- My carpool buddy has been on vacation for 2.5 weeks, which means my rigid commuting schedule has been more relaxed. This is the last day of it, so EGM and I went out to breakfast with friends. I never do things like go out to breakfast on a weekday. Unexpected bonus: our friends picked up the check.
- I still managed to work a full day, so I don't feel guilty about going to said breakfast.
- I gave the first draft of my manuscript to my lab group yesterday, which felt good. We're going to discuss it at lab meeting next week. The How to Write a Lot book told me that only a fool celebrates achieving a writing goal by skipping her scheduled writing time, so I spent 1.5 hours doing writing stuff for other projects.
- I then spent the rest of the day in the lab, which I love. One of my projects involves doing a crummy, tedious, boring, dirty task on a LOT of samples. It's never ending. I spent big chunks of the past two summers working on this with intern helpers, but there's still about 1/3 of the samples left to do. Today was the first time I've worked on it since August and it went pretty quickly. I figure if I bust my ass on it, I could have it done in 6 weeks. It'll probably take 12. Anyone want to place bets?
- EGM and I still managed to make a dinner that didn't involve pizza.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
RBof Good Day
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10 comments:
Crummy, tedious, and boring tasks seem to encompass a lot of lab work. Good luck!
Woohoo productivity!
Sounds like a great day!
That sounds like an excellent day :-) I'm jealous about going out to breakfast (it's my favorite meal) and that you were able to stay motivated to do your writing.
I want to ask you about that book. I'm guessing that you like it, but what I was really wondering about is how appropriate is it for a third year student that doesn't have to do much writing (but would like to improve)?
Breakfast is my favorite meal too!! Going out to breakfast means guaranteed good day in my book.
I love going out for breakfast, we go most Sundays. I think I've only ever done it once on a weekday, and it was because we were off work prior to heading to the airport for an afternoon flight.
There's no activity so pleasant that it can't be improved by doing it when everyone else is working!
Sounds like a good day indeed =)
Wow, I *really* need to follow your third bullet.
As for having breakfast out on weekdays...ahhh....I love going out for breakfast, and starting the day off like that always makes me so much more relaxed.
amanda, I think it could be useful to anyone. The main points of the book are 1. the very best way to get your writing done is to stick to a writing schedule and 2. most of the reasons people give for not writing a lot are bullshit. For example, "I need to do more analyses or I need to read more papers first" are excuses. If that's what is really holding you back, do it. In your scheduled writing time. So in that case, anything you need to do to prepare for writing counts, like compiling literature or learning a statistical technique.
I think setting up scheduled writing time, even when you don't have a huge writing project at hand, would be a great idea. And there must be small things you have to write, like small grants or abstracts for meetings.
Like most things, I think writing is a skill. While some people are gifted, most can improve with practice. I think even writing this blog has improved my writing; at the very least it has helped me get over the difficulty of starting something and helped me realize that no matter how bad it sounds at first, I can edit to make it better.
_How to Write a Lot_ had a small chapter on style that, while cursory, was really helpful for me. He recommends some other books about style that I think I might read. I always thought those sort of books were bogus, but now I think they might be worth a try.
The book is a really fast read and not too expensive, so it's not much of an investment. You should check it out.
i've been writing on about the same schedule as you, starting with coming back from xmas. so it was interesting to see you planned to finish it by this tuesday (you were 2 days off, right? or am i confused?) which was about my timeline. except i didnt, but i got a "are you finished yet?" conversation every single freakin day since! nothing helps stifle productivity more than constant nagging!
Well, it's just a first draft. For example, there are still uncited statements and some sections are much stronger than others. I wanted the lab to read it for overall consistency, logic, flow -- big picture stuff. I want to know if there are problems with that before I spent lots of time polishing text that might get deleted. Academic Advisor was happy I had something ready. We'll see if he's still happy after he reads it!
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