The Midnight Conundrum

Here you are, it's midnight on a Saturday night. You feel tired, you could definitely go to sleep, but you also feel able to continue working. You have two big assignments due on Tuesday and have put a few hours into one of them already today, and you're primed to continue. But if you stay up late doing this, you'll sleep late tomorrow, and then getting up Monday will be even harder than usual.

Go to bed or keep working?

For me, the answer usually has to be "keep working." This is because I really cannot (or, at any rate, do not, ever) get up in the morning and get right to work. So if I go to bed, I may never recover the momentum that I feel right now, or at best I may recover it hours after getting up on Sunday. For the most part, I get stronger and find it easier to work more and more as the day goes on, at least when I'm vaguely able to structure my time that way.

I made the choice to continue working and I got some really excellent work done despite also feeling tired. Now it's 3:15 and I'm really quite tired and ready for bed, but I have big tasks completed. I also happened to stop at a "downhill" point, which is good. (By "downhill" I mean a point from which it is easy to continue. It's like riding on hills with your bike - if you need to stop, it's better to stop on a downward slant so that you can easily start up again.)

Basically when I feel "tempted" to work I have to make use of that temptation unless there are truly compelling reasons not to. As long as I get overall something like enough sleep, getting my work done is more important than sleeping at any particular time.

Grad School vs. Working

Back when I was thinking about going to grad school, I had one hope that I was almost afraid to confess. I hoped, despite how hard grad school was reputed to be, and how many hours it was said that I would have to work (i.e., way more than 40 per week), that it would take me away from the horrible feeling associated with having a regular job.

I don't know exactly how to describe the feeling, and I feel like a spoiled brat or a wimp for even having it, but I'm basically talking about that kind of bored feeling of waiting for the day to be over, killing time, trying to think of a good reason to leave work early, etc. I mean the basic feeling of just not wanting to be at work.

It turns out to be true that grad school, for me, totally does not have this feeling. I had it over the summer when I worked in the math lab (a worse job than any I've had in many years, though still not bad in the overall scheme of possible jobs), but I don't have it during the regular semesters at all.

It's interesting. I spend more hours at school now than I ever have at a job, and (more or less completely independently) more hours working than when I had a job. But I simply do not have that feeling of being required to be in a place for 8-9 hours every day. Aside from my office hours (4 per week), I am always either doing a specific thing (teaching or attending class or a seminar) or I am free to go if I want to. Everything now is about accomplishing specific tasks on time rather than spending a particular amount of time appearing to work.

Consequently, my office, and the building where I work, doesn't feel like a workplace to me. It feels a lot like my dorm felt when I was originally in undergrad, actually - like a cool place to hang out, the place where I do most of my work, and the place where, at all hours of the day and night, some of my friends and acquaintances are around.

I was able to confirm this when I was working in the math lab. I left there one day during my shift to go to the restroom, and when I walked out into the hall, past the offices of my friends, I had a feeling like, "Oh, I am trapped in the math lab, and all these people out here get to have their regular lives."

That dreadful feeling of being trapped at work was a really large feature of my previous life, and it's pretty fantastic for me that I don't have it anymore. It's like, as I wrote once before, my work life and life life have all become the same thing. Some people hate that aspect of grad school but I think, for the most part, I really like it.

Tricking My Brain

Disclaimer/spoiler alert: The following insights are brought to you by the miracle of introspection, and should not be confused with factual statements about the human brain.

Sitting down to do work for a few hours at a time is very hard for me. Hell, sometimes even sitting for half an hour to do math (which I like better than most kinds of work) is hard for me. I sometimes think that I have ADD, though I can certainly read a novel for hours.

It feels like there is a part of my brain that is fundamentally discontent to sit and work. It feels like a relatively animal part of my brain - not a conscious, smart part. And it is somewhat easily tricked.

I usually listen to music while I work. I can work to a variety of music, but I find that dance music (the kind you'd hear in a club - any kind of dance club) is one of the most effective kinds. It seems to trick my brain into thinking I am having fun and moving around rather than sitting and working. It's like a part of my mind is actually moving and doing something with a rhythm, and gets soothed/tricked into letting me get some work done.

Today, Pandora on my phone was acting up and sounding shitty as it sometimes does, so I switched to Simply Noise, which I haven't tried to work to before. I have an app for it on my phone.

Of the different noises, I like the brown noise the best, and I like to make it oscillate. It sounds like ocean waves to me.Very soothing.

After listening to this for a while and working, I realized it was extremely soothing indeed. It feels very much like it makes that part of my brain think I am actually asleep. That part doesn't seem to mind sleeping - in fact, it's pretty much content to let me sleep forever. It was really an amazing feeling. I think I may try this more often in the future.

The Work-Life Boundary

Earlier this week, I was reading some posts about how many hours people in academia work every week. Some people claimed to work about 35 hours a week, and others claimed more in the 70-80 hour range. Some asserted that professionals in "9-5" jobs typically work 60 hours a week anyway, and others that comparing an academic job to a 9-5 job is folly.

I've come to realize that one of my favorite things about being in grad school, as strange as this is, is that I always have something I should be doing. I don't actually work all that many hours (certainly not 60), but every single day my focus is on what I can get done that day, and how, and when. I don't have any days off. And I love it.

