New Year's Resolutions: Ride or Die 2024

Since it’s now April, I wanted to report on how my goal has been going (for the three weeks of March since I created it).


Extremely well, as you can see from the graph.

A brief reminder: I am tracking the time (stochastically, via tag time) spent on my post-doc project in a way that prioritizes time invested before lunch over those working hours postponed until after dinner.
It feels like Duolingo’s double time and I have often found myself eager to start working earlier or to continue working more rather than switch to a different type of activity, especially if it’s the 3x or the 2x time of the day.

Above, I outlined that I will have the right to some flat spots, including when I will go on a library research trip. Though a library research trip is also to work on the same project, I tend not to lose focus on my work when at the library, so I could have flattened the road for such days. More importantly, honestly, since one of my library trips is to Kyiv, Ukraine, I just didn’t want to have the added stress of the need to accumulate the pings for this goal when I expected I might have circumstances that prevent me from putting in the hours on the schedule I want (e.g. during air raid alarms, we have to quickly return the materials and proceed to a shelter outside the library facility).
But then I finally planned to go on this trip on such short notice that I simply didn’t have the time to schedule the flat spot! So I decided to give it a try, keeping in mind that I am still entitled to a flat spot if things go wrong. The day around March 22 when I started in the red is the day I got on the train. (I “consumed” the previously accumulated buffer over the previous days because of the pre-journey errands.) And you can see how wonderfully it has been going since then! Without this goal, I wouldn’t have cared to put in the time into my project on the trains, which is pure gain. I have also realized that I still work in the mornings and in the evenings, before and after the library visits - processing what I have written down the previous days, looking for where to find/order/download other materials I realized I would need. So I am technically also in the same “working-at-home” regime half of the time here in Kyiv, for which I initially created the goal, so it is totally fair to continue measuring the input in the same way. (For the actual time at the library - honestly, I do not answer pings on the go but just tag them in bulk after I exit: everything between the minute I entered the library and the minute I left; as I said, I am not prone to distractions there in the same way as I am when working from home).
With the accumulated buffer, I will be able to spend some of the remaining days meeting with friends - without the remorse that I am not spending enough time on my project. Which is also a pure gain. (I tend to scold myself for not spending enough time on important things, regardless of how much time I actually spent - it could always be more, right?)

TD;DR: the goal has proven to measure my effort in such a way that I feel motivated to put in more effort, and it is also gratifying to see via this measurement that I have been accomplishing something, so I can add other valuable activities into my life

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