8. Selective caring, importance of community, setting the right conditions
Insights
I have heard this advice many times: “What is not worth doing is not worth doing at all.”
While living by this dictum would make all our lives more meaningful, it is not always practical to do so. In PhD, as in other areas of life, we are often required to do relatively mundane or meaningless tasks. I have in mind some of the administrative duties that come with being teaching assistants: grading papers, marking attendance, entering marks, booking classrooms, sending weekly announcements. I have come to regard these tasks as ‘chores’ - things that you have to do, but not really worth doing.
Since you can’t exactly say no to these ‘duties’, here’s my revised version of the advice above: “What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.”
As an aspiring perfectionist, I am a stickler for details as much as the next person. But I have come to realise that you can’t care equally about every little thing you do, if you have any hopes of doing the things that truly matter to you. Of all the things that we routinely do, there are only some things that are genuinely worth doing, while the rest simply need to be done. Once you figure out which is which, chalk out the maximum time, energy and attention you are willing to allocate for the ‘chores’ so that the rest of your resources are freed up for those things that genuinely matter to you.
When faced with a mundane task next time, ask yourself: what is the least amount of time it would take to do this? And try to do it by then.
Ideas
PhD is often thought of as a lone endeavour. The image of a solitary researcher, walking about in a deserted ideascape, chopping away at their research problem all by themselves is a familiar one.
But this is not how research is done, either within philosophy or in most other disciplines. Research is like a team sport, something you play with others.
I have long believed that the best learning and thinking - key traits of a researcher - happens through collaboration, as part of communities. And especially in a PhD, a huge part of one’s learning comes from the intellectual communities one is part of. This could be reading groups, writing groups, discussion forums etc.
At my department, we have been successfully running a philosophy reading group every week, for over a semester now. In the last few months, we have worked through some insanely difficult papers and have engaged in high-quality and rigorous discussions about abstract philosophical topics. I am certain that my overall PhD experience would have been greatly diminished, if not for this group and its brilliant people. Our next project now is to start a general philosophy seminar series. More on that, later.
I want to leave you with this question: Which learning communities are you already part of or would like to join? And which ones would you like to start, wherever you may be?
Inspiration
I am set to write my first conference paper this week and I haven’t got a clue how to write one or how to finish it in a week’s time. So, my big question is: what conditions do I need to set and create, such that I can best do my work?