Navigating versus Journeying: Brief Reflections on my PhD journey (part 2)
Emotions signal when to pivot plans -- neglect them at our peril
The Evolution of my Perspective on Goal Setting
When I started my academic journey, I envisioned my scholarly development as a sequence of progressive goals. Steps on a staircase. One by one. However, I soon realized that development was more about discerning which among many goals, possible and impossible, were truly important and others less so. The key insight, although not quite at the level of an “aha,” was that if you want to get somewhere, you're going to use one or more goals to organize tasks to help you get there.
Initially, my background as a data scientist in government and working in the philanthropic sector led me to believe I could create systems without underlying theory. Explanatory teleologicalism was my fundamental orientation, similar to older views of biological function — “the heart beats for the sake of moving the blood through the body … [t]herefore, the blood moving through the body is the cause for the heart beating” [1] — and is often how engineers are often trained to execute. The system exists because it needs to exist and we need to make it better. For myself I was used to engineering specific applications or within a designed technical environment and taking a research artifact (typically encapsulated as a trained model or less useful algorithm) and modifying it for a variety of business and social goals. Diligently, I carried this mindset through my first year and part of my second year. But then came a moment in my program, when I found myself sputtering, unable to answer a simple question: Kwame, but Why?
The Importance of Theory
The second great "aha" was recognizing the importance of theory. I credit my advisers for allowing this importance to unfold through a series of questions probing the underlying causality and prefiguration of my proposals and claims. For example, yes, you think that if you use ABC model or theory in this configuration, or for this purpose, that some effect will be achieved. Great. But why? What are the theoretical linkages to the action that you are undertaking to better the world. Why is it important to start with those already in no small part achieving these end goals. For myself, the why question forces a deeper thinking when integrating academic theory with applied socio-technical investigation. Behind theory is rhetoric, which is also equally important (I will discuss this in my final post in this series).
We need to understand "why" because it justifies the use of models and theories in application. Would you want to commute in an untested autonomous vehicle designed by the common sense and selected theory of an engineer who had never driven a car? Probably not. You would want an excellent explanation and why to even begin to consider it. Theory allows us to not only explain but test claims as we consider them. It enables us to adjust and tweak our understanding of the world, even when dealing with multiple truths. Theory need not be positivist; it can be pragmatic, multi-causal, or even artistic, and designerly. It can just be. But it's important that it be so that we can see when we look and try to understand.
A Link Between Theory and Goals
A goal purports to be an outcome of events. It can be a one-time achievement or it can be a state of ongoing being. Either way it's a destination. And we need to explain how or why our goals can be achieved, as with all theories. Therein lies the rub: what tasks can I use to get from here to there? In my middle years (3 and 4), before my preliminary examination, I explored this understanding with a bit more grace. I pulled from different theories, considered and conceived of different experiments, quasi-experimental, natural and otherwise. I started to move into more of a design science orientation, where human-computer interaction theory and collective considerations were prefigured to rise to the forefront. But the actions were always causal, intentional, and in service of a goal.
But it's tough to connect lofty, abstract goals to tasks. Anxiety emerges when what's expected of you surpasses what you feel equipped to handle. This is where creative thinking (e.g. lateral), right-sizing, and the Pareto 80-20 principle can come to save the day. You can change what you’re equipped to handle, what is expected of you, or both. Based on what theory and intentions, what tasks or actions can bring about most of the goal.
An example: years later, in the throes of formulating and carrying out my dissertation, I realized I wasn't going to get it all done. I felt anxious but also highly motivated. I could generate novel 3D visualizations of a human body from a few photos, circumventing the 3d human mesh regression problem with a newer method — 3D Gaussian splats — but I knew I could not devise a measurement method in under a month because the although method has a metric basis it has a probabilistic representation. My goal remained the same: defend and graduate ASAP, but I was going to have to change what was expected of me.
