Thursday 13 July 2017

Motivation Is Overrated, Hack It Anyway

Winter is here, and productivity is low.

I’m not sure whether to cast this as a productivity problem or a motivation problem, actually. The problem with motivation is that, like passion and Pottermore, it’s overrated.

Let me clarify - when we talk about "motivation", we’re usually using the word in one of at least a couple of senses.

The first sense is the reason you want to do something - the reason you want to learn a language, or do a PhD, or run a marathon, or shear a sheep and knit a jumper from its wool in a day. This is a good kind of motivation, I think - it’s good to have a reason for doing something.

The second sense of motivation is the drive that makes you think Doing The Thing will be better than lying on the couch binge-watching Terrace House: Aloha State.

Y’all, this kind of motivation is overrated because your brain isn’t stupid. Your brain knows that nothing is better than lying on the couch watching Terrace House: Aloha State all day ("Torichan! Torichan!") and it will fight you to take this path, the fun path, the path of least resistance. That's its job.

The problem, then, with blaming your low productivity on "lack of motivation" is that this sort of suggests the solution is to get more motivation, and good luck with that.


Before I started this PhD I was working full time, so I approached my project much like I approached any job: show up 9 to 5, keep regular lunch hours, don’t watch youtube when people can see your computer screen. You don’t need drive to work a 9-5 job - you just need the desire to comply with the societal norm that this is how work is done, and the fear that you’ll get in trouble if you don’t.

But PhDs are not like jobs (not least because I don’t think you can legally be paid below minimum wage in Australia? Maybe? Who knows anymore?) When you do a PhD, you don’t get in trouble if you don’t work 9-5 - literally no-one cares - and so the work habits you spent years building up start to slip away.




In the first year of my PhD I thought I had productivity figured out. I went full-Hermione. I read books about it. Books that promised me I could hack productivity if only I knew the right strategies, the right approach.

But productivity - motivation - is tumultuous, frustrating, exciting. The relationship you have with productivity is, after the relationship you have with the person who makes your coffee in the morning, the most intense, rewarding relationship you’ll have during your PhD. (My barista knows my name. She gives me a bit of my soul back every morning. I don’t know her name. It’s not that kind of relationship.)

The one thing I’ve learnt about productivity and/or motivation in the eighteen months I’ve been doing a Phd now is that, for me at least, there is no guaranteed method of being productive. Productivity is trickery, sorcery, voodoo; as much an art as a science. To be productive is to be creative, to generate new ways of working and to alchemise the old. What works one month, one week, one day, doesn’t work the next.  You cannot "just get" more motivation, but you can create cheap knockoff copies of it. So, without further ado, here is a shortlist of my productivity tricks:

  • Get to uni early. There’s no way you got out of bed at Stupid O’clock just to sit in an empty office and shitpost on facebook.
  • Stay at uni late. There’s no way you stayed after everyone else has gone home for the day just to sit in an empty office and shitpost on facebook.
  • Study in the same place everyday; the repetitive environment cues your brain to the fact that it’s time to work, and if you’ve had a few successful days in a row, it gives you confidence.
  • Study in a different place. You haven’t yet procrastinated in this place, so it doesn’t automatically trigger your procrastination habits.
  • Pay for all day parking. If you pay for an all day parking spot, you’re going to stick around to make the most of it. (You guys. I know I’m not the only one who does this - if I spend $2 an hour on parking, you better believe I will use every hour. If only the government knew how little value I place on my own time.)
  • Catch the bus to your study place. (Honey I did not fight a seventeen year old sporting a Backstreet Boys haircut for a seat on the bus just to stay in my office for one hour and then leave.)
  • Work in short bursts. You can do whatever you should be doing for twenty minutes. I believe in you. The time will pass anyway. And then you might want to do more.
  • Study with someone else. It helps to see someone else working. (If they also procrastinate on facebook all day, dump them.)
  • Surround yourself with people. Study in the library. Study in the Galleria, it has three hours free wifi. Study in Ikea, it has crappy cheap coffee.
  • Reward yourself. Tell yourself you can have chocolate/coffee/the next episode of Terrace House when you have done two hours. (Just joking. This almost never works for me, I take the reward first and then don’t do the work.)
  • Find a task that you want to do less than the task you should be doing. Procrastinate on the new task by doing the old task.
  • Hang out with friends and family who care - about your PhD, or about you. Sugar, you are a lot to care about. You cannot care about yourself all by yourself.
  • And, as always, remember that finished is better than perfect.
Any more tips and tricks? Answers on a postcard, please.

