Tradeoffs

Looking back in the journal (proof that this thing can be useful!), I see that I've been at my ten-hour workdays for about four months now.  The notion of moving to ten-hour days was to free up three days at a time to work on the dissertation, the idea being that contiguous time would lead to greater productivity.  I've decided to conclude my little experiment and resume the more traditional workweek beginning tomorrow, because I've not really been any more productive with the dissertation than before, and I have been decidedly LESS committed to fitness/gym training during this time period.  I've also been dead tired in the evenings, and I don't like that.  

In retrospect, the problem with the dissertation is not really one of contiguous time.  In grad school, when I had firm deadlines, I could easily write 15-20 quality pages in the fields of international politics, political philosophy, constitutional law, or quantitative methods over the course of a day.  String together a few days like that, and there's a dissertation.  Of course, there's more time required for the research, but given the speed with which I read AND write, even that's not that big an issue.  The issue really is prioritization.  I value other things more than I value finishing the dissertation as quickly as I could finish it.  I value my health more than I did in grad school and the fact I am 60 pounds lighter today than 3 years ago, and I am dedicated to maintaining my health in the gym.  I value Callie and Kiwi (my family?) and my friends.  I value live "Texas Music" and dive bars (yeah, I'm a weird intellectual.  Sue me).  I value this website, and the 8 More Miles site.  I value the chances I have now to travel places that I never really thought about growing up in Oklahoma.  I value ideas above all else, and my interests are all over the place.  So, really, the dissertation isn't being held up by my work schedule.  It's being held up because it's not the only thing I value.

I'm slightly amused, looking back, at my notion that rearranging my schedule might just be "the answer."  Sometimes, I just like to shake things up, whether it's redesigning the website or adding a weblog or rearranging the living room, or traveling to College Station to see Brent Mitchell.  I don't know that it's ever "the answer," but a fresh perspective always seems to energize me.  

* * * *

Michael's wide-ranging 2001-01-07 journal entry is full of thought-provoking stuff, but one portion really resonates with me:

After doing my time with the Objectivists, I'm tired of people who criticize others with non-standard definitions. It's like using a personal definition for the word "blue," and accusing others of ignorance when they use it "wrong."

This isn't just a problem with Objectivists (or Anarcho-capitalists, which prompted Michael's writing on this topic).  It's a broader problem of textual analysis.  I always used to cringe when someone would pull out a dictionary in order to "prove" that some term used by an historical political philosopher "meant" this or that, when the clearest, most reliable indicator of meaning was the political philosopher's writing itself (and all of the contextual cues contained therein -- a subject that preoccupied Leo Strauss his entire academic career).  Generally, the conversation became of little use to me at that point, because it was a signal to me that the people involved were unwilling to work at the PROCESS of discovering meaning within political philosophy texts, which involves far more than the dictionary.  Similarly, I sympathize with Michael's frustration over the "scolding" that resulted when someone used anarchy in a sense that was somehow novel to a list comprised of Anarcho-capitalists (but was, in actuality, a traditional use of the term).  And while I understand Rand's motivation for wanting to reclaim the term "selfish" as a moral term, I tend to think that Objectivists might be better served by developing and promoting their philosophy than by engaging in semantic (or is that pedantic?) reclamation projects.  

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