
A while ago (probably several months), someone said they hated planning, and I’ve been meaning since then to write a blog post about it. It’s even been on my to-do list since then. To some people, that might look ironic–here I am giving advice about planning when I have been planning to do something for months and not getting to it.
That only seems ironic if we imagine planning to do something as making an iron-clad commitment we are ethically obligated to fulfill immediately. Thinking about planning that way works for some people, but for most people, it seems to me, it’s terrifying and shaming.
Planning isn’t necessarily a process that guarantees you’ll achieve everything you ever imagine yourself doing, let alone as soon as you first imagine it. Nor does planning require that you make a commitment to yourself that you must fulfill or you’re a failure. It’s about thinking about what must v. what should v. what would be nice to get done, somehow imagined within the parameters of time, cognitive style, resources, energy, support, and various other constraints. Sometimes things you’d like to get done remain in your planning for a long time.
There are people who are really good at setting specific objectives and knocking them off the list, who believe that you shouldn’t set an objective you won’t achieve, and who are very rigid about planning. They often get a lot done, and that’s great. I’m glad it works for them. Unfortunately, some of them are self-righteous and shaming because they assume that this system–because it works for them–can work for everyone. That it clearly doesn’t is not a sign that the method is not a universally valid solution, but a sign of the weakness on the part of people for whom it doesn’t work. They insist that this (sometimes very elaborate) system will work if you apply yourself, not acknowledging different constraints, and so they end up shaming others. They seem to write a lot of the books on planning, as well as blog posts.
And that’s the main point of this post. There is a lot of great advice out there about planning, but an awful lot of it is clickbait self-help rhetoric. There’s a lot of shit out there. There are some ponies. But there is so much shaming.
There are a lot of good reasons that some people are averse to planning—reasons about which they shouldn’t be ashamed. People who’ve spent too much time around compulsive critics or committed shamesters have trouble planning because they know that they will not perfectly enact their plan, and so even beginning to plan means imagining how they will fail. And then failure to be perfect will seem to prove the compulsive critic or committed shamester right. Thus, for people like that, making a plan is an existential terrordome. Personally, I think compulsive critics and committed shamesters are all just engaged in projection and deflection about how much they hate themselves, but that’s just one of many crank theories I have. Of course we will fail to enact our plan—nothing works out as planned—because we cannot actually perfectly and completely control our world. In my experience, compulsive critics and committed shamesters are people mostly concerned about protecting their fantasy that the world is under (their) control.
People who have trouble letting go of details find big-picture planning overwhelming; people who loathe drudgery find it boring; people trying to plan something they’ve never before done (a dissertation, wedding, trip to Europe, long-term budget) just get a kind of blank cloud of unknowing when they think about making a plan for it. People who are inductive thinkers (they begin with details and work up) have trouble planning big projects because it requires an opposite way of thinking. People who are deductive thinkers can have trouble imagining first steps. People who use planning to manage anxiety can get paralyzed when a situation requires making multiple plans.
I think planning of some kind is useful. I think it’s really helpful, in fact, and I think—if people can find the right approach to planning—it can reduce anxiety. But it is never to going to erase anxiety about a high-stakes project. And a method of planning shouldn’t increase anxiety.
Because there are different reasons that people are averse to planning, and people get anxious in different ways and moments, there is no process that will work for everyone. If a process doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or you’ll never be able to plan; it just means you need to find a process that works for you. And, to be blunt, that process might involve therapy (to be even more blunt, it almost always does).
Here are some books that people trying to write dissertations have found helpful. Anyone who wants to recommend something in the comments is welcome to do so, and it’s especially helpful if people say why it worked for them. Some of these are getting out of date, and yet people still like them.
