Since January I have been trying out a new working schedule. The basic idea has been to be more effective in managing time to work on the research for my Ph.D. dissertation. So far, I think it has been working quite well.
Previously, I was working four days per week in the office at my day job and spending the fifth day and, in theory, the weekends and evenings to work on research. It often turned out, though, that I was not particularly motivated to work from home on that fifth day, and it was easier to run errands and do all of the other life-sustaining things that most people do on the weekends.
Figure 1: The current directions of my Ph.D research.
So, to get myself into work mode and actually try to get a few hours of research every day, I started working on research from my office. I go in Monday through Friday, and I carve off a couple hours to do school things before or after or between doing the things I actually get paid to do. This leads to some long days of course—ten or twelve hours or more in some cases—but overall I think my productivity has increased. And a side effect is that I don’t spend my weekends thinking that I didn’t get enough research done during the week. This in turn means that I don’t have to work on research on the weekends, and instead I have time to run errands and even try to relax a little bit.
All of this is a difficult balance. This month has been difficult because I have been busier than usual at work. It’s easy for a whole day to disappear on paid tasks without doing any simulations or reading or writing for school. So it isn’t a perfect system, but things are improving, and I may actually mean it this time when I say I’ll be done with school, “in the next several months.”
And what am I working on these days? Fundamental physical limits of spectral beam combining in multiplexed volume holograms. The research directions and the topics I need to spend time writing about are depicted in Figure 1 in a deliberately blurry fashion.
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