Some less structured impressions this week. It was the week of visiting a conference/workshop event in Denmark for which I have been preparing for a while now. (Actually writing this on a train back to CPH airport 
). I think I was able to leave a good impression about myself, and as an early career scholar I think these initial events in the status of my own full-ass PhD rather than a student are very important. Here are some of the ways how beeminder helped me get ready for this event.
- The paper that I presented at this workshop is part of my current post-doc research project, so it was the main focus of my daily working hours on the project between approximately early March and mid-May. I beemind that with two goals: total time on project and tagtime pings with an elaborate system that nudges me to work earlier in the day.
- It is always hard for me to switch from the stage of “I need to read more secondary lit on the sub-topic for this chapter/paper” to “I can start writing the chapter/paper”. So, in April I tried to add a goal with the total number of words in the draft, but it failed badly. (It was a bad setup: instead of counting the number of the days that I am planning to actually work on the thing and calculating the real daily rate that won’t get wonky around weekends off and vacations, I just made a total-by-the-end of the month goal, with the idea that the buffer from what I wrote in March will allow me to quickly get done another thing, then a flat spot for a week of vacation was introduced and everything went awry. In short: don’t do that (advice to future-me, obviously; it works for you, by all means, do that)) In May, I added another auxiliary goal that tracked pomos on just this sub-task of the project, so that I couldn’t procrastinate within time-on-project by continuing to read around more, and it pretty much worked.
- After I submitted the paper mid-May, everyone’s papers were pre-circulated in the beginning of the previous week. I made a short-term goal to track my progress through them. Mostly to have a nice graphic representation that I am doing okay and getting through them in a timely manner, not that I was ever in a real danger of derailing on that.
During the workshop, I have discussed with some colleagues a couple of potential ideas for future collaboration - like co-authoring something together when I saw that we have some interesting mutually enriching material and disciplinary background. From past experience, I know that I tend not to follow up on some ideas like that once I get back to my routines after a conference. So I am wondering if I should make a goal for that, so that I am actually nudged to return to any of these ideas later. (Especially since usually everybody is really packed with deadlines and plans for the nearest future when such potential ideas of collaboration are discussed and their modus is always “well, sometime later, much much later, obviously”.) I will probably try to look into the idea of nebulous beeminding for that and set something up soon. Anybody reading this, you may hold me accountable by requesting 10 Eur (Paypal I assume) to the first person to comment about that - if I haven’t reported creating a goal for the above purpose by the end of two weeks from now (that is, in two weekly reports).
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This past week I came to the US where I will be looking at things in a library for approximately a month. It was, expectedly, hectic around the travel (a 24-hour-long “awake day”, and I wasn’t even at my final destination after that), jetlag, settling in into the work routines, and catching up with people I am staying with and some other friends. Despite my best effort to make sure I have breaks around the travel time, I still derailed (claimed non-legit) for three goals because I missed the moment when I should have changed the time zone, behind all the lack of sleep and a power outage upon my arrival on top of everything.
Changes:
- my sleep_ealier goal is on again, and I upped the rate to enforce an average bedtime of 10pm. I am hoping to put my jetlag to some use in this way, by saving a bit of the time difference and being more productive in the mornings.
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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
Changes to goals
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