Every month I am keeping track of what I’m up to, both to track progress and inform how I spend the following month. You can read about my previous post, which outlines my plan for May here. I’d also suggest checking out this post if you’re keen to know more about why I’m spending my time in this way.
May was my second month post-PhD and my first full month with no formal work commitments. I’ve started trying to get into a rhythm to split my time effectively and achieved this with mixed success in May. I’m really enjoying being fortunate enough to spend my time on whatever takes my fancy, but it’ll take a bit more time to get into a routine!
What I did in May:
In the chart below I’ve only included things which are at least semi-productive, but rest assured I spent a lot of time off in May relaxing. In total the time I’ve included here represents only about a quarter of my waking hours in May.
The weather was fantastic so I spent a decent chunk of time outside, sometimes being productive but often not!
Academic work
In April I said I wanted to spend two days in May working on a paper, well I put it off and off. Then did a half day of on it on the final weekday of the month. I won’t lie, I kind of did this because I felt guilty and knew I wanted to include it in this update. Clearly these updates are serving the purpose of keeping me accountable!
Perhaps it’s just me but I find the main things I procrastinate over are those tasks where it isn’t obvious how to proceed. Either through having a poorly organised system or other confusion.
Once I was into it I was really happy that I’d made a start again on the paper and now have a much clearer plan to progress. There is a lot more to do for the paper but I really enjoyed getting back in to it and reading some papers.
June task: Spend two days on the paper to finish off the literature and pinning down what analysis needs doing.
We currently have one paper still under review: for the moment no news is good news! Another is in the hands of coauthors who are amending it prior to submission.
Being a reviewer
As soon as you have your email address linked to a paper online you can end up with a silly amount of spam reaching your inbox from predatory journals. On a daily basis I get emails like this:
In May I did get a real request though from a journal to be a reviewer. I’d heard of the journal before and it was for a paper which was relevant to my expertise, so I decided to give it a go.
I wanted to try being a reviewer for two reasons. Firstly, because I was interested in being on the other side of the process. Secondly, so I can share the experience here.
It was enlightening seeing the submission process from another perspective. This included the judging criteria provided to reviewers from the journal editors to decide whether or not to accept the paper.
For anyone with any interest in staying in academia I think reviewing at least a few papers is probably a good thing to do. I’ll write more about the experience in a separate post.
Other academic-related things
I’ve really been enjoying this weekly webinar series which Im pleased to see continuing into June:
It’s fantastic to see proactive researchers creating initiatives such as this!
Mentoring
Following on with being matched to a mentee in April, I’ve started having my first business discussions with my mentor through the Prince’s Trust. It’s early days with us so far only making introductions, but I’m excited to begin to help my mentee with their business idea!
The Savvy Scientist website
One of my main aims for May was to spend time focusing on this website. The aim wasn’t to publish more frequently, but to get some posts scheduled for the summer and think about long term plans by creating a publishing calendar.
I don’t have any posts completely finished and scheduled but did make progress across lots of posts. It just takes me a very long time to get into and write each post! I’m working to make the process more streamlined and ultimately spend less time faffing to try and perfect everything.
June task: Get four of these draft posts finished and scheduled for publishing.
These posts went live in May:
- Beyond the PhD: May 2020
- Deciding what to publish from your PhD work
- PhD Profiles: Sara, 2nd Year in Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, New York
- How I ended up on a desert island after taking an opportunity in an email
Thank you to everyone who has suggested topics for posts. I now have an ever growing list of ideas! This is is great for the longevity of the site.
By all accounts May was a good month in terms of reach for the blog, and the best yet if looking at stats. Using the same metrics as last month there were 5467 unique page views (+117% compared to April) by 3228 users (+73%):
What happened? I spent under an hour answering two questions on Quora and one of them, which I spent all of 10 minutes on, got pretty popular and was featured in a few of the Digest newsletters:
I included a link to a few posts right at the bottom of the Quora answer because they were relevant, but didn’t think much of it! Clearly Quora has a big and relevant audience, so spending a bit of time there each month could be a good way to reach more people whilst raising the profile of this website.