Wednesday 5 July 2017

Yassmin Abdel-Magied Is Part Of Everything We Need, More Than We Deserve


I haven’t been following the Yassmin story. Partly because she’s a "TV person" and I don’t own a TV. Partly because white privilege means white girls don’t have to keep close tabs on what happens to brown girls - not because white girls don’t care what happens to brown girls, but because white girls aren’t scared of the same thing happening to them. (First they came…)

I had an idea of course that Yassmin posted something about ANZAC Day on Facebook this year and it made some people angry, because there’s nothing so insulting to the memory of ANZACs dying for our freedom as remembering other people to whom we have not extended the same freedom. So when a friend had a spare ticket to hear Yassmin speak at UWA last night, I was like ‘cool, free tickets’, and I thought Yassmin would probably be interesting in an "outspoken", "controversial" sort of way.

Even if I had been paying attention to the Yassmin story - even if you had told me exactly what to expect - I could still never have been prepared for the sheer brilliance that is Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

Co-founder of Youth Without Borders at 16. 2015 Young Australian of the Year for Queensland. 1.8 million views on her TED talk What does my headscarf mean to you. Guest panellist on Q&A, The Drum, and The Project. Author. Mechanical engineer. Petrolhead.

"Did you know" said my friend, as we settled into our seats, "that she’s only twenty-six?"

What?

Yassmin is bright, intelligent, funny, bold, fearless, cynical, truthful, humble. She also has the best self-deprecating humour, a wicked broad Queenslander accent, and a fierce fashion sense to boot. On top of that, she didn't seem outspoken or controversial at all - just genuine and kind, caring and optimistic. Everything she said was backed by the weight of experience, the wisdom of an examined life, and common sense. I liked her straight away, and I usually don’t like people who are that good at everything.


Yassmin began with a story about how when her family first arrived in Australia as skilled migrants, one of the neighbours invited them to a party and told them to "bring a plate". How poor must these neighbours be? her parents wondered, so they brought plates, knives, forks, and a chair as well - just in case.

It’s unbelievable, shameful that people would send her death threats. How can you meet someone like Yassmin and think "yes, Australia will be better without her in it. I will send her details of what guns I want to kill her with"? (And her own received her not...)

She was asked how she deals with the personal attacks. To paraphrase, she said something like "Some days I remember it’s not personal - once you’re in the media, you’re an idea, not a person, and people are attacking the idea. Other days I don’t want to leave the house. But I know in my faith that I will not be given more than I can bare, so I look for what I can learn from it."

But that’s not what Yassmin came to talk about last night. Mostly she talked about unconscious bias - those unchecked assumptions and mental shortcuts that we use to justify our own limited perspective and that results in a lack of diversity.

We don’t need diversity just because it’s Nice or Fair or The Right Thing To Do. We need diversity because without it we only see things in one way and we make multi-billion dollar mistakes. Diversity - the combination of different perspectives - has economic value.  We need those different perspectives in Australia - which is why, by the way, Yassmin Abdul-Magied is only part of everything we need, because no one person can “be diversity”. That’s not what diversity means.

Similarly it isn’t one single person’s job to dismantle bias and promote diversity - it’s everyone’s job. We can all do it; and we all need to do it. We all need to speak up for each other because once you become an advocate for someone else - as Yassmin can attest from her own lived experience - you also become a lightning rod for vitriol and hate and no one should have to endure that by themselves.

Australia’s diversity is a gift - we should use it for our benefit. Where's the controversy in that?

Yassmin is moving to London, and if she’s doing it to take some time out from the hate and death threats she faces in Australia then who can blame her. But Yassmin also struck me as the kind of person who doesn’t back down; the kind of person who can smile at her enemies and find common ground over a shared love of Ducati motorbikes. She’s vulnerable and tough and warm - ‘indefatigable, blisteringly funny, and outrageously smart’, as Benjamin Law puts it- and she’s more than we deserve right now but Yassmin, I hope you come home soon. We need you.