I kind of like this as a concept, and I think it could very usefully be applied to other areas of my life, notably, which is where of course it comes into this blog, science. As I’ve got more senior I’ve found I’m spending more and more time on managerial tasks, meetings, emails, reports, proposals, supervision and less and less on actual science. This is probably fine, it’s the way of the world, but it’s also a pity when part of (most of?) the joy of science is really in the doing. That’s why we put up with paltry wages, high workloads, social media hostility and the rest.
Actually doing science is so much fun.
Admittedly, some of it is more type 2 fun (best enjoyed retrospectively, as anyone who has spent a month CMORising model output or digging snow pits in freezing driving snow conditions can tell you), than type 1 fun (enjoyed in the moment). Nonetheless, I occasionally feel I’m in danger of losing the thread of why I started in this career in the first place. Type 2 fun: It took us 4 hours to locate and dig that lot out in wind and occasional blizzard conditions.
Autumn was absolutely and ridiculously hectic, many project meetings, as well as technical conferences and symposia, proposal deadlines, deliverable deadlines and one-off workshops. I welcome November with open arms. Finally time to do some actual work again! And in the way of paying myself forward, I have started two different but related tracks to get back into the groove this month.
The first, #30DayMapChallenge you can already see some entries for here on a dedicated page. The idea is a new map, according to the prompts from the website 30DayMapChallenge , every day. I’m certainly not going to make all 30. I will be doing well if I manage 10, but already after only 2 days, I can feel my geospatial mojo coming back. There’s nothing like practicing your GIS skills to make you want to do more of them
The second is #AcWriMo, academic writing month. I have 3 papers I’d really like to submit before the end of this year. I’m very close with one, fairly close with the second and to be entirely honest I’m not really sure where I am with the third… Now it may seem unwise to commit to 2 daily activities in November, while recovering from September and October, but in fact they’re pretty complementary. I plan to post maps that are relevant to, or even actually from the papers, and just the process of looking at data is a motivation to get the work done.
So my commitment to #AcWriMo is:
I will have the first 2 papers submitted by end November
I will write at least 20 minutes per day – every day!
I will write at least 8 hours per week
I will rediscover the joy of science.
Let’s call it paying myself first…
*Far be it from me to offer financial advice, but if I was a young graduate student, I’d be saving up pretty hard on whatever meagre wages I have. The research field can be fickle with contracts, even permanent jobs have to continue raising money and we can’t keep up the pace for ever. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t swap it for another job…
https://sternaparadisaea.net/2024/11/02/paying-yourself-first/
#climateChange #Science