If you want to follow me on Quora, here is my profile.
I don’t expect every post to be popular, but the audience is large and I have spent quite a lot of time making informative pictures and content for this site, so if I can easily share some of it there and help some people, why not?
June action: Spend 30 minutes and answer a few Quora questions.
Learning new skills
In the medium term while I’m unable to go travelling one of the main things I want to focus my time on is learning new skills. Some could be useful for my career, others I simply fancy learning.
Computing
Last month I started two courses on Coursera:
- Learn to Program: The Fundamentals No progress finishing weeks 6 & 7 (of 7)
- Machine Learning Completed week 2 (of 11)
Stupidly midway through the month I reset my deadlines for the Machine Learning course and can no longer access any of the content until July 6th!
I really didn’t spend as much time as hoped on these two courses in May. I did take part in this AI for healthcare webinar and watched this video since the images were of interest and not dissimilar to the work during my PhD. Consuming a video is nothing like actually producing a bit of code myself though…
June action: Due to my mistake resetting deadlines, progressing with the Machine Learning course is not possible in June. Therefore in terms of courses my priority is to get the Learn to Program course completed.
I’m interested in app development, so I’m tempted to look into a course on that, but also don’t want to spread myself too thin. I expect to be living out the current situation for another 12-18 months so there isn’t really a rush!
Meditation
I’m pleased to say that I meditated every day in May. It’s worked best when I’ve made it a part of my routine: usually right after making porridge while I wait for it to be cool enough to not burn my mouth!
Something I’d like to work on is ensuring I’m committing myself to each session. I’ll admit that for a few sessions I really wasn’t feeling it and was simply sitting there to tick the box that I’d done it to carry on the streak. Perhaps it’s normal to not always feel up for meditation? Also, using Headspace, at most I’ve meditated for 10 minutes at a time so often don’t really get in to it before the session is over.
Anyhow I want to stick with it, and after a friendly reader sent it to me last month I’d like to go on a proper meditation retreat such as here once possible.
June action: Carry on meditating each day and commit for each session.
Sourdough
Baking with sourdough seems to be a pretty stereotypical lockdown activity at the moment. In my defence after hearing about sourdough starter I wanted to try it as a science experiment more than anything else!
The idea is that you culture yeast which you can use for baking starting with just flour and water.
After spending more time than any reasonable person would have done devouring as much as info online on the different ways to care for the sourdough starter, I now have a nice healthy pet starter.
On the final day of the month I attempted my first loaf, or to be posh boule, and I’m very happy with the result!
The starter is now in the fridge so once a week I’ll take it out, feed it and bake something.
Piano
My girlfriend bought a fancy “electronic piano”, a keyboard to you or I, right at the end of April. I wondered: having never learned a musical instrument before in my life, how much progress could I make if I practiced for an hour a day?
Having the keyboard in the living room of a house shared with four others (three of whom are also stuck at home all day) it isn’t always easy to find a good time to practice. Nevertheless I managed 21 hours of practice over the month, making it the third biggest “productive” use of my time. Towards the end of the month I improved the setup so that I can practice silently.
Before the month began I didn’t even have a clue how to read music, so a godsend was the app Simply Piano. Within just a few hours I could read a simple tune and I’m so happy with where I’m up to now. Intrigued? Last month I mentioned I was interested in producing videos, so I’ve been recording snippets of my progress which I’ll work into a video to share in a future monthly update.
June action: start putting together my piano progress video.
If you’re interested in learning the piano I can’t recommend Simply Piano enough. There is a free trial and as soon as we saw how good it was we paid for a year’s subscription for about £3 a month.
Boring life admin
I got a few things ticked off my to-do list:
- Listing a few unwanted possessions on eBay when there was a £1 maximum listing fee offer on (full post on eBay selling here).
