Image via Katie Weilbacher

It is a truth universally acknowledged that graduate school will take over your life, if you let it.

The trick is not to let it, but if that were easy the biggest drug expense for student insurance would not be anti-depressants (I have it on good authority that this is the case at the university I attend).

The problem is that university effectively rewards workaholism – or what my roommate  in undergrad and I termed “The Guilt”. This is when you come home exhausted but there’s still more to do so you spend your evening either working, or feeling so guilty about not working that you don’t enjoy it. It’s what causes you skip yoga or that class at the gym you wanted to go to because you’re “making progress” and why you eat takeout because you can keep working until it’s delivered and you’re so mentally exhausted that you haven’t got round to buying groceries this week and it’s Friday already anyway.

This is a miserable way to live. In undergrad however, you at least have respite during the summer and (if you’re lucky) in winter break. Graduate school runs all year round, however, so after living with The Guilt 24/7/365 for a number of years it is easy to feel like you’re losing your mind.

Between third and fourth year of my undergrad, I interned at a company. It was amazing, I was productive, I was happy, and I was in amazing shape physically because I got in at 0830, left the office by 1800 and went to the gym. That was what made me realize that The Guilt – the constant working and the neglect of every other area of your life doesn’t actually result in achieving more (assuming you don’t measure your life in small blue pills and trips to the therapist). It just results in misery.

Image via NTBrown for BARC

I wish I could tell you that as a result I dramatically changed how I worked and have ever since led a happy and well balanced life – but that would be a load of crap! The thing about a regular job is that it has boundaries – a computer that you don’t necessarily take home with you, an office that you go to, a time after which your boss doesn’t expect to get hold of you. The appeal of grad school is the flexibility – work when you want! Where you want! And that can come to mean “work everywhere, all the time” – but it shouldn’t. I did make some changes, though. I spent more time with friends. I stopped staring at hard problems and instead went swimming to clear my head. I tried to hang onto the habit of getting up at a reasonable time. Flirted with the idea of not working every evening. This helped, but The Guilt kept lurking.

After a year off, mostly spent jittering about the world skiing and kickboxing, the memory of The Guilt had faded sufficiently that I went on to grad school – in city where I knew no-one, on another continent. There’s a long story behind this, starting when I moved with about a weeks notice, but here’s the summary: I ended up living with a 30-year-old Catholic philosophy student who after 2 months went bonkers and the two girls I’d become friendly with both left the city (for different reasons). Feeling a little friendless and alone I ended up spending a lot of time with a recently dumped passive aggressive with borderline personality disorder.

Chaos ensued. But – I was still doing pretty well at school. And eventually I hit a wall, decided I wasn’t going to be controlled anymore and refused to talk to the passive aggressive, ignoring the arguments of my then-boyfriend and Pet Hobo (guy who’d been living with us rent-free for four months – another story). Drama and backstabbing ensued as Pet Hobo decided his loyalties lay with the woman he wanted to sleep with (the Passive Aggressive) and not me.

Image via Rude Cactus

But eventually the dust settled, and there it was – my cognitive surplus.

Now, I would never suggest that you fill your life with lunatics in order to locate your cognitive surplus. In fact, I would advise very strongly against it. For starters, they are very, very hard to get rid of. But the biggest reason is that lunatics are not a good thing to spend your cognitive surplus on.

So, having found my cognitive surplus I started using it for things that weren’t grad school. I realized that I wasn’t learning what I needed to at university and started reading voraciously around and outside my subject (computer science). I resuscitated the Women in Science and Engineering group at my university and met some lovely people as a result. I started blogging. I took a summer contract in Shanghai, and after the break came back refreshed and motivated to work twice as hard. I was asked to TA in French, and I did – surprised myself by not sucking at it, and I submitted a proposal for a talk entitled “Art, Life and Programming”, which I ended up doing (in English and in French), and as a result got asked to develop a workshop, which was awesome. Things started to spiral and sometimes it was stressful, but I was still moving forward with my graduate work, and even spending a day a week working as a ski instructor during the season. Then I got offered a place in IBM’s Extreme Blue internship (my work with WISE got me noticed by the recruiter) and took the summer off to do that. Once again, I had structure in my life – I worked long hours, but I was loving what I did, and had time to launch Awesome Ottawa, study for interviews at Google, and plan with another EB intern the CompSci Woman blog (launched September 1st).

