Goals for Winter 2014

I wrote in yesterday’s quarterly review about living more intentionally. I’d like to begin to follow through over the next few days by establishing public goals over two time horizons: quarterly goals1 and yearly goals. The inspiration for making these goals public comes from Peter Hurford, whose detailed goal posts and in-depth public progress reviews show just how much benefit can come from such a process.

I’ll begin by setting several goals for the winter 2014 quarter, which begins in January. Come the end of winter quarter, I’ll sit down and review publicly my progress on the goals set in this post. [Update from March 2014: see my review in my quarterly reflections.]

Timeboxing

I’ve been maintaining a timeboxing practice since early November. I’ve been pretty rigorous about it, scheduling a large majority of my day ahead of time and working hard to follow through on the tasks I set out for myself. The habit has made me wonderfully productive and opened up2 lots of free time for reading, exploration, social activities, etc.

I’ve benefited so much from this practice that I think it merits its coverage in its own post. I’ll likely cover this soon, describing the exact implementation I am using and perhaps giving an analysis using this data of how I spend my time.

In the coming quarter, I want to put even more trust in these timeboxes by accomplishing the following:

  1. Maintain an early-morning timeboxing ritual. I’ve slacked on some days and left myself to timebox on-the-go, scheduling activities only an hour or less before they actually happen. I find this has a significant negative effect on my productivity, since I have a much less clear vision of what I want to accomplish once I’m already in the rush of things during the day.
  2. Get better at allocating realistic boxes. Too often I found that I scheduled too optimistically, expecting myself to finish this essay in a half hour or that reading in 15 minutes. I would then fall behind in my schedule and end up 1) having to push every event forward manually or 2) abandoning the schedule altogether and recreating something entirely different. This second point is especially harmful (see previous paragraph).
  3. Adhere more rigorously to the schedule. Assuming that I manage to allocate time realistically, I can use timeboxing for yet another purpose in combating Parkinson’s law. I want to work hard to finish tasks within the time bounds I set for myself. This goal is measureable in the number of times that I end up changing my schedule per day. I’d like to commit to changing my schedule three times or fewer per day.

Sleep

An inevitable issue for a college student, yes? I’ve been surprised, actually, that regularly getting a healthy amount of sleep as a Stanford student is not difficult at all.3 I’d still like to work on the following less absolutely crucial issues, though, with regards to sleep:

  1. Fix weekday wake-up time. I know from past experience that I can gain a lot by simply ensuring the time I have available in the morning is constant.4 It’s much easier in such an environment to establish good habits and rituals. I’m considering something around 6:00 right now—this is just a bit left of my mean weekday wake-up time over the past quarter.
  2. Establish an early weekday night routine. This routine will most likely be centered around reading in bed, a practice which I unfortunately let go in my first quarter. Given my experience over the past quarter, I don’t think it’d be reasonable to establish a strict bedtime,5 but I’d like to follow the same routine whenever I do choose to go to bed each night.

Social activities

Finding a work-play balance at Stanford has been by far the most difficult point of adjustment. Timeboxing and pre-commitment with peers has done a lot to help me counter akrasia, but I have also found that these rigid practices can clash with social life.6 I want to think hard about how to fashion my social time so that a) I can be the best companion possible and b) and I can derive the most benefit from my social activities. In short, I want to be just as intentional about social time as I am about life in general. In this spirit, I establish the following goals:

  1. Increase the value of each moment of social time. The solution here has to do with picking the proper times, places, and manners of social interaction. I need to be less shy about stepping out of long, drifting hallway conversations and seek out better opportunities to bond with friends.
  2. Reduce total social time. With an increase in the per-moment value of social interaction I can thus decrease the time input without putting anyone at a disadvantage.7 I should schedule social time just as I do work (currently the regions I leave un-boxed are dominated by social time, wandering, etc.).

Language learning

As is evident from my plans concerning German for 2014, language learning will form no small part of my activities in the coming year. Some of the techniques that I’d like to deploy have been bouncing around in my head for a while and I’d like to give them a shot. In order to not bind myself to them for an entire year, though, I’m listing them as quarterly commitments instead. If they end up working well, I’ll include them as part of the yearly commitment.

  1. Post video or audio of speaking practice. This will make me feel more accountable for my own progress, and hopefully help spur me to keep the language practice going for an entire year.
  2. Shadow. I may well not find a good speaking partner for several weeks / months, and so to ensure that I work hard on pronunciation, prosody, etc. I would like to shadow using Assimil content.

I’m only more excited now that this post is finished. I have a lot of personal progress to make with these goals this quarter, alongside some really exciting classes:

and a more routine one:

This is a pretty heavy load (by Stanford standards!), and so I might end up dropping one or multiple classes. We’ll see how things go in a few weeks!

  1. Stanford quarters, that is. The academic calendar here is split into four ten-week quarters (winter, spring, summer, and fall), each buffered by vacations. ↩

  2. Made visible, rather—it was always there! ↩

  3. YMMV. I know students here who regularly find it necessary to pull all-nighters or stay up far too late working. I am guessing this may be simply a result of overscheduling or of time mismanagement. ↩

  4. In practice, this will need to be fudged a bit. I use Sleep Cycle to wake up at whatever point within a 30-minute range is best for my health, so I’ll be fixing a brief time range rather than a single point. ↩

  5. I’m pretty certain a flexible bedtime and fixed wake-up time is the best way to go (again, though, YMMV). Thanks Steve Pavlina for the tip (see “How to Become an Early Riser”). ↩

  6. Everything is spontaneous and last-minute in the college-dorm social sphere. More spontaneous and more last-minute than you could imagine. ↩

  7. Update (late December 2013): in retrospect, this seems a bit naive to treat socializing as some sort of deterministic function whose output can be held constant by reversing its inputs. I’d rather state my intent here more generally as reducing the quantity but increasing the quality of the time I spend being social. ↩