- As I’ve moved house I spent time updating all of my addresses with banks etc: thankfully this took much less effort than expected!
There is nothing quite like ticking jobs off a to-do list! I’m pleased to say the list is now shortening. I’m trying to get in the habit of not putting jobs off, they are rarely as bad as I think yet getting them done declutters my thoughts enormously.
Time off
Painting
When I started writing this post I didn’t even realise I had done any painting in May, since it felt like so long ago. Hopefully this is a positive sign of making the most of my time by doing lots of different things rather than going stir crazy?
Anyhow I wanted to have another go at a picture I painted in April from the tutorial here.
It’s not perfect but I’d like to think Im slowly improving, though my efforts don’t hold a candle to the original. Watercolours can be tricky, but I hadn’t really painted much until recently so I’m happy.
It’s surprising how much more confident you can feel doing something the second time. As stated in the unsolicited advice list I share below: “Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.”
Media I’ve consumed
Books
In May I started reading Moby Dick, got a third of the way through and realised two things: it wasn’t the story I thought it was and that it was really pretty boring.
So for the first time I cut my losses and gave up. Maybe at some point I’ll pick it back up but there are no shortage of other books to read, so in all likelihood I’ll probably never finish it.
I’ve downloaded a few books to my Kindle (which I got out of the trash!) from the almost endless supply of classics on Project Gutenberg.
In May I finished reading these two books:
- How Not to Die – Bits of this were startling but the actionable advice was mostly common sense, with a few additions like apparently how good ground flax seeds are. Some TLDR: avoid smoking, limit alcohol, get exercise & sleep, eat healthily with a plant-based diet including lots of green veggies.
- Alice in Wonderland – Great fun to read!
I didn’t do any fiction writing like I had originally planned to do, lots of other things were simply more of a priority. I’l leave it on the back-burner for now.
Other things I read:
Reading this list of 68 bits of unsolicited advice was time well spent. There are some gems.
Besides that, I always enjoy Ben Evan’s weekly tech newsletter.
Podcasts
I don’t listen to as many podcasts as I once did but still find them a great medium.
A few that I regularly listen to are:
- How I Built This
- The Indicator by Planet Money
- Crowd Science
From the podcasts I listened to in May, both the Pat Brown and Luis von Ahn episodes of How I Built This were definitely worth listening to.
A few of my favourites from the past:
- 50 things that made the modern economy
- DeepMind: The podcast
- The Catch and Kill podcast, this was both devastating and incredible
If you have any recommendations please let me know.
Videos
I’ve been working my way through a series of films shared by Banff after they postponed the screening I was due to go to back in London in March.
The Last Honey Hunter was pretty crazy:
I’ve also continued to lose a good amount of time to YouTube. There are a wide mix of channels I subscribe to. A few which may be of interest include:
- MinuteEarth – science
- Andy Rawls – woodworking
- avantegarde vegan – food
- Bon Appétit – food
- Exploring Alternatives*
- How to Make Everything – engineering
- Kraig Adams – travel
- Living Big In A Tiny House*
- Mark Rober – engineering
- Mike Boyd – skill learning
- Our Changing Climate – sustainability
- OverSimplified – history
- Primer – just watch it!
- Primitive Technology – engineering
- Rob Greenfield – food / sustainability
- SmarterEveryDay – science/engineering
*I’ve been obsessed with small, sustainable living for several years so those are a few specific favourite channels.
Food growing
With the weather having been so warm and dry, a good chunk of my exercise has been going to the allotment once (or even twice!) a day to water everything.
The upside is that the plants are doing great, and we’ve been harvesting kale.
We sowed a few more seeds and started growing carrots, spring onions and salad leaves at home in the garden.
There is something so wholesome about growing your own food, if you’ve not given it a go I really recommend it. You can grow things even if you just have a windowsill available.
