Success/Failure

For me today was in many ways successful and in other ways a failure.  Today marked the beginning of my new self imposed schedule.  Essentially I created a schedule that I want to stick to throughout the rest of my time as a grad student.  I will explain the basis of my schedule but first let me explain my need for a schedule.

For those of you who don't know I am a 4th year graduate student studying Biostatistics at UC Davis.  This essentially means that I am passed all of the coursework and now am working independently on my own research.  While you're in courses, school in many ways is much easier than an actual job.  Imagine a job in which your boss tells you exactly what he/she wants you to do and gives you a week in which to get it done.  You take the week to do that job and then the next week you get a new assignment.  I loved being in classes.  No self-motivation needed.  You're given an assignment and in a week you will be graded on that assignment.  You work hard to get it done and when the due date comes you turn it in and you no longer have to worry about it.  Research on the other hand is a job in which your boss says "Hey come up with a project that no one has done before and that will take around 2 years to do and get it done".   Needless to say you need a good amount of self-motivation which I seem to be lacking.  Hence the reason for a schedule.

So in an attempt to get it together and start making some progress I set a daily schedule for myself.  Essentially I get up at 6, work out, then from 9-5 I work on my dissertation research, my gsr research, and any consulting projects that I'm working on.  At 5 I stop all work for the day, make dinner, and then take the rest of the evening off.  So today I managed to follow my schedule to a T until about 3:00 when I took a nap :-(  I'm hoping it takes me about a week to get adjusted to this schedule and make it work.  I was pretty disappointed when I woke up from the nap but I will try again tomorrow.

I know I'm kind of blabbering on but I promised myself I would treat this as a journal.  I'm done for the evening now so I'm going to relax and prepare myself for tomorrow morning :-)  I hope you all had a wonderful day and I hope that you will continue to work on your New Year's Resolutions.  Perhaps one of my New Year's Resolutions should be to keep my New Year's resolutions :-)

To be continued....