), tempting as it might be. :)The elements of my proactive plan shall be shamelessly stolen and adapted from The Living Simple Manifesto.
Thus, each day, I am going to take a couple ideas from that page and apply it to my case. Call it misplaced optimism, but I like the thought that a major chunk of my messed up world can potentially be straightened up in 72 days or less!
Since I am glued to a computer most of my waking hours, its only fitting that I start where it might impact the most. Starting with Rule 7: Limit your communications and Rule 60: Simplify your RSS feeds
I admit I am guilty of internet trawling. I wiki-surf and feed-read all the time. I am attracted to every remote science story there is and I read them all. Not only do I read the article, most often than not, I track down the source journal papers and read them as well. Then I email the most interesting of these to a handful of my friends and my family. I do this all in separate emails because they are all from a different timespan and/or sphere of my life and some of them don't know each other so clumping them all in one To:/CC: line seems inappropriate. I receive many of their responses and opinions and answer them all. Some of them send me some related papers, which I then proceed to track down and read. Its a never-ending cycle.
The result of all this frantic reading and emailing is:
1. I become a little bit more informed each day. Score: +1
2. I lag behind in the dissertation reading I am supposed to be doing. Score: -1
3. I feel guilty about this and get nightmares. Score: -2
Net Score: -2. I feel worse by the end of the day even though I feel informed.
The objective now is to convert this negative score into an overwhelmingly positive one and I can do this by:
1. Eliminating all superfluous emails. The emailing probably takes more of my time than reading stuff.
2. Just limiting myself to a science-digest like programme every weekend.
3. Do more dissertation reading and use the time saved from emailing to summarize this reading.
4. Post progress on (e:strip). (Which, BTW, I need to check just once a day, preferably in the morning. :))
~End of Day One~
The Simple Pliny Project.
(E:Paul): Those are great ideas! Maybe I should collect all my stories and post it all together in an entry here each weekend. I am warding off email temptations for now. :)
(E:hodown): THANK YOU!
(E:Chico): THANKS!! That is an awesome plan. Would you really do that for me? Read through monotonous snippets of even more ultra-boring dissertation stuff? I think the plan might work. I am thinking just 1 article a day for starters. I could mail in the summaries by 7:00 AM each day. I am posting my email address on your journal's yellow-post-it thing. Let me know with just a yes/no! (I promise I shall try to make the snippets as interesting as possible! :))
If you like, you can create a schedule and send me a layperson's summary of a dissertation-related article every day. (Or MWF, or whatever.) Just 2-3 sentences, perhaps? I can't guarantee that I will understand the scientific significance, but having someone waiting for your summary will help emphasize and maybe even validate the significance of staying disciplined about dissertation reading. If you don't send it to me on schedule, I will rattle your cage and irritate you until you send it! And you don't want to ruin your day with that sort of mild irritation. ;-)
:D Good for you. That really was the point of my post, doing something to really make yourself better in some way. I look forward to reading about your progress!
1. To simplify this email problem use bcc instead of cc. It allows you to send email to more than one person, but none of them see each other on the list.
2. Why not post all the stuff you read about on a blog and then make your friends and family go there. This has virtually eliminated the need for most email for me. You could post some of it here and then we could all learn about it. I know (e:enknot) would love it, he loves everything science.