Time on my phone
Last month I mentioned I was slightly addicted to Mario Kart on my phone. I didn’t play it for a few days and fell out of the habit, so I took the opportunity to delete it. I do believe in relaxing but by the end I found I wasn’t actually enjoying playing that much.
My girlfriend bought Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the Wii, so we’ve been playing a few levels of that as a house every few days. The game came out a decade ago – as you can see I don’t bother keeping with current trends!
Monthly finances
May was my first full month after my academic employment. I got paid for the final week of work I did in April (£817.94) but going forwards I have no dependable monthly income.
Thankfully I’m in no urgent need to earn extra money, but I am exploring new routes to earn money for a few reasons:
- I’m intrigued to see how they work
- Would be nice to earn a bit of money
- If they’re any good I can write about them here and hopefully help some people
Income
Prolific – online science surveys
Last month I mentioned I started trying out Prolific. I’ve done a few more surveys through them, earning another £30 or so, averaging around £10 an hour.
I keep a tab open and get notified of new surveys but there aren’t an abundance of projects on there. The hourly rate for many of them don’t really make it worth my while other than as an experiment to write about here. Nevertheless, some of them are fun and I want to continue trying it before potentially writing a full post about it here.
At the same time as signing up to Prolific, I signed up to PopulusLive and really haven’t been anywhere near as impressed with the platform compared to Prolific.
Kolabtree – technical consultancy
In the final week of May I signed up to Kolabtree. It’s a platform where you bid to do a variety of projects requiring technical input:
I figure this would be an ideal long term way to keep a hand in research skills, working flexibly whilst earning a decent amount.
You can browse all the projects here, which are divided between those for a fixed fee and an hourly rate:
I quickly set up a profile (here) and after a few days someone has reached out inviting me to their project. We’re currently in discussions. It seems like potentially a decent platform so far, I’ll test it out and If I end up using it much I’ll write a full post with my experiences.
June action: browse the projects on Kolabtree, apply for any which are relevant to my skills
Savings
Stocks & Shares
The stock market has (concerningly) been roaring. Despite not having a full time salary coming in my savings this month actually went up by a similar amount to normal.
I’ve had a few people reach out mentioning ethical investing in the last few weeks. There seems to be an appetite for more content about this, so I’ll add a post about my approach in the future.
Premium bonds
For many years, owning premium bonds did not make financial sense. The top monthly prize of £1 million is enticing but in reality the effective interest rate didn’t make it worth entering compared to putting your money elsewhere.
If you like the chance of a large cash prize you would actually have been better off putting your savings in a bank account with a decent rate, withdrawing some of the interest and buying lottery tickets!
Now that interest rates are so low, premium bonds are actually becoming attractive when paired with other investments. The effective interest rate is currently 1.4% though note that this is far from guaranteed. Of course the more money you have in there the more chance you have of winning and achieving this rate.
I’ve put some of my spare cash (which for a while was earning 0% interest) in premium bonds for the time being.
NS&I, who issue premium bonds, also offer income bonds (basically a savings account) which beat all of the easy access highstreet banks at a somewhat depressing rate of 1.16%.
May Summary
I remain really appreciative of being able to split my time as I choose. It has been so fulfilling to work on such a variety of activities. There have been a few teething issues with balancing my time but every week is getting better.
Until I put this post together I didn’t feel completely satisfied with what I had done in May. It felt like I hadn’t done as much as I actually had!
This should probably act as a reminder that unless progress is frequently tracked, you may be unnecessarily giving yourself a hard time. No matter what you’re doing with your time, remember to take a break to enjoy yourself!
June Plan
Along with making progress on my academic paper, playing the piano and anything else which takes my fancy, for June there are a few specifc things I’d like to get done:
- End the month with four blog posts already scheduled for the future
- Finish the Intro to Coding course
- Put together the video content I have of my piano progress
Having three specific goals for the coming month sounds reasonable to me: enough variety to not get bored but few enough to not get overwhelmed. Let’s check back in in a month to see things go!
Do you have goals you want to work towards? Set some goals for the following month too!
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