Last week has left a sour taste in my mouth. I explaind yesterday why I thought I wasn't as productive as I could have been, but I also mentioned that there's an ebb and flow to studying for your PhD. Moving forward, I could write off last week as a coincidence of bad luck, foul moods and exhaustion. Or I can take responsibility for my mistakes and the role they played in my performance last week.
As I've mentioned, my planning last week was weak. I struggled to know what to do and that made it difficult to focus on my work at hand. I will admit, it can be difficult to know what needs to be done a week in advance. And it's even more difficult to grasp the time frame of individual tasks. As a student, I am still learning to manage my time and I count myself fortunate for this opportunity to refine such a useful skill.
Practically, this week I plan to do a better job of writing. By that I mean I will get down on paper (or on the computer) the next leading steps of my work. As I knock a couple items off my to do list, I'll add to the bottom the next logical steps.
By extension, these will include scheduling time in my calendar. Last week, when I struggled to keep on task, I had the fewest number of meetings in months. Last weekend I looked greedily at the endless hours I could work uninterrupted in the lab, but in the end I couldn't take advantage. I see now, I am better when I am busy and can work with a sense of urgency. "Sense of urgency" is a term I remember from my days as an apprentice electrician. Working on big job sites in California, productivity was key (and so was safety). Of course running around a construction site would have been dangerous and frowned upon, so instead my foreman elegantly instructed our crew to work with a sense of urgency. It's a concept I've also enjoyed as urgency doesn't imply carelessness or chaos, but it does impress a form of intensity. I don't need to make work to fill my diary, I only need to apportion my time. This combined with a thorough and constant evaluation of my progress and work plan should help me beat the cyclic ups and downs of a PhD.
That's the hypothesis at least, now it's time to run the experiment.
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