It shouldn’t have been as big a surprise to me that a PhD would require improving, learning, or relearning skills. The endurance to write has been a challenge to get back. Reading art theory, philosophy, and dense texts is a muscle I’ve had to build up again. Analyzing and critiquing art has remained over the years, but learning to view my own work with an analytical eye has been an enjoyable new task.
Through all of this, the biggest surprise is the need to build systems for organizing literary research. (And let’s face it, I should have seen this one coming.) A significant challenge in this has been establishing a pattern of organization that sticks. Over the last year and some change, I’ve started and abandoned numerous systems for study.
Mind mapping platforms: I love the idea of these. It’s so impressive when I see other researchers and artists use them well. I’m envious when I see a presentation and the speaker pulls up this huge web of quotes and images, woven together through vague connections that sum up their thoughts. And despite my own mind feeling quite tangled, sorting out that mess on a digital platform feels so impossible. Every time I try one of these platforms I get overwhelmed by its potential and I quickly lose steam.
Notebooks: I haven’t fully abandoned these, but I find them less and less useful for me. That’s mostly due to a bad habit of taking notes across multiple notebooks and not taking notes linearly. It’s the same bad habit I have with sketchbooks. I bounce from one sketchbook to another and skip pages throughout. I don’t know why. But I do know that it makes it very difficult to follow a thought or a history of ideas and notes. I keep trying this one, but it remains a challenge.
Task management programs: I’ve used these in many day jobs, and here’s what I’ve learned: When you use them right and consistently, they’re the best thing ever, and when you don’t keep up with them, they become an absolute burden. I’m currently in the “not keeping up with them” period, and I feel frustrated and bogged down every time I get a notification on my phone or in my email reminding me that I haven’t accomplished a task I set for myself.
I’ll just share these three here as this whole post is a very negative side of my PhD organizational systems. A follow-up to this post will highlight the things that ARE working.