Choosing Your Power, Wayne Pernell (self-help generally)
Destination Dissertation, Sonja Foss and William Waters
Getting Things Done, David Allen (the basic principle is good, but it’s getting very aged in terms of technology)
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey (another one that is getting long in the tooth)
I haven’t done much with this website, but the research is strong: https://woopmylife.org/
There are some things that can help. If you don’t like planning because it’s drudgery, then make it fun. Buy a new kind of planner every year. Use colors to code your goals. If planning paralyzes you because of fear of failure, then set low “must” goals that you can definitely achieve, and have a continuum of what should get done. Get into some kind of group that will encourage you. If you feel that you’re facing a white wall of uncertainty, work with someone who has done what you’re trying to do (e.g., your diss director) to create a reasonable plan. This strategy works best if they see part of their job as reducing anxiety, and if they have a way of planning that works with yours.
One of the toxically seductive things about being a student is that you don’t have to have a plan through most of undergraduate and even graduate school. You have to pick a major, but it’s possible to pick one not because of any specific plan–it’s the one in which we succeed (a completely reasonable way to pick a major, I think), and then we might go to graduate school in that thing at which we’re succeeding (it makes sense), and in graduate school we’re given a set of courses we have to take. The “plan,” so to speak, might be nothing more than “complete the assignments with deadlines set by faculty.” Those deadlines are all within a fifteen week period, and it’s relatively straightforward to meet them through sheer panic and caffeine. Then, suddenly (for many people), we are supposed to have a plan for finishing your dissertation, with deadlines that are years apart, for things we’ve never done—a prospectus, a dissertation. We have to know how to plan something long-term, with contingencies.
In my experience, planning in academia means being able to engage in a multiple timeline plan. Having one plan that requires that you get a paper accepted by this time, a job by that time, a course release by then increases anxiety. It seems to me that people tend to do better with an approach that enables a distinction between hard deadlines (if this doesn’t happen by that date, funding will run our) and various degrees of aspirational achievements.
I think this challenge is present in lots of fields: you can’t determine to hit a certain milestone, as much as hope to do so, and try to figure out what things you can do between now and then to make that outcome likely. Thus, there are approaches out there helpful for that kind of contingent planning. But, just to be clear, there are a lot that really aren’t.
I also think it’s helpful to find a way of planning that is productive given our particular habits, anxieties, ways of thinking. People who are drawn to closure seem to thrive with a method that is panic-inducing for people who are averse to it, for instance. So, it might take some time to find a method (it took me till well into my first job, but that was before the internet).
Writing a dissertation is hard; there is nothing that will make it easy. There are things that will make it harder, and doing it without a way of planning that works fits personality, situation, and so on is one. But there is no method of planning that will work for everyone, and there is no shame if some particular method isn’t working.
On finding my notes and files from my dissertation
I recently found my notes and files from when I was writing my dissertation. I’ll start with saying that I’ve had a respectable publishing career, but hooyah, that dissertation was a hot steaming mess. So was my process of writing it. So, if you’re trying to write a dissertation, and you’re in the midst of a chaotic writing process and you think that what you’re writing is awful, it can’t be worse than either my process or product. You’ll be fine.
There’s a longer version of this, but here I’ll list a few ways that things went wrong. First, I was trying to use a technology that lots of people used (a notecard system), but it really didn’t work for me. I didn’t know that, and I couldn’t have known it till I tried it. It got me too caught up in details, and I’m an inductive thinker (and writer), and it worsened all the flaws of inductive writing (assuming that if you give enough details people will infer your argument).
There are lots of technologies that people now use—zotero, commenting on pdf—and they work for some people and not for others. If one that other people are using doesn’t work for you, then committing to it with more will won’t make it work. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure; it means there’s a bad match between that technology and you, and the technology needs to go.
Second, I was working with faculty who were not in the conversation I was trying to enter. That was simply a function of my topic and department. My committee was really good, but they couldn’t tell me what to read or what conferences to attend. Make sure someone on your committee knows the conversation, or change the conversation.
Third, I was modelling my argument on books I admired that were written by advanced scholars. Your dissertation, in terms of scope and structure, should be modelled on books written by junior scholars or other dissertations in your department.
