I look down at my lab journal. It’s been a long, but a good enough day. Got all those glass slides washed and rinsed thoroughly for the experiment I’m planning to start tomorrow. Basically 2 hours of manual labor (there were a lot of slides to wash), but needs to be done, right? So let’s give ourselves a gold star for that (because there’s no telling which way the actual experiment will go as yet, but from my recent failed attempts, doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any kind of star for that work).
So, it’s a little late, but I definitely feel energetic enough. Great! How about finishing that review that you had started?
Yeah, okay, I could do that. In fact, I have been trying to squeeze in a little bit of reading for the past 3-4 weeks, which is just as important as manual labor in science (in fact, more important, as all that “manual labor” is, after all, designed around the literature in your field).
I mean, how hard can it really be, to just take out an hour – an hour – everyday to read up on questions that have been popping in your head for some time now? You still need to develop, like, tons of understanding of your research area – it won’t come to you in your dreams, you know.
Yes, yes, I get it. Just let me get done with this blog post.
I mean, I have been running up and down all day. One moment, you are just supposed to follow protocol, do things like second nature, that you don’t need to think twice about. Next moment, you should slow down and sit down (reading time!) – and take deep breaths (not in the lab, mind you, too much fumes). Pick up the paper that you left off five weeks ago (you know where you left it off, right?) And then focus… F-O-C-U-S… Focus! But sometimes, no matter if you repeat the mantra in your head in all caps or in italics, you just cannot get in the Zone.
In science, you are supposed to juggle these two very different mindsets on a routine. Now you are in the lab, now you are not. Now you are in the lab again. I think when you do it better, when this shifting between these two “personas” becomes more and more seamless, you become better at your thing (after all, theory and practice are supposed to complement each other).
After brute-forcing myself to read for the past few weeks (it’s been 4 weeks and no reading done), I’m not-so-quickly finding out that I need to get to this problem more smartly. Like may be try reading in the morning instead of at the end of the day, when I mostly just end up finding a new way of telling myself to focus, without actually focusing.
Having figured out the theory, let’s see how this comes out in practice.