When I had a job-type job, there were hours I was required to be at work (not necessarily working) and hours that were my free, non-work time. I had a job and, separately, the rest of my life. Now it feels like my life is my work. I still spend most of my time not working, but I am never not thinking of work and how to get back to it.

I'm not sure why I like this but I really do.

Small Revelation about Time Management

Grad school life has been pretty great for me so far, but the major thing that I struggle with is getting work done. I don't usually have an actually overwhelming amount of work to do, but I waste a large number of hours each week procrastinating or trying to start working, when if I just worked I would have more free time to do things like read.

I have, however, realized one thing that has made a big difference over the past few weeks, and that is that I really hate doing things at the last minute. When it's "do or die" and you will stay up all night to finish something due the next morning, it feels like some giant metal rod is pressing against you. Sometimes the thought of doing the work is intolerable but, of course, not doing it at all is unthinkable.

The "correct" way to avoid this is to do the work ahead of time, but I sometimes struggle with that. My revelation is that just moving that "last minute" point up by a day has a huge impact. So my current strategy is staying up all night the night before the night before something is due, rather than just the night before.

You would think it wouldn't matter or help. Staying up all night is staying up all night, right? (I've not literally had to stay up all night yet; I'm using the term loosely.) But it actually makes an enormous difference to me. I have that "I am not going to bed until I [more or less] finish this" urgency to keep me going, but without the horrible iron bar feeling. Instead, I have the virtuous and enjoyable feeling of kicking ass by getting something done early. Also, once I get to the point where I have only a little bit left to do, I can leave off and finish up the next day with minimal stress.

It's sort of exciting to have a working, specific strategy to avoid being crushed by things at the last minute.

The Working-Procrastination Continuum

My work habits have definitely changed a little bit since I started grad school, shifting towards the better end of what I see as a continuum between working and procrastinating that goes something like this:

Flow: You're working and not even thinking about not working. You might not notice that you're getting hungry or stiff, and when it's time to stop, you wish you could go on. If you do take a break, you spend it wanting to get back to work.

Work is Work: You're working pretty steadily, but it's rough going. You take breaks when you can, and think a lot about how much longer you have to go, or how much more you need to do.

Pretending to Work: You're sort of doing some work, but you stop every few minutes to check email or play solitaire or stare into space. You're trying to get settled down and do some work, but not much is being accomplished.

Trying to Get to Work: You have a definite plan to start working, but you're trying to pry yourself out of bed/away from the TV/off the Internet. There might be a couple of things you need to do first, like clean off your desk or get a glass of water, but you're not quite doing those things yet. But you will soon - honest!

Procrastinating: There's something you could, maybe should, be working on, but you figure you can work on it later, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. You definitely plan to do it, there's no doubt about that, but not right now.

Pretending to Procrastinate: You claim that you're going to do something, but if you look into yourself, there is no plan at all for getting it done. You might be in a sort of passive rebellion against doing it. There is no time that it could occur to you to work on it that you would actually then go and actually work on it. It is not possible that the conditions under which you would do the work could occur. Some change in attitude (perhaps partly unconscious) would be required in order for it to happen.

Refusal/Blowing Off: You consciously have no intention of doing a particular thing, though you realize that in some sense you should. Perhaps you've given up because there is no longer enough time to get it done before it's due, and it won't be accepted late, or maybe you've just decided it's not a priority for you.

I used to spend the bulk of my working hours in the range from "Pretending to procrastinate" to "Pretending to work" range. I find that, now that I'm in school, I'm never (so far) pretending to procrastinate, and most of my work times are in the "Trying to get to work" to "Flow" range. It's hard to distinguish between procrastinating and just not working right now in my current life, since I always have work that I could be doing, and yet I don't need to work 12 or 16 hours a day either. But cutting out that "pretending to procrastinate" stage is a big deal for me, and spending more time in the various working stages is great.

I still spend a vast amount of time in the "trying to work to work" and "pretending to work" phases. I'm not sure how to get better at that.

Resume Pet Peeve

I realize that even having pet peeves is obnoxious. Nevertheless, I really hate it when resumes (we are looking at some this week for the person who is to replace me) have a bullet point list of the duties associated with the job and the entries in the list are not in the same grammatical category, e.g.,

Massive Oil Company, Melbourne, Australia, 2008-2010

• Worked extensively with Aries.
• Finding and maintaining city and county records.
• Assist engineers with daily tasks.

Bah! Fie on thee!

Try. First.

I have a coworker who was hired as an engineer right out of college (by us, I mean, a year or so ago). I imagine he's relatively intelligent, yet the way that he works drives me up the wall. Today, for instance, he called me to find out the easiest way to get a map of an area.

"Probably just make the map in Petra," I said. Petra is software we use very commonly and I have walked him through many processes in Petra before.

"OK," he said, "well, I've never made a new project in Petra. I was wondering if you could walk me through it."

Now when you start up Petra, the very first screen asks if you want to open an existing project or make a new one, so it's not mysterious how to at least start making a new project. And I really resent this guy asking me to "walk him through" something in a program he already uses without even trying it himself first.

