As a doctoral student, everything you do is tied together. As one professor put it, "The secret of life is to try to make everything you do work for you." She wasn't kidding. In an ideal world, everything I wrote would all be easily scoopable into a book or something. The truth is, we get burned out on things we do. We get tired of looking at the same page (or 8,000-10,000 words) over and over again and we want to put it down and never look at it again.
Life doesn't afford us that luxury. It might for journalists, but not for doctoral students. We have to keep hammering away at various topics until eventually some publication accepts them. Only then can we put them down and move on. Ultimately, we have to make our work count. And we have to make it count as often as possible.
Until this Spring I was fairly lucky -- everything I submitted to conferences had been accepted. Once I started submitting to journals, however, that changed. I got some pretty scathing reviews, and even had one paper declined from a national conference, despite incredible timeliness for the topic (it was about illegal immigration activism, and right after that Arizona passed a law allowing the police to detain suspected illegal immigrants.)
So the Lego I'm presenting here is this: it has to count. Anything I do, it has to count towards my dissertation and also be able to stand on its own as a conference paper or journal submission. This may seem like a no-brainer -- everybody with a PhD will tell you the same. The truth is, actually doing it is incredibly difficult because it's very easy to get burned out and sick to death of a subject.
