Juggling

There is a tradition that Ph.D. students get three balls and they have to learn to juggle before finishing the Ph.D. In fact, learning to juggle is supposed to contribute to the Ph.D. work. The precise relation has to be figured out by the person in question, of course. Some, rather than trying to juggle with three balls, start writing three papers at the same time. This is not a good idea. Start with one paper at a time and learn to juggle with two balls. If the paper is accepted and two ball juggling has been mastered as well, one is almost there: 1+2=3.

Multi-tasking is difficult and when self-inflected stress is added an explosive cocktail can result, as witnessed in a chess game I played recently:

• Halfway through the game the mobile phone of my opponent goes off. According to regulations he has lost the game.
• My opponent stopped the clock. According to regulations, if you stop the clock, you resign. His clock was running, and he wanted to answer the phone call without losing any time. First sign of stress during multi-tasking.
• Being somewhat lenient, I allowed the game to continue. Somewhat later, I was interrupted by a third person. My opponent noticed this and stopped the clock again. It was his move, and his clock was running. Again, according to regulations, resigning the game.
• Close to the end of the game, my opponent stopped writing down the moves. When I reminded him about this he became furious. I was not a good sport (etc.). According to regulations one has to write down the moves.
• It became clear that my opponent was simply not capable anymore to multi-task: playing reasonable moves and writing them down. In fact, he failed at single-tasking and lost on time not being able to write down the moves.

Conclusions? Replace the ticking chess clock by the general notion of a "deadline" and figure out whether you can cope ...

Comments

[Mattijs]

And what if you're already able to juggle with three balls but haven't written a single paper yet?

[Anjo]

Oh well, then you've wasted your time :-).