And that's a key relationship between goals and tasks: tasks change all the time in service of a mostly stable goal. It's how you concoct success that allows you to accept different tasks. So what I did, after a wonderful forest-for-the-trees discussion with my partner (waves at K.), is to swap in and argue for the inclusion of an already published paper to take up a part of my dissertation. The argument was successful and I was suddenly much closer to my goal.
The Power of the Pareto 80-20 Principle
For me, the Pareto 80-20 principle has been one of the most powerful mechanisms for reselecting and prioritizing tasks in service of goal. A summary is here (Wikipedia) and a wonderfully written description of cautions of applying it are here (Faber 2009). A lot of my work involves pulling from disparate Github repositories, combining them in ways unintended by their authors, with the help of large language models, and making a running proof of concept, with a decent user interface, that can be poked at, made malleable, within community co-design. When done with prefiguration, keeping the end-means goal in mind, this can lead to quite novel designs. The 80-20 principle can guide a researcher to ways of shifting slowed momentum towards a goal but it does not tell you when to do so. It was another great “aha” that qualitative methods can be applied to quantitative and mixed-method day-to-day work and that feelings and emotions point to the need for change …
We Neglect Emotion at Our Peril
Starting out, I was surprised at the role of emotion and feeling in developing an intuitive sense of when actions needed to change: they turned out to be valuable waypoints to notice.
Goal setting is hard when progress is uncertain because you're never quite sure where you are, relative to the end goal. One approach is to dump all your tasks out in a way that lets you group them in different ways that serve you. Then closely examine the groups while keeping in mind your founding and guiding principles, which may change! The idea is to have a regenerative confluence, a bubbling stack of work, where things that continue to move you towards your principles and fundamental goals. Emotion is the leader that tells you when something has to shift. Listen to yourself carefully because you are your best guide. I won’t go much into it in this post but I have a set of Logseq scripts that let me query blocks formatted to indicate tasks, priorities, and contextual information.
Practical Approaches to Goal Setting and Task Management
1. Focus on a limited set of tasks each day.
2. Use context to scope down what you can focus on. some tasks can be done when you’re holding your phone, others on a laptop, still others fun to do while listening to music. For the power of context, I borrowed the idea from Getting Things Done and todo.txt by Gina Trapani.
3. Notice what haunts you and think smarter, not harder, on how to deal with it. The most efficient way to handle things is to not do them. Does the goal need to be met? I don’t have the space to dig into it here but ideas from Triz and inventive thinking hint at this kind of reformulation.
4. If communication is a large part of your job, write a little bit every day — as scribbles, notes, revisions of collected scribbles and notes, final articles, or journal articles.
5. Review your tasks by categories — priority or context (A, B, DUE, etc.) — and pay attention to how you feel about them. If you feel pretty good, then you're doing pretty good. Emotion is a valuable barometer that we often overly seek to quash, especially when it comes to productivity management in this culture.
6. Align your work with your goals by considering how you would feel better about the work and what adjustments could be made. Don’t be afraid to dramatically change things (see 80-20 principle) or take other pathways on the advice of others unlike you.
7. Recognize that everything has three stages: a beginning, middle, and an end. Even stages have them (there’s a beginning, middle and end to the beginning stage of work). Acknowledge what stage of the work you’re in and celebrate transitions between them. Incremental progress helps contextualize where you are relative to a goal and acknowledging it should reduce stress.
If there’s one take away I would want you, dear researcher, to take away, it is this: neglect emotion at your own peril for it sprouts wayposts that invite you to reprioritize, reselect, and regenerate your actions. By keep emotion, action, and goals in balance you can change what you’re equipped to handle, what is expected of you or both — with far less anxiety and stress.
P.S. By the way, as an final aside, I forgot to note that during the work week I regularly do mini-notes on my work for the day in my notes, as a way to communicate a sense of my ongoing efforts, day by day, for community-based economies.
[1] UNL Digital Commons (2024) Biological Teleology in the Modern World