Upcoming work

I hardly did a great job with purposefulness at today's work hours. In a three-hour shift, all I actually got done was walking one fellow student through uploading his personal Web page to the department server. Other than that, my time was largely wasted. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm working on improving about myself.

In truth, there is a great deal of real work that I could stand to get done. The work projects I must prioritize include:

• Social science research.
  
  • My dissertation in evolutionary game theory. Work on this, at least for the moment, still mostly consists of writing to one member of my prospectus committee and trying to get his attention to some additional material I sent him as long ago as the middle of March. When I learn whether and how well that work addressed the concerns he had at my original prospectus defense, the whole committee and I can move forward toward a revised prospectus and defense date.
  • My conference paper. I presented a conference paper in April, one that's got nothing to do with my main line of work, but that I really didn't find hard at all. I want to expand the work done in the conference version, which wasn't much more than a demo, according to the comments I received in presentation and other goals of my own for the research, and, having done so, to turn it around for my first individually-authored publication. That expansion of the work will consist in nothing but adding terms to the code running my models to include more columns of the data set, and perhaps rebuilding the data set if the version I got from previous authors in this line of studies doesn't actually have all the variables I mean to use.
• Quiz bowl tournament organizing and writing. My school runs a large high school invitational tournament. Last year under two co-directors and co-editors, there were some complaints about quality; this year, I'm taking over directing and editing to keep any tasks from falling through the cracks. To get started on the questions right away, I'm going to have to do the following.
  
  • Find three assistant editors, one each for literature, science, and history, and get them to start working with me. My history and science candidates are known, but I haven't contacted them; I don't have a good choice yet for literature. These will be people from my own quizbowl team who can commit to working a great deal, and doing so over the summer.
  • Together with them, start compiling an answer document. The whole team will be involved in writing questions, but it's much easier for them to do so if some answers are picked out ahead of time.
  • Contact some outside partners — other teams — to provide some supplementary questions. Those folks will get to run the same tournament in other locations for their assistance. Since they're outside normal editorial channels, though, I want to get started with them very early; last year, much of what we got from other schools was unusably badly written, and we got it too late to collaborate on editing it into shape.

Besides all those things, there are some side projects in the forefront of my mind, mostly of a software nature. Those projects can, I think, wait longer.

My macaroni and cheese is nearly done baking upstairs. Time to cut up a salad to eat with it and dig in.

Skeleton of a schedule

This retreat time is to be divided, roughly, between time spent living my personal life deliberately and critically and time spent deliberately pursuing one or more of the professional or avocational projects I am called to complete — my work, so to speak.

Inasmuch as I've still got computer lab hours to attend on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00 to 4:00, I've decided that mornings will be set aside for the former and afternoons for the latter, broadly speaking. I don't have many specific choices made, but my goal is to get them made over the course of one week and have them in place for the next two.

Early mornings will continue to look like the one I spent today. The whole schedule of attendance to pets and of waking up between 7:00 and 9:00 worked very well. I don't wholly know yet what the rest of deliberately living my individual life will mean.

I'm going to write a separate post about the other main goal, the work projects I'm pursuing. I started writing it here, but I've already got too much to write to include it in this otherwise short post, or to finish before I've got to be off making lunch and traveling in to campus.

I mean not to come out of the house to do much besides church on Sundays. Maybe, maybe for some really special events I'll emerge, but I won't let my evenings get spent on the first thing I get suggested every night. I'll still be going to aikido classes, though, including tonight at 7:15 and tomorrow at 6:30, back in the city. (Without choir practice to attend in the summer, I might even go to the satellite dojo for their Thursday classes, although I haven't decided.)

I will pray at least three times daily: once on waking between 7:00 and 8:00, once just after lunch at noon, and once in the evening. If I can schedule it well, I'll set aside both an evening prayer time and a separate one for compline, presumably right before bed.