Finding optimal working times... (or how I learnt that sleeping in wasn't bad).

Recently, I came home to my parents in the effort to try and write up a large portion of my thesis. This was because an unexpected, long trip to Bosnia presented itself. I will be off to collect more data to make my thesis more complete. So I thought, I will go home for a few months and concentrate on writing as much as I possibly can before I get more data and re-run analyses.

So off I went to Canada and I began in earnest. I forced myself awake at 7am every morning so I could be in the study by 8am... And then I spent my morning reading the papers, the PhD related blogs, chatting to my twitter contacts and generally doing things thinly veiled as "productive".

I started thinking to myself, I'm not really getting much work done am I? And no, I wasn't. When I compiled the items I'd be writing recently, my progress didn't seem as great as I'd hoped. Through suggestions in the many PhD and productivity blogs I read, I came across apps that will record everything you're doing on the computer during the day. And all of a sudden, after a week or so of use, I saw in the little graphs where I was wasting my time and just how I was wasting it.

Miraculously, I realised that there was no point whatsoever in me getting up so early when clearly I was never getting any real work done. So why not get more sleep??? And the first day after I turned the alarm clock off (and never set it again), I started being more productive by realising that my late morning was better spent reading (and writing a few mindless notes) and my best writing time was in the late afternoon or evening...

I think that finding your groove and productive time is essential. My productivity has changed dramatically. And I'm no longer exhausted in the morning or wracked with guilt. Probably won't last, but at least I'm oddly calm these days...