Hi friends :) It's been a funny September for me at work. Almost daily I'm forced to acknowledge that I'll be wrapping up my projects at Penn State within the next few months. It's a simultaneously relieving and terrifying thought: graduate school is almost over, BUT THERE'S STILL SO MUCH LEFT TO DO!
One of the most common struggles for grad students is fighting the feeling that you're not getting "enough" done every day. Actually, maybe that's just an adulthood struggle. Regardless I think it's a silly thing to worry about: we each decide what "enough" is for a given day, but more often than not that idea of "enough" is very abstract and just adds unnecessary stress. We've got enough to worry about just living our lives.
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Yet lately I've been struggling with my daily idea of "enough". A year or so into grad school Dan and I decided to have a 10 PM rule: we shut down all electronics and anything work-related at 10 PM every day. He'd noticed that, prior to this rule, I really struggled falling (and staying) asleep every night because I was thinking about work things during my every waking moment. Our 10 PM rule has helped, but for the past few weeks I keep trying to work faster and get "enough" done before the clock strikes 10 and I close my laptop for the day. It's especially tough when some of the computational work I've been doing literally takes days to run.
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And then the other day I saw this viral Tweet from 2018:
My 3yo said she wanted to be an astronaut, and I said she had to study hard, go to college, learn a lot of science, and take a physical fitness test, and she shrugged and said, "That's just 4 things." So she's basically a nonchalant motivational speaker.
— jendziura (@jendziura) February 15, 2018
The idea of "That's just 4 things" really stuck with me. I realized that a potentially healthier way for me to look at my daily productivity was just to focus on what I had gotten done versus everything that's still left for me to do. So I started making lists in my Rocketbook of every work related thing I'd accomplished every day. Honestly it's helped me a lot: it doesn't matter how big or small tasks are, I'm still getting things done every day. And Rocketbook even converts my notes into .txt files (see screenshots below). These files are not perfect because my handwriting is quite tiny, but it's nice to have a digital record of my daily accomplishments. In fact, I'm gonna go add "Write a blog post" to my list for today. Cheers to focusing on the positive instead of the negative! Talk to y'all next week :)