In pursuit of good enough

Essentialism meets bootcamp

I was listening to the audiobook of Essentialism in the week leading up to starting the Metis data science bootcamp, and it’s one of those wonderful moments of kismet that occasionally happen when the books I request from the library suddenly show up at just the right moment. Especially now with the libraries mostly closed due to COVID, a lot of my digital holds are showing up weeks and months after I first request them, often resulting in a pleasant surprise when “I Can’t Date Jesus” shows up just when I want a fluffy read and need a good reminder of the importance of building the kind of society I want to live in.

But back to Essentialism. The elevator pitch is that in our quest to do everything, we often end up accomplishing nothing of import and getting frustrated by the endless busyness that doesn’t satisfy our deeper needs; this book is all about paring back to the true essentials so we can do the things that really matter.

It also intersects nicely with a Twitter thread about a Nora Roberts Q&A that’s going viral; in short, when you’re juggling 55 different balls, you need to know which balls are plastic (crazy sock day at school or this important work project with a deadline three weeks out or figuring out this week’s dinner plan with your partner) and which balls are glass (your kid’s soccer game/choral performance/science fair project or these delicate negotiations with a new client or a long-awaited date night). Which things are essential and have to be prioritized? Which things are non-essential and can (at least for now) get dropped?

After the first week of bootcamp it’s obvious that a theme of the next 2-ish months of my life is going to be “bootcamp or family or sleep, pick two.” If I didn’t have a toddler or if my partner wasn’t trying to work full-time while recovering from a car wreck, it’s possible that I’d be able to do everything that’s on the schedule for bootcamp. Then again, it might still be impossible. On Wednesday (yes, day three of bootcamp), I started having some rather uncomfortable eye strain; Thursday night I fell into one of those “I think I’ll have this bug licked in another five or ten minutes so I’ll just keep going” rabbit-holes, and by the time I went to bed at midnight, my eye muscles were in pain and twitching randomly. I was less than well-rested when we were putting the finishing touches on our group presentation on Friday. Saturday was a minimal screentime day. At this moment on Sunday, I’ve got most of my programs displaying at 150+% size, my eyes are burning and watering, and I’m taking breaks every minute or three to stare at the house across the street for a few seconds.

I literally can’t do it all; my body isn’t up to the challenge at the moment.

This might lead you to wonder why in the hell I’m taking the time to type up a blog post if my eye capacity is being so sorely taxed. It’s certainly leading me to wonder why this feels so important! It’s all about talking through my ideas and attempting to reset my thinking.

In grad school, there was more than just a feeling of “you’ll get this done no matter what,” there was a kind of pigheaded pride in being the person in the lab when the lights rebooted at midnight, in pulling all-nighters or having to stand at the hood for four hours without a break to get a reaction to run properly. It felt as if the suffering you endured made you more of a real scientist, a better scientist, and certainly superior to those people who attempted to maintain a work-life balance. We bragged on 14 hour days and hoofing it across campus to fetch old articles from the backest of back stacks as if these were good things and not evidence that we were doing a poor job of valuing our own time.

In the first week of bootcamp, some of those old thought patterns were very much in evidence alongside what is less a competitive streak than a “if I don’t answer the question correctly in the time allotted I’m a failure and everyone will judge me” streak. I got extremely stressed about getting things right, to the point that my inability to solve a particular coding problem affected my mood for more than 24 hours. I started jumping into coding questions without actually thinking them through, resulting in some hideous kludgy solutions implemented in spaghetti code. (I’m probably an advanced beginner when it comes to Python and even I could tell my notebooks were full of hot garbage.)

But here’s the thing: the essential thing about bootcamp is learning the things I need to succeed. I need to learn how to write good code; I don’t necessarily need to know how to write perfect docstrings per PEP257 or how to get a perfect score from pylint. I’ll need to know enough about ML to make good decisions about which strategies to pursue; I don’t necessarily have to understand all of the underlying math or be able to maximally optimize runtime. If I do a good job now of learning the fundamentals and getting through it, there will be time later to really dig into the things that I didn’t master yet.

And still, even if I do an excellent job of paring down the nonessentials from the next 11 weeks, there won’t be enough time for everything. I have a decided tendency to start running down interesting rabbitholes at the drop of a white rabbit, and we live in an older house with a plethora of projects in progress; I’ll need to continue practicing figuring out what is essential and what is nonessential, which balls are plastic and which are glass. It’s not a “fix your life in seven simple steps” kind of deal, it’s a continuous practice — the ball that’s plastic today may be three different glass balls next week; family obligations don’t necessarily supercede work obligations; sometimes I really do just need to stay up until this damn thing is done and deal with the consequences the following evening.

But! At least now I have a framework for making the best decisions for me; item one is learning to be OK with “good enough.”