Nevertheless, I walked him through a few initial stages, at which point he had some steps to do on his own, and then I just happened not to take his follow-up phone call. (Yes, I realize it's unprofessional, but I wanted him to have the opportunity to try the next steps on his own, and I don't have the balls, I guess, to just tell him so.) He sent me an email a while later so I sent back some hints.

The next time he called, I did take the call. He was stuck at a certain point, which is a reasonable time to call someone. But when I walked him through what he was doing, he (a) repeatedly did not listen to what I was saying, (b) indicated an inability to figure out the simplest things, and (c) simply failed to try obvious things in the software.

Of course, since he never takes notes or anything like that, I expect someone will have to walk him through his next new Petra project as well.

Or There Is Always Plan B

Next week, after my cabin vacation with Ed (woot), I am flying to visit one of the graduate programs to which I have been admitted. I think I might get a pretty sweet financial deal there and I want to get a feel for the department. Meanwhile, given that I don't have financial packages piling up on my doorstep, I have made preparations for a solid Plan B.

Plan B would consist of doing a master's degree in applied math at a local public university. I hadn't applied to this school, but the deadline is April 1 (and it's not a very firm deadline), and today I filled out the application, wrote the SOP, had the transcripts and GRE scores sent, begged one more letter from my poor recommenders, and am about to mail them the signed forms and stamped, addressed envelopes, etc., so that should be completely taken care of. (In other news, I have gotten pretty good at doing at least basic graduate school applications.)

I don't feel that this master's program is very competitive, so I think I have a good chance of being admitted, especially as I am not seeking any funding. My plan would be to do this program full time, but cut back my actual job to half-time. I think a 20-hour job plus full time graduate study is doable (many TAships take 20 hours anyway), particularly at a perhaps not terrifically demanding program, and half-time at my job would pay more than most graduate stipends, even with full tuition and fees deducted.

In related news, today I let my boss at work in on my graduate plans. She was happy for me, and supportive, but afterwards also (jokingly) called me "bitch" and "ignorant slut." She was quite grateful for the ~ four months of notice, which should give them enough time to hire someone to replace me. She said she is selfishly hoping that the Plan B option is what happens, so that they can keep me part time. (This company is also quite possibly moving to within a few blocks of the Plan B University, which would be mighty convenient.)

I am pretty excited about both Plan A and Plan B at this point even though they are rather different paths. The idea of Plan B is that afterwards I could either work in industry (or government) in a more professional position, or apply to doctoral programs as a (hopefully) stronger candidate.

Living Under Threat

I made a discovery about myself and my motivations a few months ago in therapy, and I think I wrote about it at the time, but it's worth revisiting because I keep realizing it over and over and it's something I need to remember to apply. And that is that (a) I respond much more strongly to positive than to negative motivations, and yet (b) my natural instinct is to try to motivate myself negatively.

I don't remember, as a child, ever being given positive reasons to do anything. (I mean, of course I was given positive motivations for things that are intrinsically fun, like swimming or going to Disney World. I'm talking here about things one would not naturally want to do.) It was never, "Eat your vegetables so you'll grow big and strong," or, "Think how great you'll feel when your homework is all finished," or, "If you're an honest person then people will trust and respect you." The reason for doing something hard was always the avoidance of some negative outcome like not getting into a good program in school or being disbelieved or being one of those ridiculous children who will only eat hamburgers.

This strikes me now as a bit odd (although possibly not as odd as it actually is).

Last night, I needed to finish the homework for my Seminar class today. I really didn't want to - I wasn't looking forward to puzzling out the proofs I needed to write, and the class doesn't (generally) interest me that much. I really fought myself over it, but there was no way I could justify not turning it in. But I didn't want to do it. But if I didn't do it, then I wouldn't have it, and I'd have to do it later and apologize to Dr. Ruch again and feel bad about it.

Eventually I was able to cajole myself into doing the assignment, which turned out to be really easy once I was willing to put in the required organized effort. And once it was done, I felt amazing! I absolutely love the feeling of having a completed assignement ready to turn in. Also, the proofs turned out to be moderately fun. Overall it was terrifically satisfying and I was really high from it.

And that is how I should have motivated myself, not by pondering how screwed I would be if I didn't do it, and by convincing myself I had no choice (which is pretty much never true, and don't think I don't know it), but by thinking about how much I would enjoy having it done, and how good I would feel about finishing it on time and doing a good job on it. But that type of motivation doesn't often occur to me.

The thing is, after a lifetime of living under threats (my mom's, when I was a kid, and my own internal ones), I am not very responsive to them. Not that many horrible things have ever happened to me as a result of my actions (or inaction), so most of those past threats have turned out to be baloney. Other threats ("I need to lose weight or I'll die of diabetes") are either far in the future or so horrible that they cause me to avoid thinking about the topic at all.

And who wants to live a life of doing things just to avoid some bad outcome? I mean, seriously? I am a descendent of millions of generations of humans and other creatures who survived despite the perilous nature of living, and I live in the safest and happiest time of all (so far). It's no wonder I'm not that easily frightened.