By the end of the summer, my time away from my research has led me to rethink my direction and I’m really, really excited to go back to it. I have an amazing job lined up for January, which will motivate me to finish on time (this will be my 5th semester if you don’t count the one in Shanghai).

The thing is, I don’t think I would have this job lined up, and I would definitely not have spent the summer at IBM if I hadn’t found my cognitive surplus. I might have finished earlier, but probably not because my interest in blogging and twitter has definitely influenced the direction of my research (and made it better). In fact at the moment, I’m working on a side-project with a friend in the Communications department to visualize her research (I’m also working on Twitter so I gave a talk to the Communications grad students and that’s how we connected).

Your cognitive surplus is there – it’s just being eaten by The Guilt and/or unnecessary drama.

So, I hope I’ve convinced you that you want to find your cognitive surplus but as this post is entitled “How to find your cognitive surplus in graduate school” here are some tips and tricks that I find helpful.

Avoid a reactionary workflow

I really think this is the number one thing that enables me to do everything that I do. Email is a huge killer of this (why I hate email), so I check it infrequently and don’t have alerts set up. Twitter can do this too, so whilst I use Twitter during the day I don’t click any links but instead mark things as favourite and go through them at times when I won’t be productive. I schedule links that I want to share through the week (using SocialOomph) and also schedule my blog posts. When scheduling things in my calendar, I know what works for me in terms of effectiveness (enough going on that I don’t spend too many days in my pjs, and enough free that I can have long chunks of time to focus) and I try and work to that. Also, I don’t play the “I’m busier than you” game – it’s stupid and pointless. I try to say yes to opportunities, but I’m learning how to say no to things that aren’t.

Don’t give up what you love theorizing that it’ll still be there when grad school is done – say yes to things you are passionate about

During last winter, I worked one day a week as a ski instructor. Some people thought this was bonkers, but spending a day a week on the hill away from my computer (and cell phone service) was really refreshing, and I’d go back to my thesis more motivated. That might be the only time that I end up teaching skiing, and I’m glad I did it.

The Awesome Foundation is a group of 10 trustees and a dean and every month we give away an $1000 grant (each trustee puts in $100). The sensible thing to do would be to wait until I have a regular job to do something like this, but I had a well paying internship and I decided to do it now, not later. The fall will be harder as a result, and yes, it takes time, but I cannot tell you what I buzz I get from helping enable stuff like this. It keeps me going.

Eliminate people who don’t support you, or create pointless drama

This should be self-explanatory after my story about the passive aggressive above. Don’t underestimate how much some people drain your energy – why are you letting them?

Surround yourself with people who support and believe in you

I got a ton of stuff done this summer. What changed? My social circle. I started spending more time with amazing people who believe in me and who pushed me forward even when I doubted myself.

Make commitments – and keep them

Leadership and Self Deception (Amazon) is an amazing book, and it talks about how “betraying yourself” (thinking one thing and then doing another) is damaging to your relationships – this applies in work and in other areas of your life. Don’t break your commitments – in my opinion it has the same effect. And don’t weasel around this one by not committing in the first place, “I’ll do X if I get enough work done” is usually a guarantee that you won’t do X. Work with the constraint – often, you’ll surprise yourself.

Commitments doesn’t just apply to spending time with friends, but also non-grad-school things that you do. After work and life settled down earlier this summer I committed to 3 blog posts a week. Sometimes I schedule them in advance, sometimes I think “damn I don’t have anything scheduled for tomorrow”. But I’ve kept that commitment, and it’s helpful. Self-discipline is self-perpetuating – self-discipline in one area of your life will flow to other areas. I keep over-committing myself, but it does tend to work out.

