Part 1 of this post I listed some goals under two headings, trivial hobbies on a personal level and PhD career goals. Both are only for 2023. Let's make these goals more achievable and realistic by enumerating the different steps how to achieve this. First:
1. Trivial hobbies on a personal level
a. Exercise 3-4x per week. So far, since 2 January, I've exercise six times. That makes it to the quota of 3x per week. To make this more solid, here are some ways that made me stick to the routine:
a1. Sleep early, wake up early. I noticed I have more energy in the day if I were able to sleep at least seven hours. Lately, I've been sleeping eight hours, which is super duper great.
a2. Let it be the first thing I do in the morning. And do it on an empty stomach. I feel motivated to workout right after I wake up. It's the first thing I do in the morning prior to eating. However, if it's already 11AM and I haven't gone to the gym, I will already feel hungry and I need to eat. When I eat, that zaps my motivation to go to the gym. However, if this happens, I notice I start to regain my motivation to work out around 2 or 3PM. So it's either I exercise before 9AM or after 2PM.
a3. Crossing off "exercise" on my to-do list motivates me. I'm the type of person who needs to list all the things I need to do, even something as simple as "shower". And the more tasks I see crossed off the list, the better I'll feel throughout the day. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. But, I make sure that each quadrant in my Eisenhower matrix does not exceed eight tasks.
a4. Marking my progress on a monthly calendar. I have a monthly calendar printed and displayed on my fridge. Each day I'm able to exercise, I'll highlight the box with a pink marker. On rest days, I highlight it with orange. The feeling associated is similar to a3. But the difference is that I get to see my progress printed out and on a monthly basis. It's an "at-a-glance" means of monitoring my weekly and monthly progress. The more pink highlights I see, the better I'll feel.
a5. Progressing with my reps, sets, and weights. Because I'm using the Volt training app, my workout progress gets recorded on the app, and the AI automatically adjusts the weight and type of equipment that I need to use for my workouts. An improvement for me really is doing 20lbs dumbbell bench presses. I started with 10lbs. Progressed to 15lbs. Now, doing 20lbs dumbbell presses at 10 reps, 4 sets, is very doable. Soon, I think I'm going to progress to 25lbs dumbbell bench presses.
b. Write in blog 2-3x per week. So I learned 'reflective journaling' (RJ) in the PhD Life Raft podcast yesterday. RJ is a tool used by many, in this case, PhD students, to record events, feelings, progress, failures, basically reflections about your experiments, experiences, and day-to-day activities as a PhD student. As I Googled more about this RJ, I came across the term metacognitive awareness. Its definition is being aware of how you think; being mindful of how you think, and being aware of the strategies that you use while thinking. This allows for an individual to monitor and evaluate his approach towards thinking. And we usually think while solving problems or learning or doing things. And Anyway, I am not going to give an in-depth discussion about this. I found this article and this article by A Happy PhD to be very helpful in starting one's journaling journey. So here are some ways that I think would allow journaling 2-3x per week stick to me:
b1. Setting a time and day to journal. I read in the article above that he writes every day for his daily journaling, and every Sunday for his what-happened-this-week assessment. Perhaps for me, instead of the Sunday weekly journal schedule, what would work is a weekly journaling on a Saturday. And those in between can be Wednesday (hump day), and the other one can be 'whenever I feel like', so it's fluid. So solids would be Sunday and Wednesday, and one fluid 'whenever I feel like it'. As for the time, it would most likely be at night, or in the late afternoon after school. It should only be at most an hour, like an hour break from studying
b2. Thinking throughout the day what topic would be interesting to write in the blog. This can be facilitated by my S-pen. Whenever a nice blog topic comes to mind, or if I want to record what happened in the day, I'll write it down in my phone and use that as kodigo as I write my post.
b3. Thinking and projecting the emotion I'd feel after I finish writing. Then reading what I wrote a few days, weeks, or even years later would help me reminisce that memory. I was age seven or eight when I started writing in a diary. I still remember what the diary looks like in my mind's eye. It has an acrylic cover and a lock on the side. The cover image was cartoon bunnies and birds communing. Inside were ruled, light pink pages, with a GSM that I estimate to be ~75-80. I would write about my crushes and what happened to me during those days I feel like writing. It was a nice experience. I wish I can dig up those old diaries and read all that I've written since 1993. It wasn't a consistent recording, as I've shifted to an online platform 13 years later. But man, to read those memories... I wonder how my writing style was then...
b4. Each entry serves as a memory, just like when Dumbledore would extract a memory and put it in the Pensieve. This idea would help motivate me to write more and record my memories in writing. I consider my life to be an adventurous one, with a lot of ups and downs. I should have recorded most of them. It would have been fun to relive those memories of the past.
c. Continue learning French and Spanish in Duolingo. My main motivation for this is not to actually be conversational, although that would be great. It's to exercise my brain and improve cognitive performance. Learning a language has many benefits for brain health, particularly focus, mental alertness, and attention. I noticed that English translations of languages most likely lose the true meaning of what the speaker wanted to say. There's a lot of nuance to language and if one really wants to fully comprehend what a person is saying in their own language, that language must be learned. For example, "Grabe sobrang hirap nung exam, nangamote ako!". In English, "The exam was very difficult/challenging/hard! There were many items I was unable to answer!" Nangamote clearly is not, "there were many items I was unable to answer". So anyway, how do we keep ourselves motivated with Duolingo:
c1. I should always keep in mind that Duolingo is only AT LEAST 15mins per day. That could easily be done. If I can scroll through Instagram from an hour without budging, what's 15mins of learning in Duolingo, right? I've done a 100day streak before, it shouldn't be difficult to replicate that. Only reason why I broke streak was because I went back home to Manila and my routine was completely disarrayed.
c2. Identify a time in the day where productivity starts to wane and do Duolingo in that time window. I noticed I get hardly anything done in the afternoon, between 2-5PM. I'm productive in the morning, and after dinner, around 7PM. So Duolingo should be somewhere in between this time frame. Or maybe i can do it in between my 15min Pomodoro breaks. That'll be a nice break from studying.
I'd like to think this is a good strategy of fulfilling these personal hobbies. I'll give myself three months to be consistent. And if I am, let's add a few more personal goals. Top of head is learning guitar and voice an hour a day, 2-3x per week. Let's see.
Next post would be Part 3 of what I look forward to in 2023. But it'll discuss my PhD career goals for this year.
i remain, edz
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