For the most part, if my only motivations for doing something are negative, it better be pretty easy. Wearing a seat belt is a good example of something easy that we only do to avoid something bad. Everything else worth doing has some positive reason behind it - it's satisfying, or remunerative, or improves the quality of one's life in some other way.

So, to hell with threats. I am gonna MESS THESE THREATS UP. I call them out.

Looks Like I'm Going to Grad School

Nothing is fully determined yet, but I have been assured by the grad director at one school that I will either get a nice fellowship from the school, or a TAship and tuition + fee waiver. I should find out either at the end of this week, or in a couple of weeks. The offer is good enough (either way) that, if it's my best offer, I'll go. I'm pretty psyched.

Once I have an offer on paper I will let my boss (and, by extension, my coworkers) know. I'm friends with one and he knows already, but the rest do not, and I don't see any reason not to give them a few months' notice rather than a couple of weeks. And it's getting a little awkward when people congratulate me on my impending graduation and either ask what I'm going to do next or say I must be relieved that I won't have to do icky school anymore.

The Two Acceptable Approaches

At work, I have noticed two approaches that people use when being shown how to do something new:

1. They write it down, sometimes in great detail, so that they can refer to their notes in the future, or
2. They do not write it down, and later they use a combination of memory, trying things, struggling, etc., to perform the action.

Now, either of these approaches is just fine. I tend to use Method 2 unless I'm doing something so complicated that I know I won't remember it, but I know people who almost always use Method 1, and it's a good plan.

What is not acceptable is doing neither. Specifically, it is not OK to ask me to show you how to do the same things over and over again, ten or more times each over a period of several months, while you

• don't take notes
• don't remember anything
• are unwilling to struggle to figure something out on your own
• refuse to consult outside reference materials, and
• act helpless

That will really just piss me off, which I will then struggle (and probably fail) to hide in my tone of voice when you call me for the umpteenth time. And if you make more money and have a fancier title than I do while doing (or failing to do, as the case may be) the same kind of work, that goes double.

Conversation with a Baby Engineer

I'm working on a project for a boss, Saul. Saul sent me some forecast curves generated by one of our young, somewhat recent engineering hires, Ricky. (Names changed to protect, well, me.) When I looked at the curves, they were unfortunately printed in such a way that the parameters I needed were not printed on them. Once I realized this, I called Ricky.

Me: Hey, Ricky. Remember these curves you did for Project X?
Ricky: Oh yeah, sure.
Me: Unfortunately I can't get the Qi or the initial decline off them because, when you printed them, the walk point was way down the curve.
Ricky: Oh, that's too bad.
Me: Yeah. So, do you know what those are, or can you open them and look?
Ricky: Shit. I don't know if I saved those, or what project I did them in. Let me look and call you back.
Me: All right.

[Two minutes later]

Ricky: Hey, Tam. Yeah, I don't think I saved those. Do you need me to redo them?
Me: Yes, unless you have some magical engineer way to calculate the decline from the curve - I don't know how, but it seems like maybe you could. I can guess the Qi from the graph, but I don't know how to get the decline.
Ricky: You can do it with graph paper, but it's probably easier to just redo it.
Me: OK.
Ricky: So do you want me to do that?
Me: Whatever's easiest for you.
Ricky: OK, well, let me finish up what I'm doing and I'll do that next thing.
Me: OK.

I'm sorry to admit that my first impulse, before calling Ricky, was just to send an email back to Saul explaining why the document that Ricky sent was not useful. Then it occurred to me to maybe not throw my coworker under the bus. Heh.

Attitudes

For weeks, two of my coworkers (let's call 'em James and Morgan) and I have been speculating over the situation with bonuses, which are typically given out in December at my company. James has been saying all along that he didn't think we'd get a bonus this year. We had been assured (since our president heard about these rumors) that a bonus with forthcoming, but James pointed out that any token amount could qualify as a "bonus" so the assurances were meaningless.

Last year, my first year here, I got quite a magnificent bonus. I was told that 1/3 of it came from the group that had recently purchased our company, and the rest was from our company. It was awesome. My offer letter says that the company typically pays bonuses of around 10%, depending on company profits and individual performance. I didn't have much hope of getting the same bonus as last year, but I was hoping for around 10%. That is still a really large bonus, in my book, despite what we may have seen last year.

Santa Claus finally came today, in the form of our president telling us our amounts. Mine was slightly less than last year, and well above any line at which I would have felt disappointed. I am pretty thrilled with it.

I made the mistake of going to lunch with James and Morgan. James is angry - he saved the company some large amount of money this year, was told this would be remembered at bonus time, and yet he didn't get a proportionately large bonus, he didn't feel. Morgan was not dissatisfied with her amount (she also reported getting slightly less than last year, but none of us shared our amounts or percentages), but was fretful over various things she's heard. She fears that because she is sort of mousy and doesn't often work directly with the people who decided the bonus amounts, it might be easier to "screw her" by not giving her as much as she should get. She had a lot of process worries over how these amounts were decided, and was also upset because of some conflicts over other people's bonuses. (Apparently one employee was upset that another employee got a larger bonus - something she was in a position to know about - and left for the day.)

