Alternatively titled - Laments of a 'Sciency' part II
Are you one of those people who measure a day's success/worth at the end by how productive it was? Well then, welcome to the "My day sucks, everyday!" club. Being a researcher, I am no stranger to deadlines and pressures of short term targets, even if they come few and far in between. But when they do come, more often than not, after a long period of lethargy and complacence, they seem all the more like the proverbial gun to your head or sword at your neck. And its not just me. I have seen many of my lab mates, current and former, grappling with this. Often enough, for days on end, we end the day looking at the time, and bemoaning the lack of productivity that day. Regretting the hours spent in the canteen over cups of tea, the longer than usual lunch 'hour', and most of all, the hours whiled away surfing the Internet, and not looking for publications. Then all you can do after the realization strikes is to curse yourself, promise punitive action, and vow to come in early tomorrow, work your derriere off, and not leave the lab until you get some productive data. Only to do it all over again the next day. Rinse and repeat. And this is just one of the average days during the long periods of inaction, exploration, or as I like to call it, literature survey. And being a computational biologist, I am more prone to face such periods frequently than an experimental biologist. But what happens when those deadlines strike and immediate goals rear their ugly head? How does one used to taking time in figuring things out cope with the sudden and urgent requirement for action? While a few righteous ones rise to the challenge, shrug off the complacence and deal with the task at hand head on, others follow a more convoluted route. I have often seen people, friends rather (and myself included), initially trying to the best of their ability to go down the above mentioned idealistic route, and 'man up', but then unable to sustain this initial blast of fuel combustion and the resulting drive, determination and optimism, and ultimately failing to the see it through to the desired conclusion in the given time frame. Instead, once the initial explosion of drive has fizzled out, the exponential growth of productivity plateaus, and one gets into a mundane, dog-chasing-its-own-tail-in-circles routine. The results stop, and the exasperation grows, resulting in an eventual inversely proportional relationship with productivity. The more one gets stuck, the lesser time one spends working, and finds refuge in checking their e-mail or Facebook every five minutes. Then either you give up or leave it all up to fate, with a firm belief (or rather, a desperate optimism) that things will work out - eventually. It HAS to work out. The principle of 'something's gotta give' will kick in. You just hope its the God of negative or no results who gives in before you do. And if you think about it, more or less almost every time, don't things DO actually work out? The universe has a peculiar way of sorting itself out, or at least that's what I'd like to believe, cause usually when you find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place, its imperative that a miraculous, third way out does appear out of the blue. Now that might be your own perseverance and/or desperation at work, but it helps to believe that a guardian angel was at work while you were busy 'liking' (and cursing) the weekend getaway pictures of your friends' in other professions on Facebook. Meanwhile, if you come up with better ways to deal with these low-on-productivity phases while you ponder over it over a cup of coffee in the canteen, do let me know.
