Being away from school for most of the week it was easy to escape the distractions of my desk and the lab. As I tried to explain yesterday, I thoroughly enjoy my work, however, my enthusiasm can lead me astray during the day and cause me to lose entire days to various side tracks.
Spending time reading papers and textbooks I was reminded that these exercises are not simply to build references for manuscripts and ultimately a thesis. In fact these source materials are boundless sources of motivation and inspiration. Over the past two years I've spent the majority of my time tackling scientific problems through engineering and design. For most of my studies, I've tackled basic questions in my field that were previously unanswerable because the hardware didn't exist to perform the experiments. After considerable effort, the fruits of my labour are starting to come together, but now I need to apply these emerging methodologies to new research problems.
Last week I discussed the importance of (realistically) scheduling my days to make my time as productive as possible. Moving forward I'll need to figure out how to integrate "quiet" time away from the lab so that I can continue to tap into the wealth of knowledge (and inspiration) that exists in published works.
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