How I stopped wasting time
I have been working really hard the past few months. I slowed down a bit last week to cool down, recharge and become active again. In this post, I will write how I morphed from an procrastinating grad student to a productive one.
I know from my conversations with my friends that grad students waste a lot of time. They usually operate in bursts --- they scramble the month before a paper deadline, but otherwise spend a lot of time being idle. They spend a lot of time consuming blogs on various topics. Want to find an expert on the torture memos, the stimulus package, NFL draft prospects, the Indian Premier League, or fivethirtyeight.com's poll numbers? Ask around for grad students and you are sure to find intelligent grad students well-versed in these various topics.
On top of this, they usually live in a persistent state of guilt, because they do not do what they are supposed to. They cannot allocate a Saturday to read a book they badly want to. Why? Because they do not want to feel guilty of not working on a Saturday. Instead they will choose to spend the entire day idle doing nothing.
I was one such student. I could be easily distracted away from my work. I used to procrastinate a lot. I wanted to break free, focus on work, and work hard at that. I have say, I succeeded and here is how it happened.
Economist article on why people procrastinate
I read an article in the Economist that was kind of stating the obvious, but it had a profound impact on me. The crux of the article is that people procrastinate when they are tasked with huge abstract tasks. The problems that I am trying to solve in grad school are vast open-ended problems with no end in sight. It is easy to get bogged down thinking about accomplishing an enormous task and make no progress as a result. The key is to understand this, split your problem into small concrete sub-tasks, and device a course of action that you can evaluate every couple of days.
For instance, we are beginning to work on an idea for PLDI submission (due in November). We have absolutely now clue how it will pan out nor what we need to do to get there. Nevertheless, we have a rough roadmap, and I have an immediate task at hand that should take me two to three days. I can evaluate at the end of three days where I am, but during that time I can think just about this task and not be saddled by the big picture.
Scrum for research
Early last Fall, our research group starting using "Scrum for Research" as suggested by our friend over at Maryland. Our group meets thrice a week, MWF. Each meeting that lasts about 15-20 minutes. Each person gets to speak for two minutes on what they did in the two days prior to the meeting and their plan for the next two days. While this can seem like a very demanding environment to work in, we really like it. Trying to come up with tangible goals that we can reach in two days makes us efficient and productive. If you are doing systems research, you should try to incorporate scrum into your research workflow.
Aftermath
I have become very organized outside of work as well. I pursue my other interests without feeling guilty, have great weekends and eagerly look forward to going to school early on Mondays.
