Dissertating Under the Influence

“I don’t wanna talk to these cocksuckers, but you have to. In life, you have to do a lot of things you don’t fuckin’ wanna do. Many times, that’s what’s the fuck life is: one vile fucking task after another.

But don’t get aggravated. Then the enemy has you by the short hair.”

-Al Swearengen (played by Ian Mcshane) from the HBO series Deadwood

Mama said knock you out

Procrastination: meet your foe. Today my officemate Gilberto and I have declared you to be the terrorist of doctoral students everywhere, spreading fear and self-loathing in the most un-Hunter Thompson-like of ways. We declare you Enemy of the State. Wait –that’s us. Okay: Supreme Enemy of PhD students at Tijuana’s El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

Our WMD of choice: “Contingency Management,” a ‘carrot-and-stick’ technique that forces a procrastinator to produce written text before s/he engages in meaningful tasks like, say, watching Comedy Central or waxing your legs.

I first learned about CM on Jim Gibbon’s marvelous blog on life, Turkey, and dissertation research. I’ve never met Jim (a fellow IDRF recipient) but, like me, he lives the same unfortunate plight of having to turn awesome cocktail party stories (see the Turkish barbershop debate over strawberries vs. circumcision) into a 300-page academic tome no one but my PhD committee will read.

So when Gilberto, a PhD student and my desk jockey neighbor at El Colegio, confessed his addiction to Skype in the face of rapidly-approaching graduation deadlines, we turned to Jim’s blog.

“Contingency Management is simple,” writes Jim, “Choose a daily task that you value (e.g., checking your email, working out, showering) and make it contingent on writing for a period of, say, 30 minutes. The trick is finding something you really can’t go a day without doing. For me, checking my email works like a charm.”

If sobriety were only that tempting. But Jim goes to Princeton and seems to have his shit together, so Gilberto and I were willing to take the plunge.

Classy Baja alternatives, but no beloved Tecate

This morning we sat down in our office and came up with a set of guidelines for Contingency Management that any self-destructive, anxiety-ridden doctoral students –namely us– can safely abide by. Henceforth, The Rules of Cubículo 9:

1. 500 words (approximately two pages) = 1 Tecate. (a)
2. Tecate Light is not an appropriate substitute for the real, canned, delicious thing. (b)
3. No Tecates until those palabras are etched in Microsoft Word and shown to officemate. (c)

(a) Rule-makers reserve the right to lower minimum wordage under conditions of extreme duress, such as every Friday, phone conversations with PhD advisors, and most Mondays.
(b) Studies show that light beer sucks.
(c) Penalty for violation is contributing to General DUI Fund.

We constructed a “time sheet” to tally our pages and Tecates. For instance, Gilberto writes 500 words of his lit review on historical water politics in the Tigris and Euphrates River Basins (his PhD topic), records the achievement, and presto –one beer closer to graduation.

No more trips to Baja wine country until Chapter 2 is complete

“Procrastination”, Gilberto tells me, has no precise translation into Spanish. He uses a variety of phrases (“leaving until tomorrow what I should do today”, etc) but nothing quite has the clipped, culpable blend of guilty Catholicism and Fordist models of production that our English version intonates. To procrastinate. Now it’s merely that space between a blank page and my drink.

So, yeah, I’ll get on writing that dissertation. After I get back from my vacation to Mexico City. Next week. I promise. Beer by beer.