Sleep

I genuinely don’t know how anyone expects to be effective whilst not getting enough sleep. If sleep deprivation can affect your moral judgement, what else will it affect? Make time for the 7-9 hours you need a night, every night. You’ll feel better, and be more effective for it. You are not Jon Skeet, who does, shockingly, actually sleep ~6 hours a night.

Exercise – use a gym buddy or trainer to help stick to it

IMO, you can cope with one, maybe 2 nights of insufficient sleep at a crunch. I think you can take a week off exercising in a crisis. However it’s not a long term strategy – being unhealthy is a huge time sink. Last fall I dislocated my kneecap and couldn’t do anything – for a while, I could barely walk. It took me a while to get back into reasonable shape (and I’m still not where I want to be) but the difference is enormous. Go back to the gym with a friend to motivate you, make a schedule and stick to it. You’ll feel better for it – promise.

Image via PhD comics

Set goals

Your thesis is this huge, and often far off goal – it’s hard to comprehend achieving it and all you can really do it chip away at it. Goals are important, and not something like “make progress on thesis” – they need to be tangible, like “read 5 papers” and “review chapter 2 and send to supervisor”. I spend a lot of time thinking about effectiveness and time management, and I’ve found a system that works for me. I separate my top level (yearly) goals, from my mid-level (weekly) goals, and my Remember The Milk todo list. This keeps me sane – my todo list should mean I work towards my mid-level goals, and my mid-level goals have to be such that they work towards my overall plan. I put my top- and mid-level goals in public on my blog. This is just what works for me, try it or find some other system that works for you – but set goals – how else do you know if you’re on track?

Find an imbalance you can live with

I don’t know any grad student who has a balanced life. I certainly don’t. But I realized that the problem wasn’t the imbalance, it was the nature of it. Now I work to have an imbalance that I can work with – I even experimented with a PA this summer and I delegate as aggressively as I can. For CompSci Woman, my friend and I have an agreement that I deal with WordPress and she deals with email – it works to our strengths. We also decided that neither of us have the time or inclination to manage a Twitter account so we just automate that from the blog. Hopefully in time we’ll be able to delegate it. We accept that for a side project we can’t do everything, and we need to do mostly things that we enjoy.

Forgive yourself for failing

I have achieved my weekly goals a total of ONCE. So pretty much every week my eyes are bigger than my achievements and I fail. At the start of the summer, I had two – huge failures – I’ve since bounced back. I actually finished work this summer with 32 unread emails (I hope they weren’t important). What was important was that I got our two patent disclosures in, and beating myself up about never getting to those emails would be unproductive. You’re going to fail – and when you do, decide what you can learn and move on from it.

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In a similar vein – How To Be Crazy Busy Without Losing Your Mind

Cate Huston is an alumna of IBM’s Extreme Blue program and will finish her Masters in Computer Science at the University of Ottawa researching influence and media contagion on Twitter by the end of 2010. She has a BSc (hons) in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh. Cate has trained in martial arts in China and is a CSIA Level 2 certified ski instructor. She has taught programming in the UK, US, China and Canada and has developed programming curricula that was taught across the US. You can find her latest CC-licensed curriculum, developed for uOttawa here. Cate is the former president of Women in Science and Engineering at uOttawa and is currently Instigator of Awesome at Awesome Ottawa and an Editor of CompSci Woman. She blogs about technology, programming, effectiveness and life at Accidentally in Code and twitters as @catehstn.

This is the first week of class.  With my syllabi in hand, I did my best to coordinate schedules and duties for my courses, student organizations, work, and teaching assistantship.  I tried to organize my calendar in such a way that I have time for myself, my friends, my health and my hobbies.  I made a list of all the things I should do and discovered many of my thoughts were contradictory or at the very least impossible to achieve.

• I should lose 30 pounds.
• I should do more research to boost my Vita.
• I should be more organized.
• I should clean more often.
• I should be better with staying on top of everything and everyone online.
• I should start paying back my loans now.
• I should spend less on groceries.
• I should go to yoga more often.
• I should spend more time studying.
• I should move now to maintain my sanity, but I should wait a month to appease my family.
• I should I should I should I should I should…

You get the idea.  Somewhere in all that thinking and all that “shoulding,” I remembered something a friend said to me last week.

