General impressions
- This week I was mostly working like crazy to finish a manuscript for the submission deadline of July 1. And it’s ready, pending the last sanity-check reread tomorrow. And I actually moderately like how it looks, especially given that I wrote it from scratch over the past 1.5 months, which I didn’t even dedicate to it fully, as these 1.5 months included a conference/workshop and travel around it. So, there’s a reason to commend myself for finishing this after all, once I submit it tomorrow. Which brings me to…
Completed goals
- In the last days of April, I created a goal to make sure that I work on the most urgent aspects of my project, and not just “on the project” in general. At that point, it included finishing the half-written paper for the workshop and writing from scratch this one that I am finishing these days. I will still be doing the final checks for the submission tomorrow, but I am already reporting this as “completed” because I already overshot the initial goal by 26 pomos over the marathon-like past few days. I could say I underestimated the amount of time needed to actually finish these two things by 10-15%, but a more likely explanation is that any work can fit into any available amount of time - so while the daily pomos helped me make sure I sit to work on these things regularly, the speed with which anything is accomplished is more dictated by the external idea of urgency. So I could have set a higher rate from the beginning but would still need to pull an all-weekender to finalize the thing, just after having spent more time on that in total. Crazy how irrational our brains are. I liked the general idea; will probably create another goal like that for the next portion of most urgent things.
UPD:
So, in the end, I spent 18% more time on the defined tasks than I guesstimated when I created this goal with 6 pomos/workday two months ago. A pretty close guesstimate, I would say, though, as all of this “overtime” happened throughout the final three days before the deadline, I still stay with the interpretation above that any work tends to occupy all the time set aside for it and a bit more. /End UPD
New goals
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future_papers - as I described my intention a couple of weeks ago, I created this goal that works on the principles of nebulous beeminding. This goal just receives the word count from a google doc where I describe a couple of ideas for potential co-authored papers that I had during the workshop. I first set the rate to make sure I actually write down the ideas over the few next days, and when I jotted down everything I wanted, I adjusted the rate so that the goal with gently nudge me to look at this file again in a month. The idea is just to have one place where these “not right now” ideas are written down so that they are not forgotten, and that I have to look at them once in a while so that the brain will connect the dots if I encounter an appropriate call for papers or something. [My promise to send money to the first person to call me out on not creating this goal within two weeks’ time is thus voided, because I have created it in time and am reporting the fact within two weekly reports.]
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photos_2025_1 - a whittle-down goal, like I did with the isolated photos backlog from 2024 but for the first half of the 2025. The thing is, I haven’t even downloaded all of the photos from June yet. So I set up this goal with the thought that I will have to download the remaining ones during the week of “feet-wetting” period, when I can derail for free. To add the urgency to the need to download them after all.
Derailments
- meta
Changes to goals
- none this week