Please Don't Get a Dog

Don’t get a dog. Don’t get married. Don’t take a new job. Don’t accept a promotion. Don’t travel. Don’t buy a new house. And whatever you do, don’t have children. Every one of my children is a book I didn’t write.

For years, I repeated this advice to scores of PhD students as they launched into their dissertation projects. In the best cases, completing a dissertation in political science (my field) takes two or three years. In many cases, however, that stretches to five, seven, even ten years. And as many as half never finish.

The biggest threat to derail someone’s PhD dreams is losing focus. Finishing a dissertation, like any kind of book, requires great focus and sustained momentum over a long period. For a person in their 20s, however, life throws up opportunity after opportunity to lose focus. Pretty much every one of my PhD students did most of the things I told them not to do, some of them repeatedly. Despite my best efforts, a few of my students did not finish.

My advice was meant to scare people into paying attention, but the real advice wasn’t really to avoid those things. Instead, the trick is figuring out how to do them without losing focus. As you add things to your plate, things have to give - time is a zero sum game. Every hour you spend walking your dog or on your fancy new job is an hour you’re not writing your book.

If your writing is important enough to you, you need to preserve your focus and momentum even as you embrace all the fun and rewarding entanglements of life (yes, even children). It isn’t easy, but it is doable. I’m living proof.

As I’ve written before, my days as an assistant professor trying to get tenure were hectic. When I started, we had three kids under 7 years old, two dogs, and a new house. Then my wife went back to get her PhD and I started a brewery with a friend. We were busy, to say the least, as I violated the rules I would one day give others.

There is no question that I wrote less than I would have if we had fewer children and if I hadn’t started the brewery. But thanks to having a system and writing routine I could trust, I was able to stay focused and sustain my publishing momentum at a level I was happy with (and enough to get tenure, whew!) in the midst of all the chaos of life.

There isn’t a simple formula for how many “things” is too many. The answer is different for every writer. Some folks thrive when their plate is full. Others need quiet. Your goal shouldn’t be to avoid life - we do need kids to carry the baton, after all. Instead, your goal should be to find the balance between work, life, and writing that allows you to live a full life and to still get your writing done.

Thanks for the writing you do, and thanks for reading mine. I'll see you next Friday.

Happy writing,

Trevor