Remove the word “should” from your vocabulary.

Some definitions of should: past tense of shall; must; ought; would. Some definitions of shall: plan to, intend to, or expect to; will have to, is determined to, or definitely will; must;is or are obliged to.

I did a little digging in some of my psychology textbooks and online.  A“should statement“ is one of the ten cognitive distortions within the framework of Cognitive Therapy. There is some discrepancy about who coined the phrase “stop shoulding on yourself” first, Clayton Barbeau or Albert Ellis.  Ellis is a founding father of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and also calls it “musterbation.”  CBT is, in my opinion, the most effective form of therapy and one with which I am very familiar.

They are not talking about cost-benefit analyses or times when we rationally weigh our options to decide which obligation is healthiest.  They are talking about automatic, guilt- and anxiety-inducing thoughts about obligations we place on ourselves or obligations we believe society, family, friends, etc. place on us.  These are the kinds of thoughts that might lead to negative self-talk and procrastination because they induce anxiety and negative affect. One goal of cognitive therapy is to eliminate and remove these types of distortions from our cognitive blueprint via a process called cognitive restructuring.

Lisa Martin – Stop Shoulding on Yourself:

Shoulds get in the way. They stop you from doing what you really want – what is important to you. Living your life based on shoulds takes you away from your true purpose. It can make you feel miserable and out of balance.

Peter G. Vajda – I should, no I choose

The antidote to should is “I choose.” When we change our internal script from “should” to “choose”, we take ownership of our actions. We are in charge; we are in control. The energy underneath “I choose” is empowering and freeing – even if I choose “not to be” or “not to do”. Since I am making the choice, even when I choose “not to”, the burden of guilt has been lifted. I am indebted to no one, but myself. That “inner judge and critic” that wags its finger and shakes its critical and judgmental head when I don’t do what I “should” is now silent, almost nonexistent. Freedom and lightness arise.

I choose to stop shoulding on myself

Many of the “shoulds” in my life revolve around others’ expectations, needs and desires or they revolve around what I think others expect from me. I feel guilty for not being a better friend, grand-daughter, sister, blogger, student, worker, lab mate, researcher, etc.  I take on too many roles and try to be everything for everyone and sometimes I lose myself. I am human, nothing more.  I do not want to be perfect because I know my desire for perfection in the past held me back from truly living my life.  Why do I continue to try to make everyone happy instead of taking care of myself?

This semester is going to be tough and I want to be successful in finding balance in my life. To be successful in anything I want to accomplish for myself, I choose to reduce the number of times I think I should do or be something. Most importantly, I choose to focus on the things that will bring me closer to my bigger life goals. Right now, I choose to focus on school.

Image via YATL

Last week, two posts popped up in my Google Reader that I couldn’t ignore.  Sometimes it seems like my Google Reader is conspiring to read my mind, shake it up and tell me everything will be OK.  Clearly, this is not the case.  It is just that sometimes we notice things more frequently when they are fresh on our mind or we are primed.  It is like a mix of confirmation bias, pareidolia, and the availability heuristic.  Are you still with me?

Julie from Escape the Ivory Tower wrote the first post that caught my eye.  She wrote, Moving Beyond Talent and Skill, which is the first in a great series of posts. She talks about how so many people on the Internet seem to know everything about finding one’s “calling” in life.  People think all you need to do is make a list of your talents and skills or to write down the things that are easy for you.  I love that she says, “If finding your calling were that simple, no one would have to search the damn web for help, because they would be long done with that process.”  I wholeheartedly agree.  If something comes naturally for us, she says, it may be confused with what will make us happy.  I absolutely love learning about skincare and makeup and could talk to you about it for hours. I know a lot about both.  Based on my sales as a makeup consultant and on feedback from friends, I am good at it.  I have a makeup artist license.  I would be a spa manager today if I had not come to grad school.  I was incredibly, utterly, abysmally unhappy in my work.  Julie reiterates that limiting one’s “calling” to one’s natural talent “confuses talent with training,” “limits us to what we’ve already done,” and “focuses on career to the exclusion of life.”  More importantly, we need to ask ourselves about our passions, values and our ideal life.