It was basically non-stop negativity from those two. The president had apparently made a comment to James that, given that she didn't have as much total bonus money as she would like, she trimmed down the bonuses to some people who are highly paid in order to boost bonuses for people who make less. He was very angry and upset over this prospect, calling it "unprofessional" and commenting, "A company that knew what they were doing would pay people their market value," and then going on for at least 5 minutes explaining how this idea that some people make a "premium" could be applied to anyone and bitching how there are no standards and so on and so forth. Morgan mostly cavilled about this, that, and the other.

Morgan also pressed me about how I felt, and though I didn't want to be self-righteous about it, I did have to make it clear that I thought the amount was very satisfying and generous, and that I have chosen not to concern myself with the sausage-making aspects of how the company is run, both in general and with regard to bonuses. (I have found that worrying or becoming annoyed at the ways of corporations only leads to madness, especially since I'm never privy to the real details of what is going on. Best to just let them run the company, assume they know what they're doing, and look out for my own interests in more productive ways.)

I did not say any of this, but I find it really unproductive and, frankly, immoral to have the attitude (in life in general) that, while what you got might be OK, someone else might be unfairly getting more. Our whole economic system invariably leads to a lot of "unfair" things that people at my company, at least, are benefitting from. I have friends who are harder working, probably smarter, and definitely more educated than I am, and who make less money than I do even though their jobs are not in any sense easier. That is not "fair." It is not supposed to be fair. Fair did not come into it at any point.

Morgan was concerned that some people might get higher bonuses because they are more liked rather than because they are better employees. On what basis is an employee liked? How do we judge "better"? Why worry about the parts you can't control? Why choose to be dissatisfied when things are, actually, really good?

I don't think either of these people has had a serious job working for another company, or they would know that all companies are fucked up, to a lesser or greater extent, and that this one is particularly great to work for, and very generous in every way. And, you know, if you don't think you're being paid your "market value," there is an easy remedy for that. (That would be the, um, job market.)

If I do go to grad school, and if my cohort is large enough that there are subgroups to it, I really need to be part of a subgroup of people who work hard and have good attitudes. Because this stuff does influence me and I don't want to be around a bunch of whiners who think life is unfair all the time.

(NB: I don't think people are wrong for complaining about legitimate grievances. If you work at Walmart and can't afford to take your child to the doctor, rail all you want - I'm with you. But if all you have are upper middle class problems, then STFU with your BS about "unfair.")

School Motivation

I've been thinking about all of my years of schooling and the difference between times that I excelled and times that I failed or just got by. There are some of each.

In grade school, there were structural changes that made a difference for me. In elementary school, I generally had good grades just because I was academically ahead of my peers and homework wasn't such a big deal. I also did well in the gifted program at my main elementary school, where we had a certain number of tasks to complete independently each week, the completion of each of which led to a box being hilited in your folder. If you finished early you could play (educational) games on Friday, and I loved my teacher very much.

Middle school was more of a struggle, because suddenly things like keeping your folder in a certain order were important, and homework began to be more of the grade, which was calculated in a more fixed fashion than before. Some teachers were more flexible than others if you got high test grades but didn't turn in a lot of homework.

And yet, in 7th grade, the middle year of middle school, I got all A's the entire year. I remember doing the same things I had always done - leaving assignments until the last minute if I did them at all, being smart but disorganized, etc. - but I think what made the difference was that I really loved some of my teachers. I had a giant crush on my earth science teacher (Mr. Garrett) and my English teacher (Mrs. Agrons) was the bomb as well. (She taught us to write essays. I remember a whole board filled with statements about Rikki Tikki Tavi that were and were not thesis statements, e.g., "Rikki Tikki Tavi is a weasel" - not a thesis statement - vs. "Rikki Tikki Tavi succeeds through cleverness.")

So, clearly I do better when grading is flexible, and I do better when I love (and thus want to please) my teachers. But those things are pretty much beyond my control, and in particular, the flexibility of grading becomes much less of an issue once courses become hard enough that I actually need to do the homework in order to succeed. (At that point, graded homework becomes a help to me, since it's slightly harder for me to do otherwise.)

If I go to grad school, there probably will not be classes where I can ace the tests while blowing off the homework.

But, more interesting than this stuff is something that I have noticed only recently, though I think it is a pattern of long standing. When I specifically desire to excel at a class, then I do; when I view the class as something to get through, or something I don't want to fail, then I tend to do poorly. I think most of the classes I've taken in my life I've viewed in the latter way - as obligations, basically, or something I just needed to survive - and so I haven't done very well at them.

When I find a class very tricky or puzzling (like Logic at Rice), or I love the teacher (like Mrs. Agrons), or I want to defeat my classmates, or somehow or other I really want to do well, then I generally perform at or near my best. By contrast, when I don't really see an upside to the class, I have a hard time even meeting the minimum standards.

I am not sure how much this generalizes to life, but it strikes me that one of my problems at work is that I don't really see much point to excelling at my job. When I apply a very moderate amount of effort, people are very impressed (probably because most people who have my position are not very talented, or they'd be engineers or something instead). There are not spot bonuses or anything like that. Mostly they pay me a fixed amount of money as long as I do whatever is basically required of me.