Fourth, people writing their dissertations should be prohibited from making any major decisions regarding things like marriage.
Fifth, I was in a highly competitive department in which something like a writing group would probably not have been helpful, but I wish I had found one. It’s hard, though, since people outside your field will often give advice that isn’t appropriate for yours.
How things went right.
First through fifth: my dissertation director was a smart, insightful, and kind person. He was a student of Thomas Kuhn’s, and so stepped back and saw processes. When you’re writing a dissertation, there are moments you are completely paralyzed. It’s because we’ve often gotten through undergrad and coursework without thinking about structure very much. So, you go from thinking about how to structure a 20-page paper (or not, you just make it a list) to how to structure something that is 200 pages. You have to decide what’s background, where to explain that background, how to position yourself in regard to other scholarship, how much of that scholarship to discuss, where to start…so many things that just don’t come up in a seminar paper.
My director, Arthur Quinn, taught a course about 18th century rhetoric that was entirely histories of the 18th century that happened to emphasize rhetoric, and we spend the semester talking about their methods, structures, assumptions, rhetoric. It was one of four classes I had in that program that were historiography (maybe five), but I didn’t know that at the time. What I did know is that he was asking us to step up a ladder, from just thinking about our data, or our argument, to the various ways we might make that argument. That course influenced every single grad course I taught.
At one point, completely paralyzed in my writing, I was in a grad student office, rearranging the Gumby-like figures my office-mate had into a baseball game. His office was next door, and he stopped, looked in, and then went to his office. A while later, he came into my office and said, “Here’s what you’re arguing.” He gave me an outline for my dissertation. I started writing again.
My dissertation did not end up with that outline. But his giving me that direction got me writing. He was generally a hands-off director, but he knew the moment he had to step in.
Now that I’ve seen a lot of grad students, and a lot of directors, I appreciate him so much. A lot of scholars rely on panic to motivate themselves, and so they sincerely believe they are helping their students when they deliberately work their students into a panic. Many rely on shaming themselves in order to write, and so they think that shaming students is helpful. Some forget how hard it is to write a dissertation, and so they dismiss or minimize the concerns of their students. Some believe that they benefitted from how isolating writing a dissertation is, and so they believe that refusing to give directive advice is helping their students. Some have writing processes in which you have to have the entire argument determined before you start, and so they insist their students do. Some drift around in data and so encourage their students to do so. All of these processes work for someone—that’s why people adopt them—but none of them work for all students, and none of them work for any one student all the time.
And that is what Art Quinn taught me.
Self-help rhetoric has a pony, but there’s a lot of shit, and some of it is toxic
There’s a joke my family used to tell.
Two parents have twins who are each irritating in their own way. One is relentlessly pessimistic and griping, and the other irritatingly optimistic. Finally, fed up, the parents decide that they’ll give the pessimist gifts so wonderful he can’t possibly be unhappy, and the optimist a gift so awful he can’t possibly be positive about it. Birthday morning, they send the pessimist to a room filled with all the best and most desirable toys, and the optimist to a room filled with horse shit.
They wait a bit, and then go to the pessimist. He’s sitting, sulking, in the middle of the room. They say, “But, why are you so unhappy?” And he says, “Because you gave me all this crap, and not what I really wanted.” They’re discouraged, but they go on to the other room, thinking, “He can’t possibly like horse shit.” They get there, and find the optimist cheerfully shovelling the horse shit out of the room. They ask, “What are you doing?” And he says, “With all this shit, there has to be a pony someplace.”
I’ve read a lot of self-help (some of it from as far back as the 17th century), and there’s often a pony, and I like the ponies. But there’s also a lot of horse shit. As it happens, I don’t need horse shit, but other people might be looking for manure, so they might find it useful. Or they might find ponies I didn’t notice. I’m grateful for self-help rhetoric.
Some of that shit, however, is toxic.
