Strange as it may sound, it is easy to drift along in academia without focus. You would think that, with the long hours and hard work involved in research and publishing, every academic would know exactly where they are going and the best way to get there. Not so. There are so many pressures on our time, so many “great opportunities” that come our way, and so many people wanting to recruit us for their own pet project that it’s easy to spread ourselves very thinly. So thinly, in fact, that even we don’t know what we’re about any more, never mind trying to convinve anyone else. It’s something we can start to do as a PhD, and from which it can be very hard to extricate ourselves later on.
Think of your research like a river. The more you publish, the more water flows downstream. What you want is a healthy and vigorous flow, not a miserable, stagnant trickle. There are two ways to increase the flow, but most of the time we only think of one of them. The first and obvious way to increase the flow is the brute force method: work harder, produce more, send more water down the river. This is a strategy with limited potential; you only have 24 hours a day and if you don’t want to neglect your health, your family, your friends, or the rest of your life, then your capacity to increase your flow by this first method has a low ceiling.
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The second strategy doesn’t involve sending more water downstream, but rather narrowing the riverbanks. The more the water is constricted, the faster and more forcefully it will flow; it is a principle you prove every time you put your finger over the end of a hosepipe and then turn it on. This strategy doesn’t necessarily increase the amount you produce, but tightens its focus to an area where your compound impact is more likely to make an impression.
So how do you choose what to focus on? Here is one very important question that can help you move toward that fast-flowing ideal:
- What do you want to do better than anyone else?
Or perhaps this variant will be more suited to your research:
- What do you want to know more about than anyone else?
The key word in the question is “anyone”. The question is not asking what you want to be good at; it’s asking what you want to be the best in the world at. The question is simple enough, but it’s potential to change the way we see our research is huge.
Think about it: when you want to know something, where do you go? Most likely, you go straight to the single most respected authority in that area. Then, if you have some spare time, perhaps to the second most respected. Everyone else does exactly the same. So if you aren’t in the top two go-to people for a particular topic, the likelihood is the impact and visibility of your work will be minimal.
In case this is beginning to sound like an oracle of doom, the good news is that the area in which you know more than everyone else doesn’t have to be huge. In fact, everyone who has completed a PhD almost certainly has such an area already, however small it is.
Once you have identified the area in which you want to be THE go-to person, the key is to focus on it relentlessly, gradually widening it. Publish in that area; interact with others in that area; review in that area; speak in that area; blog in that area; advocate for that area. Make it yours. Because if your research lacks focus and you are not the go-to person for anything at all, then what compelling reason does anyone have to read your work?
What strategies have you devised to focus your academic research amid the competing demands on your time?
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