I am led to understand that some people have an internal drive to excel (or to be professional or work hard), but I seem to be much more likely to respond to external incentives like grades or professorial approval. (I do respond to some internal things, like feeling brilliant - which is part of why I can excel at math - but doing a good job at work doesn't usually make me feel brilliant since most of my job is pretty easy.)

This is probably why I like school so much, just in general. You get constant feedback (I love getting graded things back) and there are always new people to please and impress.

I wonder if I can find a way to internalize the desire for excellence such that it applies to more situations and is less reliant on external motivators.

Self-Motivation

In therapy lately, we've been talking (of course) about my unusual degree of inability to make myself do things. Of course, everyone struggles with self-discipline to some extent - working is hard - but I seem to struggle less successfully than most.

I got frustrated with my therapist because he was doing more talking than listening and saying things about setting goals for yourself and finding out what is holding me back from performing and blah de blah, and I felt like a person missing a leg being asked why they don't want to walk and whether they've tried building up to it with just a few steps at a time. Like, no, you don't fucking get it, that is not what is going on here.

I specifically do not believe (though I would love to find out that I'm wrong) that something is blocking or preventing me from applying myself. I think I have an actual deficit of whatever it is that people use to get things done.

Way to take responsibility there, Tam.

One of the ways people motivate themselves is by setting small (at first) goals, and then building on their success in meeting those goals. But I have set goals so many times, and not met them so unbelievably many times, that I don't even believe myself when I say I'm going to do something. I mean, I can tell myself I am going to do something that takes 5 minutes later that very same day, and I know all along that I'm probably not going to actually do it.

How many times does a person have to let you down before you stop thinking they might step up? When the person is yourself, it seems the answer is "quite a few times," but those quite a few times have long since passed by. (I'm tired tonight, so this is a slightly more negative view than I usually have, but not far off.)

However, obviously I do in fact do some things. I go to work every day, get some work done on most of those days, and I keep up with my classes well enough to ace most of them, which does require some work. I attend classes more than half the time. I sometimes clean the kitchen or wash the towels. I have clean laundry to wear every day. I am able to present as a functional person.

There are strategies I use to get myself to do things. First, I'll tell you what I don't use:

• Ongoing To-Do Lists: I often make one for the next few hours, but never one for days from now, because then I will just avoid even looking at or thinking about the list or anything on it.
• Small Goals: Discussed above.
• Rewards: I know I won't honor this type of promise to myself, so there's no point. I'll get the reward later whether I did the thing to earn it or not, if I want it. This includes very short-term rewards like "I'll work for 30 minutes, then relax for 10 minutes," because I won't follow through on those either.
• Punishments/Consequences: I definitely won't honor these.

So, let's look at some specific things I do and see if there is a pattern. For work (at my job) or homework, I turn on music when I am working, and only very rarely at other times. (I also listen to music in my car, but that's about it.) Sometimes I will start working because the idea of putting on some music is appealing. The appeal of the music kind of bleeds into the appeal of the work.

At home, for homework, I almost always sit down with a glass of iced tea, which I brew first. I keep regular and decaf tea bags for this purpose. The brewing time lets me goof off while knowing I'll soon start working. I can let the tea go for a while but eventually I need to go pour it over the ice. I really enjoy the tea and, although I sometimes drink it when I'm not doing homework, I mostly have it with homework (to the point that I feel cheated when I try to do homework with just a glass of water). Tea time = homework time.

Some household tasks are naturally appealing to me, like washing the towels. I don't have too much trouble at least getting that started, though sometimes I fail to ever fold them afterwards. Other household tasks, like doing the dishes, I just push myself to do in whatever way I can. "This will only take 5 minutes," I tell myself. "All you have to do is put them in the dishwasher. Look, it's 9:17. By 9:25 you'll be done. And Ed will be really happy." Sometimes that works.

There are two things that need to happen in order for me to do some work. First, I have to actually decide to do it. That may seem really basic, but sometimes I can feel myself, in my mind, simply refusing to do something, even a task at my actual job, where they pay me to do things I don't necessarily want to do. Dishes is a hard task to decide to do. Sending a letter or calling someone on the phone is hard. Homework, by contrast, is a very, very easy task to decide to do - there is almost no barrier there at all. I am always open to doing homework.

The second thing that needs to happen is for me to get around to actually starting to do the task. That is also often a challenge. Sometimes I start and then drift off to doing something else, if I'm not careful. Sometimes hours go by while I just don't quite get started. (Brewing tea helps this problem with homework, since it puts a soft, flexible time limit on goofing off. Of course, sometimes it takes me a while to get up and actually start the tea brewing.)

Then, of course, you have to stick with the task. Some tasks, like washing dishes, are so short and different from the rest of life that they're easy to stick with. Working at my job is the hardest task to stick with, because I'm almost always using the computer, which makes it very easy to slide over to looking at things on the Internet instead. Homework is intermediate, because I take the keyboard off my desk and usually only surf the net intermittently when I need a little break; I can't get too absorbed with all the papers between me and the monitor. Also there is my glass of tea looking at me, saying, "Don't finish me too soon - you still have a lot of homework left."

