Far-flung Spring & the Eisenhower Matrix
On finishing my second year of my PhD + planning for comps
Dear Friends,
Last time I saw one of my posts on the Substack feed it was labeled a “14-minute read” next to a bunch of 3- and 4-minute reads, so I’ll try to keep things simpler this time. I’m in my last month or so of the semester and dreaming of those transitory weeks of ‘true spring’ where the chilliness fades and the neighborhood trees bursts into bloom.
I don’t even know if I really like spring all that much. It’s so over-hyped and fleeting, especially here in New England. The melting snow, the mud and slush, pollen, maybe two weeks in the fifties or sixties, mushy petals on the ground, and then straight into summer. I’m so used to the subtropics, where it’s more-or-less summer for ten months a year. At least in Florida I knew how to manage my expectations.
I know why I’ve been dreaming of spring though, and it has nothing to do with regions.
To the grad student, as May approaches it feels like the year-long sprint is finally over; you can re-focus on everything you’ve neglected since September. Which is also probably the last time I went to the gym or read a book for pleasure. Spring: a vague season to look forward to as a moment of repose. Spring: my second year as a PhD student will be over before I know it. I can’t believe it’s been nearly twelve months since I was ruminating on the previous spring’s return and listing everything I’d read in my first year returning to grad school.
I’ve thought of writing more about life as a PhD student before, but I know there’s that inevitable hindsight that won’t come until I’m on the other side, so it seems a bit imprudent to say anything before my current self catches up with the wisdom of a future self. That being said, if everything goes according to plan, I will be moving onto the second major phase of the English PhD process in the fall, which is beginning my comprehensive exams (“comps”) academic years.
A PhD with a creative writing focus is a paradoxical thing—at least it seems this way to me. To get a PhD means to specialize in something—to become a specialist. By my nature I am more of a generalist. A jack of all trades; a master of none. Both a chameleon and a crow. Someone who collects little interests with a corvid-like curiosity. Someone who changes with all the rotating shiny things the world offers up.
If anything, if you’re a creative writer your specialty is your creative writing and the various genre(s) or subgenre(s) you live inside. However, that specialty can be slightly antithetical to the traditional English PhD. At some point, you have to prove that you can think like a scholar—not just as an artist. Usually a scholar has a period, say, the Victorian era. Or Modernism. You become an expert on George Eliot or James Joyce. Maybe you find a newer academic/theoretical field to look at older works through. You publish some articles, a book, make a career of it….
The other aspect of being a creative writer is that you are often of your moment. You are creating work in the extreme present—or perhaps even looking toward futures. It often feels dizzying to be tasked to focus on some aspect of a time period in the past while you’re still trying to figure out where you fit in during this nowness.
So it feels like a tricky balance: trying to figure out where your creative self lies and your critical self begins. The truth is: they may be one self, and I may be unfairly trying to compartmentalize. Which makes sense, as my comprehensive exam process will involve reading and being tested on ~100 books over the course of the next twelve months. So, this is where I am currently: torn between all my various interests, my creative writing career, and the tasks I am supposed to complete as a PhD student. I am preparing for the hundred.
I want to be clear that at this time I intend to produce a creative dissertation in the form of a novel (although this might change) despite having to prove myself as a critical thinker during the exam process. First though, I have to prove I am competent enough to get to what people call the “A.B.D.” (“all but dissertation”) phase.
I’ve been trying to parse what I feel confident enough to approach as a scholar while also acknowledging that there are topics I’m interested in but don’t need to specialize in; topics that lend themselves better to a course I could teach rather than something I want to dedicate my comps to; and topics that just feel too vague, abstract, or nascent to write anything meaningful about. There are also just topics that I’m interested in but they don’t feel like they’re the right time. Or maybe it’s just that they’re something I want to dedicate myself to creatively without the pressure to become a scholar on said topic. Which brings me to….
I spent part of the weekend trying to brainstorm every ephemeral interest that has crossed my magpie mind this past decade. I wanted to weigh them against each other. Heart against feather. I was thinking about the best way to brainstorm and try to check in with myself about my own interests, and for some reason the Eisenhower Matrix came to mind. As a side-bar, I do some coaching as a side gig where I talk to graduate students about topics like time and task management—so I’ve developed an odd grab bag of resources to work with. I normally don’t even like using the Eisenhower Method in my personal life (it feels ‘too left-brained’ for me), but I wondered if I could quickly repurpose it for my own research delegation needs. This is what I came up with:
As I booted up Photoshop to remix my own matrix (minus the trench coat and sunglasses), part of me was concerned that I might be indulging in some time-wasting activity that ultimately makes more work for myself, but I have to say the end result was incredibly helpful. I managed to sort through my thoughts and consider more what I can practically and realistically do in the next year during my comprehensive exam process. All of my ideas were able to fit into one of the four quadrants. What moved into the upper left quadrant are the serious contenders for what will guide my hundred books as I spend more time making my comps lists.
I don’t know if this matrix is too JD-specific, but I always try to give y’all some offering of something you could potentially bring into your creative or writerly practices. Do you, too, suffer from a scatterbrain and a scatterheart? Maybe then the Eisenhower (or Jaydeehower) method will be something you can work into your own writerly-scholarly-artistic-organizational-human life?
I know some of you may be wondering what I actually came up with in my four boxes, and to that I say: there are some things you need to keep to yourself. At least for now. Happy spring. 💐
Until next time,
JD