Update: Tracking my Monthly Goals

I briefly mentioned at the beginning of one of my recent blog posts that May felt like it lasted the equivalent of 3 months. It's still true- when it's Tuesday, the weekend feels like it happened a week ago. Why? I couldn't really put my finger down on this until I started thinking about this blog post. I realized I'm spending far more of my waking hours fully conscious. I'm no longer shutting down my brain for hours everyday by wasting time on the Internet. I'm deliberately planning and working towards my goals and developing my habits. Therefore, it feels like I have three times as much… time. Concrete accomplishments and productivity are a natural and happy outcome, but they are almost incidental at this point.

Today is an update on the goals I established at the beginning of the month.

I had 5 goals that I established for myself this month. These are, of course, in addition to everyday work.

• Focus: An incredibly important meta-goal. I'm trying to stop myself from becoming distracted by cool-sounding goals other than the 5 I've listed here. It's way too easy to move from goal to goal because of the allure of novelty, at the expense of never fully internalizing any habit and never satisfactorily completing any goal. I have specific criteria for checking this off each day, based on how many of the following goals I finish each day and how early in the day I finish them.
• Idea habit: The most enjoyable goal so far. Each morning I spend up to 30 minutes coming up with lists of ~10 ideas, to actively develop my creativity. These can be relevant to my day or not. Some example lists.
• Wake up at 6am: This one is fantastic when I actually do it because it's a productivity bonanza. However, waking up early is not a priority when I have evening social obligations or when I'm hosting someone at my place.
• Reading habit: Keeping up with the literature is critical to any career in science, and I've been neglecting it. I try to read at least an hour each day, or read to the point that I feel like I've gained an important insight. I'm also trying to develop a systematic way to proceed through the literature, but I've made minimal progress.
• Long-term lab plan: This one didn't really work out as I hoped. I've been treating it as a two-step process. First, developing a list of experiments that would be critical for proving a case in a manuscript. Second, putting it into a calendar format with 1-3 critical experiments I could perform each day in addition to run-of-the-mill labwork. However, I haven't actually done the second part because the first part keeps on changing (ah the realities of science).

I'm using Evernote to keep track of both my "Big Rocks" for each week as well as my progress on goals.

And how have I actually been doing? This morning I'm experimenting with graphing my results and seeing if it's useful.

Yes, I used Microsoft Excel to do this. So sue me.

Clearly, I'm having bursts of productivity (at the beginning of each week, I noticed) and then I slip up as the week goes on. That's just good to keep in mind as I finish the month- I don't necessarily have a plan to correct it. Notably, I'm pretty happy that my reading/plan habits are hovering in the 60-80% range, and the idea habit is a stunning success.

Observations on how I can keep up each habit:

• Focus: When I have an idea for a self-improvement project, I just write it down in a note in Evernote and then forget about it until it's time to make next month's goals. Don't want to get distracted. Also, waking up early gives me a boost of motivation that allows me to finish all my goals early in the day.
• Idea habit: Just continue my excitement over being creative each day. Also, I want to try mixing my already-generated ideas in non-intuitive combinations. That's also one reason why I share my ideas- because maybe one of your ideas will have sex with mine have a bunch of little baby ideas.
• Wake up at 6am: Have something I'm excited to do that day. My buddy Jake mentioned this piece of wisdom: "If you don't know why you're getting up in the morning, you should just go back to sleep."
• Reading habit: I can really only accomplish this when I drag myself away from lab to a cafe somewhere and tell myself "OK you are going to read now." Perhaps I should start reserving a specific timeslot for this each day.
• Plan: Just start with the calendar. Use the calendar as my mechanism for generating experimental ideas, rather than trying to list out all experiments first and then stick them into a calendar.

Finally, I have another habit that I've picked up even though I'm not actively focusing on it. And its quite simple: try something new everyday.