#mildnothing

I stress too much about my reading speed. I want to read more quickly in order to devour more books (and kinda make up for all those hours, months and years I spent not reading??) But the more I concentrate on it the less I manage to grasp the story. It's maddening.

I returned back to work yesterday and was alone for the first three hours. I felt at ease, being all alone and just slowly working, checking emails to see what I’ve missed in my absense. I received new deadlines and felt stress rising. The next three weeks will definitely be stressful and demanding and I hate that the year started exactly as I did not intend it to start. It cannot be helped. Talking to friends helped. They assured me all will be fine. Journaling my thoughts helped, too. I did journal as soon as I noticed revolving thoughts. I think about quitting my PhD a lot, but I am also quite convinced I will not do that. Not really. It would be the easy way out but that’s not what I signed up for.

06 | 01 | 2021 – [29/100] –  Today’s plan: continue reading literature, taking notes and then finally putting it into words for my thesis. Also: lab meeting for the first time in a few weeks. I’m a bit nervous but this year will be the year.

25.03.2021::: I'm happy to say that I managed to fill my daily to do lists with achievable goals. This week has been surprisingly busy. I expected to get comments on a paper on Monday, but they didn't arrive until late Tuesday. Now, all of a sudden, I get really close to submitting my first paper and it is kind of scary. It's just this feeling of things actually ending, that felt so infinite for the longest time. [53/100]

[21/100] 15.05.2020 :: The graduate school I belong to holds a digital writing space every Friday in which we have four shared pomodoro sessions (25/5 min). I took part in it this morning and actually used the time that I would otherwise probably have wasted on random shizzle. I wrote almost 1200 words. Not sure if that’s a lot or not, it’s certainly a lot for me.

[23/100] 18.05.2020 :: Had a lot of (black) tea, procrastinated quite a lot, had lunch and finally started working. I re-read a paper, took notes and dove into the fantastic world of green algae taxonomy.

[17/100] :: 8.05.2020 :: Wasn’t highly productive, ran in the morning, wrote a bit on my introduction until early afternoon. Happy weekend!

[19/100] May 12 :: Doing lots of R stuff. Changed a few things in my script which then stopped compiling, so I spent an hour fixing shit. It was frustrating. We had a lab meeting via skype and I always feel like not making progress, so I can’t really tell my PI what I’ve done (”coding shit in R” doesn’t really count in my or his head) and then feel stupid about it.