our choices clearly reflect our priorities

[kareina]

Some of you may recall that I have, off an on over the years, had a goal to "read at least 1000 words from the Geologic Literature a day". This goal has helped me keep on top of the piles of reading a research scientist needs to do, and the discipline of doing it daily, even on weekends and holidays, also helps. However, it happens occasionally that I miss a day, for whatever reason. Before starting my current job my record was remembering 321 days in a row. That one ended when I was in the process of packing up and getting ready to leave Italy to move to Sweden, and, indeed, I decided to just plain take a break from the daily reading, and made no attempt to read any science papers for the year I was not working. However, once I got the job offer to start doing research here I started doing the daily reading again.

I needed to--I was moving into a new field within geology, and had no where near enough background knowledge to do the job without lots and lots of reading. I am pleased to report that this time I managed a much longer stretch without forgetting--from the day I got the job offer I made time to read things from the geologic literature for 410 days in a row! Until this weekend. This weekend I was so focused on making progress on the house and getting everything where it belongs that I simply didn't think of reading at all. On Friday I had made the effort to put a few files into dropbox in hopes that I would spend an hour or two working from home, and a couple of times over the weekend lord_kjar asked me if I was going to do that work, and each time I decided that it was far more important to do things for the house. Clearly I meant that, because on none of those occasions did it occur to me that in addition to uni work that needs doing I also had reading I should be doing, and so I didn't do it. Oops.

It is a good thing I also want to do good things for my exercise log, or I may not have come into the office at all today, but I like the walk in (42 minutes this morning), and that provides me motivation to come in in the first place. Now that I am hear I should conclude this confession to the world and actually do the things with the data in those files that I didn't look at this weekend...

Comments

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Huh. That's a really interesting idea.

How do you determine how much 1000 words is (in terms of pages)? Is this every day, or only work days, i.e., not weekends and not vacation/holidays?

[kareina.livejournal.com]

The simple way to count if it is a paper book or journal is to count the number of words in the first line of text, then the number of lines in the paragraph, multiply that to get an estimate of the number of words per paragraph of that length, then do a rough count of how many blocks of text of that size are needed to make the 1000 words (hint: many papers have 500 word abstracts, so reading two abstracts meet the goal, or read three or four just to be certain you have it covered if any are short).

If it is a pdf or other computer based thing you can simply copy-paste into your word processor and hit "word count" to find out.

I freely admit that I haven't actually *counted* the words I read in years. the reason I call it "1000 words a day" is because it was first inspired by a "100 blows a day" challenge for SCA fighters--wherein they were all supposed to throw 100 good shots every day (either at a pell-post or an opponent) in an attempt to become better fighters. While my fighting could certainly use improvement, I decided that even more than that I needed to do the lit reading. However, 100 words takes only seconds to do, and the exercise is meant to be more on the order of 10 to 15 minutes practice every day, which is why I settled on the "1000" target.

It sounds like a big number, but if you read *only* 1000 words a day you will never, ever have a chance to keep up with the relevant literature in your field! Many days I read far more than that.

The think that has made it tough is that it is everyday. Weekends. Holidays. Days when fighting off a cold. Every day. I started this challenge the first time in June of 2007. Since then I have had to restart my count every time I forgot and missed a day. Sometimes I

[kareina.livejournal.com]

arg, darn computer--I wasn't done typing that...

Anyway...

Sometimes it would only be a couple of days, and then I would forget and have to restart, sometimes it was many many months that I remembered every day. As of today I am starting my count over for the 23rd time. This means that for the past 1 day I have remembered to read my 1000 every day. That is so not as impressive sounding as last Friday, when I had remembered to read it every day for the past 410 days.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

However, just because I designed the game based on a variation of the SCA fighter challenge doesn't mean that others need to play by the same rules--for other people it might make more sense to have it be only working days...

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I like this idea quite a bit, and will ruminate for awhile on the best way to adapt it to me circumstances. Thanks for the suggestion!

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Anytime! Feel free to mention useful ideas that you have been benefiting from but I might not have thought of.

One side benefit of having had this goal is that I keep a log in a spreadsheet listing each day's reading and a short note (sometimes as short as "abstract doesn't look useful, didn't download full article at this time). This means that if I see a reference to an article I can easily look up if I read it, when, and if I read only part of it, or managed to finish the article. It also means that the spreadsheet keeps count of the number of days for me, so I don't have to...