New Year's Resolutions: Ride or Die 2024

A monthly update for August for my work-on-my-postdoc-earlier-in-the-day goal.
This month, I scored the most hours on the project when measured in raw time (95) of all months so far, and the goal in focus, which takes into account and rewards the tagtime pings received earlier in the day, progressed from edge-skating upon return from the summer school I mentioned in the last update to having 11 days of buffer.
That said, I caught myself on a propensity to still find a way to procrastinate within the boundaries of putting all that time-measured effort into the project. I spent most of this month reading important scholarly studies that I needed to inform my next paper/article/chapter. Ok, I am not saying I shouldn’t have spent time reading those at all; it is all very important since I am branching into new subareas of my area of study (and I am thinking of all this postdoc thing as most useful specifically as a chance to extend my expertise a little bit into all those subareas/zones of interdiscliplinary inquiry). But if I ultimately need to have a written paper out of that all, it is also important to start actually writing at some point. Even if I later realize mid-draft that I need to read more before proceeding. But it is so easy - and truly acratic! - to just continue reading more and more of supplementary literature, because of course there is more to learn about that new-to-me subfield. Seemingly diligently working on the project and even learning many new important things - but is it really what moves me most effectively to the nearest preliminary deliverables?
So, at some point, I estimated the number of words I want to have written in the first draft versions of two papers/chapters that I am currently working on before my next travel plans and created an additional goal for that. Once I did, it turned out pretty easy to switch to the drafting mode that I previously procrastinated from switching to.
Beeminder to the rescue, as always! :slight_smile: I think it’s an important thing to remember that even if there is one overarching goal that is generally working, it might make sense to create additional supplementary goals to encourage other subtle changes in behavior. Not all aspects of such a complicated behavior as working on an academic paper can be measured with one goal.

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