Here’s another update on my progress with the goal (working on my post-doc project earlier in the day). I haven’t reported earlier on the April progress because I was on a small vacation - and I was able to fit it in just by building up the buffer.
Here, you can see my vacation, the portion with barely any new datapoints in the last week of April and the first week of May.
The best thing is that I didn’t have to use any of my pre-declared vacation time to allow this myself. Instead, by working more than the minimum rate during the previous weeks, I have built up some buffer that I used up now. It helps mitigate a bit the perfectionist considerations on “how can you even go on a vacation when you could work more and more, always more”, which is a nice side effect in addition to simply getting the work done earlier in the day instead of postponing it to the after-dinner, as was my initial explanation of the need for this goal.
(There are, of course, more profound considerations on whether the hours of focused work - measured simply with toggl or with this fancy set-up - actually reflect any real progress. You know, you can be putting in a lot of hours but not get anything done as far as the declared outcomes are concerned. But that’s a totally different discussion. The focused hours are the best thing in my control, so I decided to beemind it.)
There are also some additional life changes for me, which I need to combine with still diligently and steadily putting in the hours of work on my post-doc. I was hoping that most of my year would look like sitting at my home office desk and contrived this goal to counter common distractions of that lifestyle. But now it looks like my life for most of the next months will be that of a digital nomad, with only occasional weeks at the home office desk that I set up for myself earlier this year. It is very new for me and I am not yet sure how I will manage that mentally, but having this special goal (with an extra level of accountability in this group, you know) actually feels like a very supportive thing to help me make sure that the project is not neglected.
On a technical note: I have heard back both from the summer school and the conference, so now that I have both the acceptance letters and the dates, I have added flat spots that were pre-declared above related to these events. 1 week in July for the summer school; 1 week in November for the conference; 2 weeks for the post-conference vacation. I still “have” and am allowed to apply as needed the 4 weeks of summer vacation. I will also go on another library research trip in early fall, but now that I understand that it won’t be much different from the rest of my year, when work and travelling has to be combined, I probably won’t even make it a flat spot and will just continue measuring the efforts in the regular way.
@shanaqui , now that I made it this far (2 months!), could you please add me to the list of participants in the original post? 