kareina

I have kept a log of how many hours I work vs how many the uni thinks I should be working ever since I started working half time as the Laser lab manager, since they made it clear when I started that as a half time employee I need to put in the equivalent of 20 hours a week, but it is ok if some weeks are more and others less, so long as the total hours happen. Therefore I went into the uni web page showing the "Referenstidtabell" (list of how many hours an employee is meant to work each day of the year), which is a useful way to figure out where holidays are (since the list will show either zero or half the usual number of expected hours for those days). However, since the uni calculates 50% as four hour work days, five days a week, and I like having Friday's off, the first thing I did was to set up the spreadsheet with one column with the hours they expect, and another with my personal goal for the day, so that my goal could be five hour work days, four days a week (with adjustments to some days up or down, so that the total at the end of the month would match the total the uni gets for the month, since where weekends happen to fall can made a difference, with some hours becoming part of a neighbouring month if Friday's hours move to the days before Friday).

Then I set up some other columns to enter in how many hours I actually worked each day, and to calculate if I were ahead or behind of the number of hours I should have already worked in the month. I set that last column to carry the balance forward into the next moth, and, over the years I have tended to fall behind during summer and winter periods around the holidays, and catch up and get ahead in the spring and autumn.

When I did the application to be a student at Durham I added a couple of columns to the spreadsheet to track the hours I spend working on things related to my second PhD. Between the beginning of September, when I first sent Karen the letter of enquiry about the position, and the end of 2017 I worked a total of 334 hours for LTU (or two hours more than required, which nicely caught up the tiny bit I had been behind at the start of September), and 64 hours on Durham application stuff and the other "about to start" tasks, like background reading, etc. This means that my total hours in that period amounted to working 60% of full time, of which 84% of them were for my paid position.

However, going forward I will need to be working at 100% of full time (or more), and I cannot let my LTU hours drop below the 50% I am being paid for, so now I have set up formulas to track the total number of hours and calculate how they are distributed. Even though I am not yet officially enrolled, enrollment date is looming, and I have already been doing some real work towards that degree, therefore I decided to set up this tracking to count from 1 January, 2018. So far this year (including the trip to Umeå (and I always count work travel (distance, not commute) time towards the hours I am working, except for those travel hours I sleep or am doing trackable exercise, since, in those cases, I would not be traveling if not for work) I have worked 27.1 hours for LTU and 16.7 for Durham. Therefore 62% of the hours I have worked has been for LTU. However, I should have worked 34 hours for LTU by now, so I will need to catch those up.

So now my goal for work hours is fairly easy to define: Try to keep LTU at the minimum, and, when I am behind, ensure that, at least, the % of my total work hours for the month doesn't fall below 50% worked for LTU. (I rather expect there will come to be times when I work more than 100%, but so long as those times still see me meeting the LTU minimum 20 hours a week, that will be fine.)

April and May were particularly busy months for me, and included travel. As a result my exercise log got kind of behind. Not the basic data entry--these days I do that on my phone, but the excel spreadsheet where I actually tally up the number of hours spent on various activities and convert the data to graphs--that part didn't really get done during those two months. Since then I have managed to keep that part up to date for new stuff, and have, every so often, gone back and copy-pasted the older data into the spreadsheet. Tonight I finally finished all of that for those two months, to discover that while April was fairly typical in terms of my exercise levels, May was the lowest month since I started keeping the logs in Excel where I could see the graphs as they form. I strongly suspect that, had I been pulling that data into Excel and looked at the graphs as they were forming, I would likely have been a bit (ok, a lot) more active that month. Oh well, the logs are current now, and likely to remain that way--nothing like seeing a record low to inspire one to return to paying attention to that aspect of one's life!

We managed another four batches of concrete today, and, since today's rock were on the back side of the wall, we were also able to fill in lots of gravel and dirt behind the walls. (Why, yes, yes that does count towards the above mentioned exercise log.) Sadly, some of the rocks used today were particularly pretty, but no one will ever see them again, since they are on the back side of the wall. So it goes, and it can't be helped--there are far too many pretty rocks available for all of them to wind up in visible places in the walls (and, sometimes, rocks that aren't so pretty wind up in visible locations because that is where they happen to fit best).

While I was updating my logs lord_kjar managed to do some maintenance on the ride-on lawn mower and make progress on the great computer stuff sorting project which has been filling the guest room. Not too much more needing to happen in there before it will be ready for mom's visit in September.

If it isn't raining tomorrow (or only does it lightly) we can make more earth cellar progress, if it is we can focus on other projects. Monday some friends are coming over for dinner, one of whom I have been discussing the possibility of her becoming my apprentice. I hope she says yes, it would be lovely to have a local apprentice.

Have I mentioned that I will be running Norrskennsfest in November? It is the big event of the year for the shire, and I am looking forward to it. We are looking at doing a day-time feast and bardic competition, in addition to some of the traditional activities.

Part way thorough my PhD program I decided to start tracking how I was spending my hours, and set up a spreadsheet to keep track of half a dozen categories

*uni work
*exercise
*reading/e-mail/livejournal/etc. or, more rarely, watching a movie, play or concert
*useful tasks
*social
*sleep

looking back over the graph most of these categories have very wavy lines--up one month, down the next. There is only one category which shows a consistent downward trend, and that is sleep. The first four months of my record I averaged more than 8 hours of sleep every night. Then spring arrived, and I started getting less sleep each night, with the average dropping to right on, or only barely below, 8 hours/night for the next 7 months. Then I hit the need-to-finish-the-thesis-ASAP crunch, and sleep dropped to only about 7.5 hours/month (other than the month I finished, where it dropped to less than 6.5 hours/night average for the whole month (keep in mind that half of that month was thesis finishing, the other half was traveling, and I am pretty certain that I got more sleep while traveling, so the low was certainly even lower than that!). Since finishing my thesis a year ago and moving to Milan I've been averaging between 7.2 and 7.6 hours of sleep/night (looking at the totals for each month as a whole).

This explains why I've generally got dark circles under my eyes, and now I'm wondering if I'd have better luck keeping my hours of uni work/week as high as I want it to be if I were getting more sleep. Therefore I'm going to try an experiment--with a new month starting in a couple of days, I'm going to see if I can push my average hours of sleep for August to (or even over) 8 hours/day, just to see what it does to my energy levels and uni work. This will be an interesting month to try this because I'll be traveling for part of it, and when I'm not traveling it will likely be way hot, which could interfere with my being able to sleep at all. I'll try to remember to report back on the topic at the end of the month.

In other news, it was a lovely day today--it rained this morning, and never got hot all day. I was able to walk to the store which carries the cheese I like (a 30 minute walk, each way), and the cheese, butter and yoghurt was all still nice and cool when I got it out of my backpack when I got home!

Today's uni progress report: Started a word document for a paper that will summarize the results of my research here, using a paper written by my predecessor as a template (at my boss'es suggestion), filled in a bit of data in bullet points in the outline, then spent some time processing data. Confirmed that the experiment that I'd started before leaving and which had the heat turned off just before I left had, in fact, been re-heated and it is going fine--we should be able to download that one next week. Booked time for the microprobe for the following week to analyze that experiment.

Now it is nearly midnight, and I still need to read my 1000 words of geologic literature and do my yoga before bed, so if I want to get more sleep I'm either going to have to sleep in in the morning, or get a nap at some point...