One of the biggest differences I’ve experienced so far in the move from work world to a PhD is having more time to do things.
In previous roles I was used to covering lots of vacant posts, having work plans for the days and weeks of myself and my team that I would constantly juggle as new ‘urgent’ things came in which meant re- and de-prioritising things. Whether it was true or not, and I definitely feel there’s been an outbreak of busy-ness amongst people that even as I try not to feed into myself, either in terms of talking to myself or presenting my workload to others, I always felt like there wasn’t enough time to do things properly.
I think I was good at coaching other people to accept that not everything needs to be gold-plated, and good enough is great most of the time. Even within that, it often felt like myself and my team were being asked to do pieces of work without much time to really explore the subject, consider options, understand the wider landscape or even just have time to think or proof-read things.
Now though, thoughts which I am sure I’ll look back on and shake my head at, I find myself looking at the timelines for a PhD and thinking it seems improbable to have so long to do one overall piece of work. Even thinking about it as multiple workstreams for different research activities, it seems like a really long time relative to the kinds of timings I’ve had before. The fact I’m the only one doing the work, whereas in work world the project plan would be capturing activity for the whole team I was managing, is obviously a big difference.
Things can take longer than I think they will take and one of the things that I have been noticing as my PhD unfolds, is a tension between expecting or being used to doing things quickly, and having the time to be more considered or thorough. Often when working on something now I have a voice in my head that has checked how long it’s taken me to do something and thinks I’ve been too slow. I then chastise myself for being slow and get into a back and forth discussion with myself about if or how I’m being slow. Taking turns to prosecute or defend myself.
Looking more widely, beyond an immediate task to the list of things I’d love to do, then more widely still to issues and challenges in the world, such as climate change, there’s a sense of urgency. A want and need for things to be moving more quickly. A sense of the impacts building up, spiralling out in time and place to this and future generations, all affected by our slowness and inaction. Or back to myself, thinking about all of the things I’m not doing, can’t do, will never do. That suffocating sense of it, rage and fury and want and need.
Then as I’m writing this, I see a man walk past my window, or in truth, very slowly shuffle past my window. I’m distracted from writing this piece, exploring my own sense of frustration and astonishment at the opportunities I have by him. It takes him, relatively or comparably, longer to pass through my line of sight than I would expect it to take me. For him, on the basis of the times I’ve seen him go by, that seems to be his normal, glacial pace. Everything he does or plans to do must presumably be calibrated to how long it takes him to get places. The actual him, not the him he perhaps used to be or wants to be. Maybe he and I might make the same journey but his expectation of timings might be double what mine would be.
As I look back to a screen full of news reports about how climate change has likely made Hurricane Melissa four times more likely, the fraying consensus around the need to act on climate change, slow progress ahead of the upcoming COP30, it all feels so very slow. Too slow. The urgency not matched with action.
I try to soothe myself with thoughts of the man shuffling past my window, telling myself that sometimes things just take longer than it seems they should take. That he might not want things to take so long either, might also be furious and frustrated but that doesn’t make things faster, probably the opposite.
I stretch and play with the analogy, coming back to it over and over to see if it can help me think differently. To find a way to translate the dignity of the man shuffling by, still trying and doing, into something that makes sense of what I see around the action on climate. For now at least I just have to hold those different things in the same view because they don’t feel like they can easily be reconciled. Things can take too long, longer than we want or need and things flow from that – sometimes good, sometimes bad, often unclear at the time or changing in hindsight. Back to the same message, over and over, to just start from where I am and do what I can. Sometimes that feels enough and sometimes it doesn’t.
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