Constant Practical Progress To Fight Overwhelm

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:00:02.600 | - All right, next question's from Overwhelmed from Toronto.

00:00:07.400 | I'm very thankful for your advice

00:00:08.660 | that podcasts should focus on research.

00:00:10.400 | - Postdocs. - Postdocs.

00:00:12.080 | - It changes the tenor of this question quite a bit.

00:00:15.280 | - However, I find I am in the middle

00:00:17.040 | of too many non-primary author projects,

00:00:19.620 | leading me to work on my primary projects

00:00:22.040 | in the evenings and on weekends.

00:00:24.360 | I tried setting up autopilot, fixed schedule,

00:00:27.000 | but I have no time to do it all.

00:00:29.580 | How do prolific professors, you included,

00:00:32.960 | balance so many projects when I find

00:00:34.920 | I can't even handle four at a time?

00:00:36.960 | - Well, four at a time's too many projects,

00:00:39.480 | and we don't do that many projects at a time.

00:00:42.120 | So I think what's going on here, Overwhelmed,

00:00:44.800 | is that you might be suffering from what I like to call

00:00:47.420 | the time compression fallacy,

00:00:49.820 | which is typical when you're surveying from a distance

00:00:55.360 | the resumes of someone who's very accomplished.

00:00:58.600 | What we tend to do when we do this is we see

00:01:02.040 | all in one place this list of all these different things

00:01:04.880 | that they have done, and then in our mind,

00:01:07.640 | when we imagine that person doing this work,

00:01:10.440 | we compress the time in which this work unfolded

00:01:14.080 | so that in our mind's eye, we imagine this person

00:01:16.300 | working on lots of these things all at the same time.

00:01:19.040 | This used to come up so common when I used to write

00:01:22.000 | about very successful students that I had a phrase

00:01:25.560 | I used to say, I called it the paradox

00:01:27.320 | of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar.

00:01:29.040 | I did a study once where I interviewed

00:01:31.040 | a bunch of Rhodes Scholars, and a lot of this

00:01:32.720 | got integrated into my first book, "How to Win at College,"

00:01:35.000 | which came out back in 2005.

00:01:36.840 | What I learned from these Rhodes Scholars

00:01:38.220 | is that from the perspective of other students,

00:01:40.040 | they had all these different things they had done,

00:01:42.080 | and so you assume they'd be very, very busy,

00:01:44.520 | but when you interview them, they weren't.

00:01:46.560 | And the secret to this was, yeah, I did these six things

00:01:49.200 | which look incredibly impressive when you see

00:01:50.960 | the press release about me winning a Rhodes Scholarship,

00:01:53.040 | but I didn't do them at the same time.

00:01:54.600 | This is over four years.

00:01:56.320 | It added up to a lot.

00:01:57.880 | But at any one point, I wasn't doing all of these things.

00:02:00.560 | So that's the time compression fallacy in action,

00:02:03.200 | and we see it through all sorts of different stages

00:02:05.360 | of people's careers, all sorts of different career fields.

00:02:09.280 | So if you look at my own academic life, for example,

00:02:12.360 | I have published a lot of peer-reviewed

00:02:14.600 | computer science papers.

00:02:16.460 | I had to do all this math recently

00:02:18.460 | because I'm submitting my application for full professor.

00:02:22.000 | I published something like 80,

00:02:24.720 | 80 peer-reviewed computer science papers.

00:02:26.840 | They've been cited something like 4,500 times.

00:02:31.120 | For those who know the lingo,

00:02:32.960 | it's generated an H-index of 31.

00:02:35.300 | You read that all at once, and you think, my God,

00:02:39.600 | you must be just writing all sorts of papers all the time.

00:02:43.040 | But if you actually go back through my timeline,

00:02:45.240 | through the now almost 20 years

00:02:47.140 | that I've been a professional academic,

00:02:49.280 | what you see is that, no, no, what I learned,

00:02:51.120 | this is the method I learned at MIT,

00:02:53.040 | was just constant practical progress.

00:02:56.640 | Always be working on a paper or two.

00:02:58.440 | When you finish one, work on another.

00:02:59.840 | Just make that the background,

00:03:01.560 | that's the background hum of your life,

00:03:02.960 | is like you're always working on a paper.

00:03:04.900 | You're not working on five at once.

00:03:06.520 | You're working on one or two at once.

00:03:08.600 | But if you're always are working on things, it adds up.

00:03:10.780 | This comes out, that comes out, this one comes out.

00:03:13.020 | And over time, it adds up to the 80 or 90 papers

00:03:15.040 | or whatever it is that seems really impressive.

00:03:16.720 | But if you zoom in on Cal in 2007 as a grad student at MIT,

00:03:22.720 | I didn't have that much else, much going on.

00:03:25.720 | Like I worked on this one paper for a couple hours today.

00:03:28.200 | Now, what am I gonna do?

00:03:29.800 | You just repeat that over enough years though,

00:03:31.400 | and a lot of things add up.

00:03:33.240 | So overwhelmed, people don't do as much work

00:03:35.500 | at the same time as you think.

00:03:38.040 | In fact, the paradox here is if you try to do too much

00:03:41.200 | at the same time, you sabotage those projects.

00:03:44.080 | They sabotage each other because you're pulling

00:03:46.000 | from too scarce of a cognitive resource

00:03:47.860 | and you end up producing less overall.

00:03:50.160 | Working on less things at a time

00:03:51.520 | can actually help you produce more.

00:03:53.320 | So you need to do less.

00:03:54.880 | You have too many projects.

00:03:56.580 | Your issue here is not that you haven't properly

00:03:59.360 | autopilot scheduled, that you haven't properly

00:04:01.840 | fixed scheduled all of this work so that it works.

00:04:04.480 | Your issue is you have too much work to schedule.

00:04:07.240 | As a postdoc, you can't be doing four papers at once.

00:04:09.920 | You wanna cut that down to two,

00:04:11.720 | maybe one primary paper and one non-primary paper.

00:04:14.840 | You don't work on any more than one on a given day

00:04:17.000 | and you stick with a paper until it's done

00:04:19.240 | or at a milestone where there's gonna be

00:04:20.760 | a long period of time until you can return from it.

00:04:23.040 | So whatever, we have to now wait two months

00:04:25.640 | to get back results from a lab.

00:04:27.600 | And then you can switch to something else.

00:04:30.040 | The key here is not gonna be quantity at any one time,

00:04:33.400 | but just making sure that you're continually

00:04:35.240 | working on something and as soon as something is done,

00:04:37.920 | you start working on something else.

00:04:39.360 | That's how real piles of impressive accomplishment build up.

00:04:43.460 | Very impressive people are actually less overloaded

00:04:47.460 | than you might imagine, unless like me,

00:04:49.960 | they for some reason have seven jobs,

00:04:51.440 | but that's a different problem.

00:04:52.760 | Don't do that.

00:04:53.600 | (upbeat music)

00:04:57.100 | (upbeat music)

Constant Practical Progress To Fight Overwhelm

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