Ok, the graphs really do matter.

[kareina]

Starting in May of 2008 I begun keeping a log of the number of hours a day I spent doing uni work, sleep, exercise, reading (email, fiction, blogs whatever—movies, plays and other forms of passive entertainment fall into this one), social stuff, or "useful tasks". I started this because I was genuinely curious as to how my time was being broken down, and in hopes that it would be a tool to help me focus on actually doing my uni work and getting my PhD project finished and written up. I think it helped, in that I did get it done, and I watched the graphs for each day to see how my hours of uni work were doing, trying to bump the totals up higher and higher. The achieved a record high during the final push to finish my thesis, and then I boarded a plane and commenced a short vacation travelling to visit friends and family before heading on to start my first post-doc position. Because I like records, I continued to dutifully keep records on how I was spending my time, but fell out of the habit of looking at the graphs and totals.

The first couple of weeks I was in town my days were largely spent doing "useful tasks" in the form of necessary paperwork so that I could get paid, so that my visa would become official, so that I’d have a place to live and a bank account. I learned where the supermarket was, and where the natural food store which carries the things I consider essential but aren’t available in a supermarket is located. After helping me with the portion of these tasks which required his assistance my boss gave me a stack of papers to read and went on holiday, telling me that if I want to do any travel, while he’s gone would be a good time. Great thought, but the budget hasn’t really recovered from the move. So instead the plan was to spend that time continuing to get to know this area and focus on doing that reading and working on tasks left over from my PhD project in terms of preparing papers for publications and talks/posters to present at conferences. However, while I continued to keep track of how I was spending my time, I didn’t look at the graphs and paid no attention to the totals. And it shows!

The category of "uni work" is down under 20 hours a week (ok, I confess, it is under 18 hours a week) for the months of July and August. 30 to 40 hours a week was typical for most of the record period, and it broke 63 hours a week during my final push to finish before boarding that plane. The only other time it got this low was December of last year, when my scholarship ran out and we moved house—I did very little work while packing boxes and moving, and then not much more doing family stuff with the holidays. Clearly it is time to actually watch these graphs, and see how high I can push August, given the slow start to for the first 10 days. Feel free to enter your guesses as to what the August total average hours/week winds up being now that I’ve realized that improvement is in order. I’ll come up with something nice for the person who guesses closest to correct!

There is good news in the log, however. The category of "exercise" is up to more than 13 hours a week (and just broke 14 hours a week in August), as I walk everywhere because I’d rather do that than take a bus and am often doing more than my "minimum" number of minutes of yoga in a day. Previously "exercise" ranged from a low of 10 to a high of 12.5 hours/week, back when I was doing the 2 hour+ walks with baronsnorri most days.

Comments

[clovis-t.livejournal.com]

I'll guess 23 hours, but they'll be a good 23 hours!

[kareina.livejournal.com]

You were closest (of the two guesses), I only managed 21.3 hrs/week in August, and, sadly, so far September isn't that high (but moving and travel do interfere with uni work getting done).

[sismith42.livejournal.com]

My guess is 28 hours per week :-)

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the optimistic guess. Alas, I only managed 21.3 hours/week in August, and September, so far, is even lower :-(

Granted, if I didn't spend time going through old e-mails from LJ notifying me of comments and replying to them ages after they were made, I'd have more time for uni work...