Sunday meeting with myself: hey, I got stuff done!

i-f875c0b07d9b3cb6229668554781b35a-alice.jpgI just had my 2nd "Sunday meeting with myself." I looked back at my list from last week, and was thrilled to be able to cross almost everything off. It helped to map tasks onto my available schedule, although I completely underestimated how much time I needed for class prep this week. I'll get better on that (both in decreasing the time, and more accurately estimating), I think. It felt very satisfying to cross off all those things, and see a full but completed list. Yay for me.

Priorities this week:

  • Revisions on a paper due Tuesday
  • Page proofs on a paper due Wednesday
  • Reading over a friend's grant proposal and sending a coherent review on Monday
  • Being prepped for class by Wednesday morning (this one is going to be hard)

What are you going to get done this week?

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The first thing I need to do is figure out exactly what I need to accomplish this fall, when I need to accomplish it, and how I'm going to do it. Basically, I need to make a huge to-do list. That's on my to-do list for tomorrow. :-)

Alice - are you familiar with the "getting things done" methods? I've been working towards using them to, well, get things done, myself. The weekly review is the key. Glad to hear it is clicking for you too.

1. Finish reviewing a grant proposal for my boss.
2. Finish project that the high school intern in our lab was supposed to do this summer. It really was too much to ask of the poor guy.
3. Finish my part of the project that really ought to have been done by a grad student from another lab.
4. Start second round of experiments to justify my existence in the lab, so that I can quickly move on to more exciting stuff.
5. Start a small experiment that will allow me to wrap up the last paper coming out of my dissertation.
6. Take kids to swim/dance/gymnastics/tutoring/therapy classes as necessary, without being late, and without driving faster than the speed of light.

Busy? Who? Me?

Mike - I am, but through OmniFocus, which I use obsessively but somewhat ineffectively. I can't seem to just get a whole bunch of ideas out of my head, and then process them afterwards - I want to process them one at a time. But I'll get there.