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More on panic and discomfort
Mark Z at ZhurnalyWiki paid me the great honor of referring to my panic post. He ended with this thought: And of course there’s my favorite strategy: try to identify what causes panic and avoid...
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Two views of boredom
The first, from an emotional, Buddhist perspective, and the second, from the productive academic’s perspective. Both emphasize being mindful of when you’re in the state of boredom and how to use that...
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Little steps
In trying to implement some new behaviors, I’m finally listening to advice and looking at how to piggyback the new behaviors on existing behaviors. The best way to introduce a new habit being to start...
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Writing in the library
I had an excellent ~6 hours of solid writing/wrestling with my master’s paper one day last week. At this stage, I’m still drafting raw text and am not in the polish stage where I’m honing the thoughts...
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Don’t overthink it (Installment #247)
I volunteered to do a tedious job at work — copy/paste about maybe 200-400 parameters scattered throughout a group of FORTRAN files. The parameters may be in one of maybe 3 different formats. Also, the...
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Christine Kane, Upleveling, and a free telecall
In July 2010, I’d made the big decision to leave the PhD program. I was back working part-time at my old job, turning over the strange things I’d experienced. And feeling a bit adrift. The PhD promised...
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On using timers and timeboxing
Mark Forster recommended the use of timers in his book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play. It sort of starts with the idea of timeboxing, a demarcated bit of time within which you choose...
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On starting before you’re ready
When I first got the idea to restart the blogging, my first thought was: “No, don’t start this Monday, start next Monday.” It felt like the safe option: give myself time to scope out other blogging...
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Inspire yourself
In my PhD methods class, our professor asked us to pick something that inspired us — it could be a song, a research article, a movie, a book chapter — make a brief presentation on it and on how it...
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Software: MacBreakz and Joe Ergo
You. You who are reading this blog post. You have already spent an ungodly number of hours sitting down, hunched forward, staring unblinking into this screen. Do we really need your computer to remind...
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