As a graduate student studying the grid, my life is relatively simple. People even tell me that grad school is the prime time of your life. I do not have dozens of meetings to schedule each week, nor must I coordinate and deal with the emotion of a large group of people. I have an armory with more tools than most superheroes have: hardware and software are covered by the university while textbooks and necessities are covered by my ample stipend. I have no excuses; in a country like the United States and at a university like the University of Michigan, every tool around the world is at my disposal. But in spite of all the resources, sometimes my mind still feels like a steam machine.
I have more tools than I could ever use. There are but three that stand out as vitally important; the rest may be relegated to the outlands. In order of how easy they are to measure and how important they are to keep pure:
- Typing
- Reading
- Thinking
If I could type harder, read better, and think faster, I would most assuredly be stronger. These are vital skills, and it is vital that nothing obstructs me from developing and using them.
When I am typing, I am often overcome by digital love. I bounce around between blog posts and open dozens of browser tabs, a voyager in search of cool tricks that might save a few minutes here and there. This instant crush approach to productivity will not do; at this rate, I will never get anything done. My mind keeps telling me I will only feel alive if I check my Twitter feed one more time, but I must be wary: sometimes the internet is the brainwasher. To be more aerodynamic –aerodynamite, even– I need to position myself in one of two modes while typing:
- Distraction free (nothing but text at 80 characters per line)
- Complete view (every relevant file displayed at once with minimal effort required to switch between them)
When I am reading, it should be just me and the book, face to face. It should be easy to make a highlight, and I should focus on maintaining contact with that one part of my frontal lobe that lights up when I read faster than I can mouth the words. That seems to heighten retention and allow me to finish a book in a couple days if I need to; to top it off, it seems I can choose to read that way as easily as flipping an on/off switch.
When I think, I must be completely free from distraction and peaceful as a nocturne. No music, no other people, no computers. Just me and some paper. The problems I am working on now require clarity and fresh thinking beyond the undergraduate mentality. I need to fit many details into one big picture. As an undergrad I used tools made by teachers. Today I make the tools. Today I am responsible for driving technological progress. Today I teach others. That requires high fidelity focus from within, focus you can only get if you take your thinking seriously. Time spent understanding my work in private will help me answer questions in public. If I spend the next few years hopping from one project to the next without thinking deeply, before too long I will find myself incapable of summoning the mental firepower it takes to build and defend a thesis. There is no way to get lucky; I am human after all, and there is something about us that causes us to let a full, beautiful day be shattered into fragments of time.
My life is simple, but the game has changed. I will not be satisfied with my process until I can say I’m doin’ it right. After a summer of discovering new tools and refining my process, genuine productivity is so close I can touch it. After my arrival this fall, I will be ready to rock’n roll. Oh yeah.