Thank you and monthly reflections

Hello! Well, this is now blog entry #7, and I've essentially succeeded at my public goal of writing 2 blog entries per week for a month! Technically I still have one more before I can pat myself on the back, but I'm saving Wednesday's post for something else (A.O., don't give it away in the comments). I'd dearly like to thank all of my readers for following me in this mini-journey. It's sometimes a little addicting (and vain) to watch Blogger track the # of views after I've posted each entry- but I just find that having an audience for my thoughts to be really good motivation to think more deeply. 

But I think going forward, I'm going to modify my blog goal a little bit. First, two major blog posts per week has been sucking up a lot of time- I know it will get easier, but I think I can cut down. However, one blog post per week doesn't seem like enough. Second, I've found that while I'm in the writing process, my blog posts usually balloon to far longer lengths than I originally intend, and I'd like to work on the art of writing concise, quantized posts that are still useful. Thus, I'm going to write 1 major blog post per week, and 1 short post per week (1-3 paragraphs).

Speaking of goals, since the beginning of 2012, I've been doing monthly assessments of how my life is going, monitoring the progress I've made on my goals. It's almost June 2012, and this blog seems like a logical forum for me to flesh things out. I always have a whole bunch of goals that I set for myself and I'm constantly generating new ones as I go through everyday life. I make some progress on all of them, but never satisfactorily. Sure, since the beginning of the year I've definitely gotten better at seeking out interesting strangers to talk to, gotten a lot more organized, been keeping up with my friends and family long-distance, wasting less time on the Internet, keeping my e-mail inbox empty, and reading a lot more. But I think what I'm missing is focus: because I have so many goals, I find it hard to pursue these goals to the point where they have a measurable impact on my life. Also, without a way to internalize and constantly remind myself of my most important goals, it is way too easy to get distracted or to waste time. Finally, having so many goals just makes me stressed that I can't handle all of them.

Writing regular blog posts is one of the few goals that I've been fully satisfied with, and I think it provides two major hints as to how I can solve my focus issue. 1) Announce and make public all of my major goals (i.e. in this post). 2) Simplify. Focus on just a few goals and don't dedicate significant time to anything else until those goals are achieved each and every day, each and every week. 3) Review- throughout each day, review my priorities for the day and ensure that my goals are being achieved.

This month, I'm going to focus on 4 major goals that I've been putting off. 

• Generate a list of ideas everyday. I'm a fan of James Altucher's blog, and one thing that he does is write down lists of ideas every morning. Basically exercising his "idea muscle" so he has no problem being creative when the situation calls for it. He's even turned some of the ideas from his list into businesses. Some lists I could generate: 30 things I'm grateful for, 10 things I did that were productive in the last week, 20 chapter names in my own autobiography.
• Wake up at 6am every morning. I did this in January and it was fantastic, and I have two good tools at my disposal to keep up this goal: 1) Sleep cycle alarm clock. This iPhone app (see photo on right) uses your iPhone to pick up vibrations to detect when you are in deep REM sleep (muscle paralysis) and when you are in the lighter stages of sleep. You give it a time interval for it to wake you up (like a normal alarm clock) and then it will only wake you up if you're not in deep sleep, so when you wake up you feel far more rested. (credit: first found out about this from my friend Dale's blog) 2) Practice, literally. Lie in bed, set the alarm clock for 5-10 minutes later, and get up immediately and perform a putative morning routine. Idea from Steve Pavlina's blog. 
• Read at least a full paper and 3 abstracts/intros/discussions every day. I briefly discussed this in my post from May 13, and I think that establishing regular reading habits right now in my training should be a top priority. Too often at lab my mind is so focused on experiments that I have a hard time setting aside time for reading, unless it's a paper that's directly relevant to what the lab is doing right now.
• Develop a long-term lab plan with all of the experiments I am going to perform over the next month or more. So far I've only been planning each day's experiments in any real detail (which has been highly successful). I can anticipate all of the big things that I need to prepare for long-term, but it's hard to evaluate how much progress I really make over a month. My plan is to write the outline of a potential paper, look at all of the components, and decide when exactly I can perform all of them. Then, I will review it daily and decide whether or not I've made progress towards completing my plan.

Finally, I'm going to keep up two other habits to make sure I don't slip. 1) Read 40+ pages of a book every night, and 2) Skype with family once a week, and skype to catch up with a friend once a week.

All of these are going to be on a notecard in my pocket, on a post-it note on my computer, on a post-it note at my lab desk, etc.

1) Focus on stated goals to the exclusion of all others. Don't get distracted by new ideas- save them for next month.

2) Generate a list of ideas. Or, find another mentally challenging task to perform.

3) Wake up at 6am.

4) Read paper + 3 abstracts

5) Develop long-term lab plan

I thought about acronyms, mnemonics, and other mental tricks to internalize these goals. In fact, I used my idea habit to generate a whole bunch of ways to internalize "focus, ideas, wake up, read, plan." These ideas can be as ridiculous as I want. Here are three highlights:

Mnemonic: Furious Igloos Wear Religious Placemats

Link system: The focus (of an ellipse) had an idea orbiting it. Then the idea exploded and woke up from a nightmare. In the wake of this event, reading was banned. Fortunately, the Cylons have a plan to get reading back.

Mnemonic: Fine Ideas Want Radical Processes

Somehow, the third one jives with me the most. Hence, I will internalize Fine Ideas Want Radical Processes. I'll probably back it up with my link system story.