Cate touched on that last point in her post Defining Dreams: “What does my ideal look like?” She cites Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture and talks about some of her own dreams.  What struck me most was that she mentions how we have to commit to big dreams and how commitment can be a scary prospect.

I will be in school, at the very least, for another four years.  If I do post-doc work as most people do in my field, it will be more like six years.  Lately, I’ve questioned why I put myself through what at times feels like torture.  I’m 30 pounds overweight, I’m usually exhausted, I’m behind on my thesis, I will have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and I can’t ever seem to remember who wrote what in what year in what empirical journal.  I’ve been pondering how I came to be in grad school in the first place and why I am studying something about which I knew nothing before moving to Virginia Beach.  I was going to be a Social Psychologist or a Sociologist when I graduated college.  I was going to sit in my Ivory Tower, pondering and learning more about humans within a group context.  What they study is very different from what I study now.  They don’t do modeling and simulation or know how to calculate various anthropometric measurements.  They don’t need to know there are 40 million olfactory receptor neurons or how the eye actually works or why there are human performance differences depending on whether interfaces employ tactile or auditory feedback.  They don’t need to know anything about Naval architecture or the physics behind shock mitigating seats. They won’t ever read entire textbooks about decision making under stress or the physiological side effects of motion sickness.  They will certainly never need to worry about Mauchley’s sphericity assumption or have to explain why they are using a (insert explicative) structural equation model.  I learn about these things every day now.  I am not naturally talented or gifted with statistics, physiology, modeling and simulation or engineering. So why am I willing to dedicate my life to these things for the rest of my life?

I graduated college with my BS in 2005 and took off what was supposed to be a semester.  That semester turned into three years because life happened as it often does.  I studied for the GRE (and bombed it) as my long-term relationship fell apart.  My research interests shifter further from Social Psychology and closer to Organizational Psychology as I switched from a retail job to a supervisor position in a spa.  I fell in love with the wrong guy as I moved in with my mom.  I took the GRE again as I applied to 20 graduate programs all over the country. I still remember the week I found out that my boss was leaving and she wanted me to take her place. I had already begun to receive acceptance letter after phone call after interview invitation.  I decided to quit what most would consider a stable, lucrative job opportunity in the health and beauty industry to go to grad school.  I started with a Master’s program to get my feet wet in academic waters, but I *knew* I was going to be an Industrial/Organizational Psychologist whose research focus involved video game-based training for distributed teams and the implementation of personality measures for team selection.  My advisor happened to run a lab that conducts both I/O and Human Factors research.  I used a first person shooter computer game for a research project. I took a course in Personnel psychology and a course in Human Factors.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  I was officially, without a doubt, head over heels a member of The Dark Side (as we jokingly call Human Factors in a program with an equal number of I/O and HF students).

So there I was, a first year graduate student launching myself head first into a discipline about which I had no experience or background knowledge.  There I was, pushing myself, freeing myself from fear and the Unknown, challenging myself and committing myself to this path.  Committing.  Commitment.  I was free because I made a commitment to grad school and to this discipline.  I made a commitment to my ideal life, my core values and my passion for making a difference in others’ lives. I had limited myself to those things for which I was naturally talented and the things that came easily to me instead of things I might learn along a more challenging path.  If I hadn’t come to grad school, I would never know this discipline I love so much even existed.  My passion for making a difference in even one person’s life has come to fruition in ways I never expected.  I am happier and more fulfilled than I have ever been.

It is not easy to make this kind of commitment.  I want to give up all the time (usually at 4am when I’m sleep deprived and have a an exam for which I’m prepared).  I question if I made the right decision because I am not perfect and don’t have all the answers.  I’m still on my own journey, figuring it all out as I go along.  On the other hand, this beats the hell out of the life I was living before grad school.  Maybe it is, in fact, easier because I chose this path and I am committed to it wholeheartedly.

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Image – Emerging Artist

Quote (a favorite of mine for a few years) – Anne Morriss