In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
How to deal with the flood of philosophical ideas that come to one’s mind? I am a productive scholar (at my career stage). But the reason why I am productive is that I often get philosophical ideas that really disturb me until I get them published or at least written on paper. Whenever I got a new idea, I get genuinely excited about the idea, and I have trouble sleeping at night since the ideas keep me awake until I have written drafts on them. I am also afraid that someone else will publish my ideas before me – which is not good since very often I have new ideas. I do not want to work during office hours (only), the best thing about being a philosopher is that I can work whenever I got the inspiration. But what should I do when I have too many ideas in my head (or new ideas come too often) so that I struggle to do anything else besides writing and thinking?
These are great questions, and I'm curious to hear answers from readers. This is something that I grapple with a lot. I constantly jot down new paper ideas in the note function in my iPhone, and create new folders for them on my computer (just to remind myself of what I might work on). However, I don't actually get to writing papers on most of the ideas, and can take a while to get to the ones I do simply because there are so many of them. How do I decide what to work on? Basically, I try to rank paper ideas in my head in terms of philosophical importance, urgency (viz. how timely the idea is and how important it may be to get it published soon), and finally, confidence in my ability to get the paper done fairly quickly (I don't like to spin my wheels on papers that I'm not clear on how to complete). Finally, I take special care to ensure that I have a fair work-life balance, so that I don't spend all of my time writing and thinking (I work M-F from roughly 9am-5pm, never in the evenings, and never on the weekends). I'm not sure how helpful this will be to the OP, but hope they find it at least somewhat helpful.
What do you all think and do? If you have a flood of philosophical ideas, how do you decide what to work on? How do you deal with the concern that someone else will publish ideas before you? Finally, how do you handle the above while achieving sufficient "work life balance", so that you have time to do things other than writing and thinking?
I second what Marcus says, but I want to take a step further and give some very personal and specific advice targeting at OP's specific concern that they can't rest well because of the paper ideas. Here are my two cents:
1. First and foremost, be genuinely proud of your creativity and productivity.
2. Jot down ideas without committing to publish them, and then focus on the potential difficulties they face, which can hopefully decrease excitement (justifiably).
3. If you are one of those who can get any of your idea into a publishable paper in good journals, try to raise the bar when you select your ideas to work on. Pick the ones that can potentially make you yourself most proud. (This decreases work and may even help your reputation in the long run.) The other ideas are not wasted anyway. At the very least, you can offer some of them to your students.
4. Even when you are excited about your ideas, it might be helpful to practice focusing sometimes on the other important aspects of your life and important people and their stories. It might also help to focus on the big picture, like how our planet is deteriorating without us doing enough about it, and how those very beautiful, smart and sensitive animals are starting to death due to shrinking habitat without the least suspect that humans to be the culprit. (These won't help distracting you if you work on environmental ethics:).
Type on a train and pardon my typos.
Posted by: Wien | 07/05/2022 at 12:09 PM
I recommend writing an academic blog. Blog posts are a super-easy, low-investment way to get those ideas written out (in basic form), leaving you plenty of time for other things in life. Only bother to turn the very best ones into papers.
Posted by: Richard Yetter Chappell | 07/05/2022 at 10:42 PM
As Wien suggests, definitely jot down all your ideas, but don't necessarily pursue all of them to fullness just yet. Figure out how much you need to 'scratch that itch' that the idea no longer nags at you - would sketching a rough plan be enough? If the itch can only be scratched by writing the paper to completion, then that is a problem, but time might also help - just sitting on an idea for a week or two might ease the urge. Personally, although I know 'scooping' does happen from time to time, I generally don't worry too much about it - even if someone else has defended the same views, and taken a similar line, I find that one's own particular take still adds value.
Enjoy it while you can - I was like this once, although now, 7 years after PhD, I find my well drying up, and I depend on invitations to nudge me to delve into paper ideas. (The job security of tenure might also had had an effect.)
Posted by: Less Productive | 07/06/2022 at 01:04 AM