So I guess I kind of try to condition myself to work by associating work with other pleasant things - not future rewards, but things going on at the same time, like iced tea and music. (I sometimes use hot herbal tea at work in a similar way, but it's not as rewarding as iced tea, which is too much trouble to make at work.) I am like a bad little mule, led on with a lot of kind pats and the simple conditioning of, "OK, here's your lead, must be time to get on with things."

Refraining from doing things is another story entirely, and I have almost no success whatsoever with that.* Occasionally I can substitute one pleasure for another ("instead of going out to eat, I could read this book, that sounds great") but otherwise it's hard to associate refraining with an immediate pleasure.

Despite my gloomy outlook here, it should be pointed out that I am far, far better at this than I used to be, so it's possible I will continue to improve over time.

(* "No success" relative to most people, that is. Obviously I refrain from doing quite a lot of things all the time.)

When I Grow Up

I've been considering a lot of career changes and such lately, and one idea that has arisen, that I'd previously dismissed but am now considering more closely, is going to graduate school in math full time, probably hoping to get a PhD, but at least for a Master's. There are several reasons that this appeals to me, among which are

• I want to study math full time, and
• I'm tired of having a job where people are surprised that I'm smart.

There are a lot of questions about the grad school idea. Can I get accepted somewhere with funding? (Based on my research, I believe the answer is yes.) Can I be a successful full-time student? (I've never managed it before, but I haven't tried since ~ 1996, and I have demonstrably changed as a student since then.) Can I live on a greatly reduced income, or will I end up in horrible debt because I can't rein in my spending?

If I do go with the full-time grad school idea, there are three general paths I could take.

Pure Math

This is the most academically appealing path. What I seem to like best in math is stuff that involves a small number of axioms and seeing what comes of them. (This could change; I don't have a lot of maturity in math yet.) I think I would enjoy (as much as one ever does) writing a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation in pure math, once I got far enough along for such a thing to become possible. (My paper on Laguerre planes last semester was as close as I've gotten, and that was thrilling and I found I could easily work on it for hours and hours.)

Having this degree would broaden my career prospects in the regular world to a degree, and enable me to try to get a job teaching at a college or, if I want to continue doing research, at a university. Academic jobs (other than horrible, low-paid adjunct positions) are often difficult to come by, however, even if you want "only" a community college job.

Applied Math

Something in applied math - perhaps Operations Research - would be the most career-applicable path. Applied math interests me somewhat less than math with no conceivable application, but is still very interesting, and, though the thought doesn't thrill me, it seems very possible to imagine writing a paper in an applied math area. As far as academic careers go, a higher applied math degree would be about the same (as best I can tell) as a higher pure math degree. They have professors in both, of course, at universities, and for lower-level teaching-oriented positions I doubt it makes any difference.

Math Education

Sally joked the other day that I could go to her interim school and get my PhD there, where they have a math education doctoral program that seems very research-oriented. I find this a very intriguing option (in general, not just at that school) because it has such strong highs and lows to it, in my view.

A PhD in math education is not at all helpful for a regular job in industry, as best I can guess, even though you do learn a lot of advanced math in the course of getting one. It pretty much limits you to the education field, if you want your degree to really count for something. It also does not feel as prestigious to me, which I admit is a consideration. ("I have a PhD in math" just sounds so much better to me than "I have a PhD in math education.")

Yet the topic of math education interests me greatly. I feel I would happily read any number of books or papers about it.

Yet I'm not sure the idea of doing original research in math education sounds that great. It doesn't really sound much better to me than the idea of doing original research in say, psychology, and I wouldn't go do that, and not just because my background for it is wrong. I like the research and want it done, but I'm not sure I should be the one doing it.

If I were to get a PhD in math education, the kinds of jobs that would be available to me would be the usual academic jobs (where I could teach either math - using my math education focus to do so more effectively, perhaps, especially if I specialized in post-secondary ed - or math education itself, like to future teachers), or I could probably get some kind of job in the public school system doing something like program or curriculum development, etc. (I'm not sure exactly what jobs exist, but there are surely jobs along those lines.)

A PhD in math education, or really any PhD, would probably make it a bit harder for me to get a high school teaching job, at least in a public school, since I would have the deadly combination of no teaching experience at that level + being required to be paid more than someone with a Bachelor's. But maybe a fancy private school would like to hire me, and I'd certainly have teaching experience in general, since teaching college courses generally happens as part of a program like that. (It's explicitly required at Sally's interim school, and would be part of TAing in any program.)

One question central to all of these considerations is really what kind of career I want to have, or at least, what kind of career I want to try next. I worry that I am not really suited, psychologically, to the general type of work I do now - i.e., working in an office. I seem to be an inveterate slacker in those types of jobs. And while having a more interesting and challenging office job - as I might after getting a higher degree - might help, it might also involve elements that I find even more impossible than what I face now, like project management.

I have never tried teaching, but I think it might be a kind of job that I would be good in. I enjoy teaching people things quite a lot, certainly. It seems like it would be very engaging and, while you can slack off as a teacher, it wouldn't have the same kind of slippery-slacker-slope thing going on, I think. I also fundamentally really like school - almost everything about school - and it would be nice to be a part of that kind of system.

Ultimately, then, I really don't know what I want to do and how I want to go about it, at all. My current plan is to apply to various schools for Fall 2010 and try to decide what to do between applying and getting the results of those applications.

