I think that it’s really interesting how people really look for so much purpose in everything that they participate in. I understand, our time is valuable, we’re grad students, the university (and our advisors) kind of owns us until we graduate. We have to do things all the time to keep up with all of our obligations, so why would we want to waste time?
I think that this warrants a little exploration of what I’d consider wasting time. I do think that more than 5-10 minutes on facebook at any given time is a waste. Why not the 5-10 minutes though? Well, it’s a pretty negligible amount of time, and sometimes doing something different is really good for refocusing yourself. I think that sleeping in after spending late nights hanging out with friends isn’t a waste – it builds relationships, it pushes you to open up to people, and it takes a lot of time. That isn’t a waste to me, even though it takes time away from sleep and from work that could get done.
My point of this is that you can get things out of activities that can get labeled as a waste of time. Sometimes, I think it is very worthwhile just to let yourself be with what you’re doing – i.e. there doesn’t need to be a direct “I’m getting __________ (fill in the blank) out of what I’m doing right this second.” I got a fun and interesting evening which, to me, was enough to make me think that the exercises were worth class time. When being a bit more thoughtful about the experience, I got a lot out of these exercises because it got me out of my box, it made me feel uncomfortable. No one likes feeling uncomfortable, especially not an introverted electrical engineer. In thinking about how it made me feel about communicating my work with people who are not my peers, it was good because that isn’t that easy. When something is not easy, you can get choked up, not tell your story/information linearly. It showed that you should think of your work as sort of a story – one that you know very well, as if it had been a part of your childhood. I say we know it well, because at this point, we should. You’re getting a Ph.D, be the expert you’re supposed to be!
Anyway, to wrap this up, I’m just trying to point out that I think that sometimes, we need to step back and appreciate an experience as an experience and not immediately jump into what it did for us.
Hey,
It was a really interesting post that you wrote. I attended Jorge Cham’s talk on the “Power of Procrastination” (http://www.phdcomics.com/speaking/print.htm) which he gave at Virginia Tech (in the not so recent past) and your blog reminded me of the things he had said. In our urgency to get things done, we often criticize ourselves for “wasting time” (atleast I do), when at times; “procrastinating” would have actually helped us in taking a step back and seeing where we are really going and if we wanted to go there.
I guess it’s a work in progress for me …
I like to think that whenever I feel like I’m “wasting time” poking around the internet, I’m actually learning more about things I can use to relate to my students – at least they *seem* to be entertained when I talk about Justin Bieber 😉
But I think you’re right; we too often get caught up in the mercenary aspects of “what did this do for me?” without just letting ourselves experience things.