Three week-ish mark

Approaching the mark, three weeks since the beginning of this year. Three weeks is the time it takes to figure out which ones of the New Years resolutions stick. I try to remove the pressure by not calling them resolutions, but lets face it thats what they are. It is a common experience that most of them do not work out. I want to share some with you.

Scientists love data, seriously like LOVE IT, so I decided to keep a detailed log of daily activities with a goal of plotting my daily time use. I called it “Two Week Schedule Challenge”. This challenge failed, mostly because it is incredibly tedious. Good news, I learned a few things. I spend most of my time pipetting. Not generally doing bench work, but specifically pipetting. Second comes reading papers that fall in my field. Then comes computational work and writing. I spend surprisingly little time reading recent literature. I feel that its an important piece of information. Hopefully as I become more aquatinted with the history of my field I will have more time to read recent research.

Getting to work early was a win. During the past few weeks I increased my average work day by two hours or so. I started to have breakfast at work. Now instead of not having breakfast every day, I have a delicious cup of oats. Also some fruit. Sometimes there are berries. Raspberries are surprisingly furry.

Cutting down meeting time did not work, but combining lunch and a weekly co-worker-supper-awesome-science-update-time stuck. Outsourcing writing of perl scripts failed miserably, this led to discovering ruby. Creating more time for writing worked, increasing writing output during that time did not go so well.

I think the word success does not adequately describes my ... my win. Next week my schedule is going from school-lane to monster-truck (sometimes I try to coin expression, feel free to let me know how that goes). Deadlines and time-crunch tend to crystalize priorities; will see what goes away. Also I hope to play with a new robot, maybe this one will have lasers.