Scholarship / Work
For years, this sphere of my life was called “study/phd” but there’s been a recent upgrade, now that I am a full-ass researcher in a post-doc position (/sarcasm)
- work_and_study
feeds on Toggl and measures time spent on projects marked as academic- or work-related. That’s mostly been my post-doc project recently, but also some side projects are counted as well. - focused_work_early
This one, however, is my single most helpful goal for the year. It is my choice for Ride-or-Die challenge this year.
Briefly, the reason behind it is that if I only track time, I am prone to procrastination and getting to do everything later in the day. So I set up a system in which tagtime pings received before 2pm count x3 and those between 2pm and 6pm x2 than those after 6pm. That has been really helpful in encouraging me to work on my project earlier in the day so far. I have been posting additional thoughts on this process in the challenge thread, will link them below:
Goal setup
Update for March
Explanation how toggl-based and tagtime-based goals work together
Update for April
Update for May
Update for June
Update for July
Update for August - sept_drafts
A short-term goal to work on the drafts of the papers I need to produce this fall. Odometer, based on word count. Fortunately, I started it early enough that it’s not hard to hit the daily word counts; I already have a significant buffer after just several days, and I will be able to spend time revising/shortening the text afterwards.
All work-related goals are weekends-off. I learned about the need for that the hard way over the years, unfortunately.
Languages
My language acquisition focus is now on Lithuanian, which is supported by two goals:
- lietuviukalba - time spent, tracked with toggl. Currently set to 1 hour a day. That includes everything, online classes with the tutor, homework, additional time spent watching videos/reading in Lithuanian, reviewing anki cards.
- lit_anki - boolean, whether or now I revised any anki cards that day. (Literally any number of cards. Because the problem is remembering to do that, not any aversion to finishing the decks once I have the app open)
My time-based goals for German and Spanish have been drastically dialed-down to focus on Lithuanian. Currently 6 min/day, which is probably even below retention level. But I wanted to keep a least this tiny bit of practice (Duolingo mostly and some youtube videos) because otherwise a new language tends to “override the settings” for the previous language in my brain. Like, the brain thinks, “oh, so this is now the correct way to say that!” The reality of ninth-language acquisition…
I had similar goal for French and Hebrew but they are somewhere in the archive or with flattened road in the lower part of the list.
And for some reason, I still have a duolingo_spanish goal, which I do not really care about, but it is mostly under the part of the list that I do care about anyways. (That is, the time-based goal covers for the required number of Duolingo points in excess).