MAYbe
Ah, as always, I realise I have been neglecting this journal (and everyone elses').
Some great stuff (woo, went to Brisbane for the Experimental Psychology Conference, my talk was well received and I had a generally good time; enjoyed a wonderful Sydney Dance Company performance), and not so great stuff (poo, drained the battery; left my car headlamps on and had to wait hours alone in scary dark to be rescued; got whacked with a $90 fine for internet overuse) happened in April.
This April, I experimented with being kinder to myself (pushing the work/life balance more toward life, a bit further from work - stopping work at 5pm, not working on weekends)... As I expected, the net result was a slightly lower momentary stress of an evening, but a noticeable pernicious decrease in productivity resulting in my being roughly a week behind in my goals for the month. This has resulted in a more long-term anxiety... So I'm not convinced the work/life shift continually recommended to we PhDders is pragmatically feasible given the constraints of our workload.
In May, I'm going to shift back to old habits... The goals are to write four papers up, two talks (for conferences in July), and catch up with my lagging scientific illustration (one rather overdue project, one relatively newer one). There's also a statistics consultancy to be working on. Let's see how we go with all that...
Anyhoo, perhaps a snapshot of my day for posterity is in order...
Got up 6:30, and after caffeinating myself (and preparing coffee for the parental units) and crickenating my dear Lizard and other sundry morning matters, spent an hour or so ploughing through uni emails. Went into uni via Dad express (he drops me off at a central bus station on his way to work) followed by a bus, spent much of the 40 minute journey working on my meta analysis on the tablet. Upon arriving, I spent 30 mins or so unpacking the month's supply of tea room biscuits (having purchased the literal trolley load the day before with the ever filling tea club kitty). Then retired to my office for an at-the-desk cerial breakfast whilst beginning work on a new paper write-up. Break at 11:30 or so for lunch with Snarfie (I wasn't hungry, so I just had a coffee), then back to the office for more work on the paper. At 12:50, I switched to working on the tablet and relocated downstairs for my weekly research assistant work, and ran seven participants (one at a time) through a visual perception task, puttering on with bits of the paper's formative introduction whilst awaiting their task completion. They were all done a bit before 5, at which point I relocated to the office and consolidated the formative paper to one document, and emailed myself a to-do list for the evening. The day at uni had been nicely peppered by brief conversations with colleagues, so it wasn't allll work. Now I'm typing this on the tablet on the way home (fighting motion sickness in the interests of efficiency as always), anticipating a rather houseworky eve (bathrooms need cleaning). As always I'm disappointed in how little progress I made today (especially on the paper - the method is done, but the intro is only about 40% drafted). Estimated time of finishing tasks and sleep - midnight, maybe?
[insert rest of day here] huh, my guess wasn't too far off- all's done just before midnight :)