Focus and Distraction

I am reaching the end of a graduate exercise called the Thesis. Actually, the thesis is like the magnum opus of graduate school, the bulk of the project is a massive writing assignment. I started working on this last summer, and I will not be finished until August. The reason I say I'm almost finished now is because I am reaching the end of the writing process after which I can submit the rough draft to my adviser for editing notes. After it is finished, I will defend it, and then I'm done with grad school.

It has not been easy because there are so many distractions that I must deal with on a regular basis. Like I've mentioned before, I live with my parents now, and living with them has brought about many extra responsibilities that I didn't have when I lived on campus or by myself. One of those--or a few of those--responsibilities is yard work. Because my father has been working non-stop for the last eighteen days, I've taken over his yard duties. One of the perks to living at home is that my mother is here and is more than happy to do my laundry and cook for me when I'm hungry. I'm also very happy to help out around the house because my parents provide for me as though I am a child again. The only difference is that I can do a lot more with a kind of lenience I never got as a teenager. There are a few drawbacks however. One of those draw backs is that my parents are conservative anti-ganj folk. Normally, this wouldn't bother me, but my mother has been asking a lot of questions that she doesn't want to know the answer to.

The problem for me is that on the one hand, I don't want to take advantage of my parents since they are my only source of funds right now, but at the same time, they won't give me permission to medicate using ganj, nor the money, so I have to find a way around that. Well, my mother thinks that I am scamming them--which I may be in a way, but I am not happy about it. I'm not proud of myself, and I wish that I could be self-sustainable and financially independent. The only way I could do that at this point in my life is to deal drugs, which is an incredibly dangerous venture, with a high-risk, low-yield business model, and so is just not a logical solution.

So this drama has been plaguing my mind, but I've been trying to push through it by working on my thesis. I'm getting so close to finishing I can taste it. Also, I found that one of the things that was keeping me from finishing was the fact that I had nothing really planned beyond grad school. I know that I want to get my PhD, but without having taken the GRE yet, or applied to any grad schools, it is not possible for me to start a PhD program (assuming I get accepted) for another year. I gave this a lot of thought, and I've been very interested in medicine in the last... going on five years now, and now that I'm at the end of one academic road, I find myself longing to hop onto another one. It was for that reason that I decided to re-enroll as an undergraduate, add a second major, and complete an undergrad pre-med program, take the MCAT and apply to med school.

This decision has sparked a kind of motivation in me to finally finish what I've started. Because I really want to start learning about this new field that I've signed up to study, I am motivated to get started, but I am also disciplined enough to know that I can not start something new until my thesis is finished. That has really lit a fire underneath me, as in the last week I've written the bulk of the thesis, whereas I had been stuck for weeks, trying to figure out what I was going to write about. These days the words have been flowing freely, although for the night I think I can not write anymore.

So what I've learned is that when faced with a task, it is best to planned the future beyond that task in order to ensure that the first task will get finished. The reasoning behind this is that once you become excited about the new project coming up, there should be a renewed sense of motivation to finished the initial project. That has been the case with my thesis. Before, when I had nothing to look forward to beyond finishing my thesis, besides looking for work, I dawdled, I was not very concerned about finishing the thesis, and I wasn't concerned if I never finished school. Now that there is an end in sight, and a post-thesis plan, I can finish the project without any anxieties as to what I will attempt to do next.

So my words of wisdom for anyone who wants to accomplish something but has a problem maintaining drive to commit to finishing is to keep working until you find yourself longing to do something else. At that point, make arrangements to start something new, which will not only give yourself a kind of deadline to finish the first project, but it will also focus and motivate you to finish what you start before diving into another project. It probably doesn't work for everyone, but I've found this to be helpful. At the end of each semester, when I have a large amount of papers due, I find myself longing to read something other than what I need to to write the papers. So instead of distracting myself, I start a pile of books that I am going to read when I finish the last paper. This also helps with finishing books before starting another one. Pick out the next book before the book prior to it is finished, and don't start it until you've finished the first. The theory is that the motivation will sustain longer if the mind has the next thing to look forward to already in its sights.