Self-help rhetoric has a structure. It says you have this problem, you’ve tried to solve this problem in various ways, and none of them have worked. It proposes a solution to the problem (the plan), shows how the plan will solve the problem, shows it’s feasible, and, ideally, argues that there won’t be unintended consequences worse than the problem it’s solving. In other words, it relies on the stock issues of policy argumentation.
I like policy argumentation, so I don’t think self-help rhetoric using that structure is a problem. Like any other discourse, it can be a problem depending on how the stock issues in policy argumentation are used. When self-help rhetoric is damaging, it tends to engage in shaming and/or fear-mongering in the need part. Often, it relies on identifying the problem as at least partially that we are bad people, or members of a bad group. It often says that the cause of the problem is a personal failing on our part and/or the machinations of a malevolent out-group. Thus, even though it isn’t necessarily political, it has a lot of qualities of demagoguery.
The plan they propose is to join their group, buy their product, pay for their advice. An important part of the argument for their plan is that they and only they or their product can solve our problem. They say the plan is feasible (is this policy practical) because you can pay in installments, or you just have to buy this one thing, read this one book, watch these free videos. They deal with stock issue of solvency (how will this plan solve the ill) in two ways. First, they provide testimonials, sometimes by representatives of the five percent (or less) that have succeeded (so far), or, second, by simply asserting that their group/plan/product will solve the problem if you commit with enough will.
Many of these ways of arguing are shared with discourses outside of self-help, and sometimes we argue one of these ways because it’s true. If our car’s brakes are failing, someone insisting that we might die if we don’t deal with this issue is not fear-mongering, and it may be that our options are limited. But it’s fairly rare that there is only one possible solution. There are many places that can fix our brakes, we might be able to take the bus for a while instead of driving, we might be able to borrow a car, or even buy a new one. So, one of the things that makes some self-help rhetoric toxic is that it says there is only one solution, and it’s the one they’re advocating.
Second, it says that, if this solution doesn’t work (and, honestly, I think every solution fails from time to time), it is our fault—we did it wrong, usually because of our inadequate will. So, there is no way that their plan/policy/product can be proven wrong because it can never fail; only you can. That evasion of accountability moves this whole discourse out of the rational, or even reasonable, and into the realm of a religious—perhaps even cult-like—way of thinking about the world. Because we failed, we have to recommit with greater effort and resources; we need to pay for another workshop, buy more products, perhaps even spend more time with other consumers of this product/members of this ideology. When it gets really toxic is when it says that we shouldn’t listen to any information that might weaken our resolve or make us doubt what we are being told.[1]
Just to be clear: what I’m saying is that the toxic kinds of self-help set you up for failure. And they set you up so that your failure will make you more dependent on the group/product.
It does this partially through appealing to the binary paired terms of good is to bad as pure is to mixed.
Good Pure Pride Determination
_____ :: _____ :: _____ :: ____________
Bad Mixed Shame “Doubt”
That we have this problem (procrastination, debt, low income) means that we are in the category of bad (the shaming part). The solution is for us to become good. If we want to be good, we need to think in absolute terms, with absolute (i.e., pure) commitment, cleansing our thinking of nuance, uncertainty, doubt, purifying our world of bad influences who might encourage us to doubt. We need to commit to this one group or one policy, and stick with it regardless of whether it works because, if it didn’t work, it’s our fault for not believing in it enough. In toxic discourses, purity becomes about opting for commitment rather than consideration. They say that we need to believe rather than think.
Far too much of our public (and even private) discourse about policy issues is the toxic kind of self-help rhetoric.
[1] Thus, as far as what makes something a pony is self-help rhetoric that is clearly presented as one way of doing things, doesn’t frame the issue as Good v. Evil, doesn’t promise its solution as one that will always work, avoids shaming, sets out reasonable expectations, recommends practices/products from which it doesn’t profit (or even benefit), can often be combined with advice/practices from elsewhere, and doesn’t present deeper commitment (more purchases) as the only possible response to setbacks or failure.