B+: When ‘good enough’ is good enough

About a year ago, I built a cupboard to fit into an alcove to one side of the fire in our living room. By any professional standards, it’s a decidedly average piece of joinery. But as a piece of DIY, it is a source of immense (and no doubt disproportionate) pride. It looks how I wanted it to, the joints are neat, edges square, and it functions exactly as intended. Fast forward to this weekend just past, and it seemed about time to finally finish it. And while applying a second coat of Ronseal Quick and Easy Brushing Wax (which performed as expected – if only there were a neat phrase to encapsulate that…), I started pondering on perfectionism.

More precisely, it was as I concluded that the back edge of a shelf, invisible from all accessible angles, could probably forego its second coat – as I decided, in other words, that ‘good enough’ was, in this case, good enough – that I realised this is perhaps one of the more important lessons I’ve learnt in my working life.

Let’s face it, if you’ve got anywhere at all in science, you’re probably a bit of a perfectionist in at least some areas of your work. You enjoy the challenge posed by difficult problems, and are prepared to work hard until that challenge is met. This is, of course, admirable; it’s also probably necessary in order to get research of any worth done. But as your responsibilities increase beyond research and into management, administration and teaching, and so the number of tasks requiring your attention proliferates (while days remain stubbornly stuck at 24h), then focusing this beam of perfectionism on every single item becomes untenable.

That’s when it’s helpful to realise that sometimes (whisper it) it really doesn’t matter if this isn’t the finest report ever written.

This is simply another way of looking at prioritising. Now, faced with a list of things to do, all of which absolutely have to be done TODAY, prioritising can seem impossible. But although you can’t choose what to do and what to neglect, you can decide which tasks require an A+ effort, and which can be safely relegated to B or C. This grading can occur within different realms of responsibility as well as between them. For a given piece of work, you should ask yourself, what am I doing this for? Who am I doing this for, and do I need to impress them? Most important, what do they expect out of it, what will they do with this output? And then you tailor your effort accordingly. For instance, if a final report on a grant will get graded as either ‘satisfactory’ or ‘not satisfactory’, is there really any point in aiming for ‘excellent’?

This is not meant as an excuse for slapdash or unacceptable work. Rather, the aim is to make sure that your most important tasks – the career-defining paper, the big seminar – get the time they deserve.

Of course, some tasks always warrant an A+ performance. Blogging, for example, is one…

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When I started writing this blog, over two years ago, I thought knocking our 800 words or so a week would be a doddle. I mean, just look at some of the idiots who manage to push out a weekly newspaper column. Then, as work and life both got busier, once a fortnight(ish) became the norm, but I felt that was still acceptable.

Now, I keep looking up to discover another week’s gone with no post. Given the launch of all the shiny new SciLogs blogs today, I felt I needed at least to stick in a placeholder this week - not so much in a marking-of-territory kind of way, but rather to demonstrate that it’s simply a lack of time to write that’s preventing me from posting more often. That, and the fact that, between nursery pick-ups and nasty weather I’m walking home less frequently at the moment – and my walk home is when I tend to compose these things.

Anyway. Here’s a taster of what you can expect when I get time to sit down and write up some notes…

The idolatry of the Beatles and Charles Darwin

Additional parental leave: firecracker of equality or damp squib?

Yorkshire megafauna: the amazing Scarborough tunny story

1 billion reasons to do a PhD (Volume 1) [with apologies to Peter Serafinowicz)

Why so few extinctions in the sea?

Endless petitions, hair-trigger outrage, and trial by Twitter

Hope that whets your appetites. And I hope you appreciate my resisting the urge to mention Monkey Tennis too…

The Size of the Sea

Last Friday I gave a talk on marine biodiversity as part of Researchers’ Night here in Sheffield. The whole evening was a wonderful exercise in public engagement which saw around 1000 people (many of them kids) in my department alone participate in various activities, and my talk seemed to go down pretty well. (What’s that? Oh, OK then, here’s a podcast Apologies for poor sound…) Anyhow, one of the things I wanted to convey in my talk was the enormity of the world’s oceans. Something I admit I find it difficult myself to get my head around. So I was happy to see a new paper from Mike Dawson in Frontiers of Biogeography which puts some numbers on things.

First of all, there’s the figure that many of us learn at school, that, based on surface area, the oceans cover around 70% of the Earth. Which led to Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation, "How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean."

But of course, area is only half the story. Actually, considerably less than that, because life exists in 3D, so the key figure is ‘habitable volume’. And there’s a hell of a lot of that in the sea. Of course, the terrestrial environment is not exactly flat either, and Dawson discusses both aerial and underground environments, and his decision to limit the vertical distribution of life on land to between the surface soil and the vegetation canopy.

So, what did he find?

The estimated total habitable volume available to freshwater organisms is 272,605 km³. The total habitable volume available to terrestrial organ‐ isms is about 2,025,315 km³. The total habitable volume available to marine organisms is approxi‐ mately 1,367,000,000 km³

Now, those numbers by themselves are hard to interpret. But in terms of proportions, we get 99.83% marine, 0.15% terrestrial and 0.02% freshwater. So for every 5ml teaspoon of freshwater habitat in the world, there is 37.5ml (about 2 ½ tablespoons) of terrestrial habitat, and 25 litres of seawater (25 LITRES, note – the size of a large camping water container).

Look at those numbers again: 1 teaspoon : 2 ½ tablespoons : 25l water carrier.

Truly, we are on Planet Ocean.

Dawson goes on to discuss differences in primary productivies (around 1000x higher in freshwater than in the sea) and per-unit comparisons of species diversity. For instance, there’s a similar number of fish species in the sea and in freshwater, but 5000 more per unit volume in freshwater. And in general, species densities (numbers of species per unit volume) are somewehre in the region of 1,000-10,000-fold lower in the sea than in non-marine habitats.

He discusses some potential mechanisms for these observed diversity differences, but the main point I think is that breaking down the problem beyond simply ‘marine vs. terrestrial’ is the way to proceed. I’m absolutely in agreement on that point.