Motivation

In therapy yesterday, Gary (my therapist) and I talked about some of the issues I have with work and motivation. He observed that I am very dependent on the opinions of others, have an external locus of control (duh), and also, in an insight that was a bit new to me, that I depend on a lot of external pressure to get things done. I would take that last bit a step further and say that I am sort of fear-dependent.

Most of that is all sort of "well-known facts about Tam."

But he asked me to think this week about what my motivation to change is. If I want to change the patterns of behavior that I exhibit, what is my motivation for that?

And for me this tied into something I've thought about a lot in the past year or so in reference to my childhood, which also relates to what I wrote about, and that is that I was never (as far as I can recall) encouraged, as a child, and (hence?) usually fail to, as an adult, consider positive motivations for anything.

That's not entirely true. I did hear, "You're so smart, you can do anything you want, if you just apply yourself," which of course is a message with its own downsides. But I never heard anything like, "It's good to be an honest person," or, "You should take pride in your work" (or appropriate formulations of those ideas).

What I heard was, "You shouldn't lie. Don't be a liar. People won't ever believe you." Or, "If you don't do your homework you won't get into college." Or, "Nobody is going to hire you looking like that" (with reference to my weight).

This doesn't sound like a big deal, but what I find is that, as an adult, I rarely ever consider positive motivations, and when I do it can be kind of a revelation. I rarely think something like, "I want to get a lot of good work done today" in reference to my job; I generally think something more like, "If I don't get caught up on a lot of this work today I am going to be doomed."

The problem with thinking only in terms of bad consequences is that it then becomes an issue of whether those bad consequences are fearful enough to motivate you. You're kind of continually trying to scare yourself into doing things. Yet, I guess bad consequences haven't actually happened to me so very much (I did get into college; I have worked for over eleven straight years without ever being laid off or fired; I flunked out of Rice but this did not doom me to work at McDonald's), and I'm not naturally all that fearful about things like this, perhaps because of all the empty threats over the course of my life.

I am curious to know how typical or atypical my fear-based motivations are. Like, when Sally thinks about sitting down to study, is she thinking mostly something like, "I want to learn this material and do well in the course," or something more like, "If I don't do this I will flunk my exam and never get into a PhD program"? (Of course, a lot of actions become habitual and don't have thoughts with them. I don't have either fear-based or positive motivations for showering every day; I just do it. Maybe studying is like that for Sally, but surely not everything is.)

I do seem, these days, to have positive motivations towards school. I want to absolutely excel at my courses, not just avoid failing or doing poorly. But the question of whether I can excel in hard classes definitely helps motivate me, and I'm unattracted to studying topics I don't feel that fear about.

So, I don't really know. What is my motivation for wanting to be better?

An Event of Unfortunate Rarity

This morning, the president of our company beeped me on the phone (not sure what you call that, when it doesn't ring but the person is just there).

"Hey Tam," she said. "Do you know the status of the Grablagher project?" This was something she left me to do while she was gone. (Project names have been changed to protect, well, me.)

"Yes," I said. "I made your changes, re-ran the economics, and I emailed you the new summaries and oneline yesterday afternoon."

"Oh. I haven't gotten that far in my email yet. I'm sorry. Thanks!"

It's nice when it goes that way, versus the much more common way where I tell the person I haven't finished their thing yet.

Stupid Consultant Tricks

A couple of weeks ago, I finished up the beta version of a data importer that a client (the representative of whom I'll call "Rick") had asked for. Specifically, he wanted a way to automate monthly well production and test data imports from their oilfield management software into their reserves database for Aries (the economics software we use). Rick asked "Jim" (one of the engineers I work for) if we could whip something like this up for them, and Jim asked me, because he knows I can do tricky technical/coding things.

It was a pretty fun project. They sent us sample data in Excel, and I learned enough VBA to write a nice little program in Access. Basically, you click a button to start the import, and it asks you where the Excel file is, sucks the data in, determines what data is duplicate and what data is new, asks you if you want to update existing records, then if you want to add new records, does all of those things, and outputs a form of log letting you know exactly what was done.

Unfortunately, after Rick (the client) had a chance to play with what we sent him, he sent Jim this email:

Looking back on our initial email, I thought we were looking at a loading process from our production database into the Aries database. Both are in Access so it would seem that there should be a way to link the tables with some type of load query. Your current load process is workable for other areas but it would be a huge benefit if the we could do this loading internally within Access.

Apparently what he had wanted was an import from one Access database to another, not from Excel into Access. Although this is not a gigantic change, and is in some ways easier to code, it wasn't what I thought we were doing.

And at first I felt quite annoyed with Rick. Why the hell would you send sample data in Excel if you weren't intending to import the data from Excel? I mean, I worked with what I was given. Stupid client!

But, no. This is actually my fault. I mean, I have most of an entire degree in software engineering. I know better than to just go off half-cocked and write a bunch of code without doing even a minimal amount of requirements engineering. (It's probably not appropriate to write up an entire set of requirements for this project, but a simple email to the client clarifying his needs would have been prudent.) It is not the client's job to know how to unambiguously ask for what he wants.

Stupid consultant! ;-)