I made wonderful progress this winter after establishing for myself a set of diverse goals. In this post I’ll set myself up for similar success in the spring with a new collection of things to aim for.
While last quarter my goals fit nicely into a few broad categories, the goals I’ve set up this quarter aren’t as nicely distributed. I’ll present them this time in two classes: “sleep” and “everything else.”
Sleep
I’ve been paying close attention to my sleep habits over the past quarter. It’s worth being especially vigilant, given that I’ve been intentionally meddling with my sleep schedule.
I’ll outline my biphasic sleep program in a forthcoming post,1 but suffice it to say for the moment that my segmented sleep has been a pretty resounding success. While I fully intend to sustain this habit through the quarter, I also want to establish some further structure around my sleep schedule:
- Establish a realistic fixed weeknight bedtime. I failed pretty badly with my (admittedly overly ambitious) 8:30 bedtime as I set out in my original biphasic plan. I want to spend the first week or two of the quarter figuring out a realistic bedtime for weeknights (probably somewhere between 9:30 and 10:30), and then stick to this time for the rest of the quarter.
- Enforce a weeknight bedtime routine. Last quarter’s weeknight routine goal was also a no-go. I expect that with a fixed bedtime, however, such a ritual will be easier to maintain.
Everything else
What follows is a grab bag of miscellaneous goals, spurred either by failures from last quarter or from new ideas that I’d like to put into action:
- Set up a regular fitness routine. I had something of an ad-hoc fitness schedule last quarter, with gym visits on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday and an occasional outdoor run on Saturday. I want to maintain this good habit, of course, and perhaps formalize the times a bit more. Again, I’ll need to live through the first week of the quarter before I can determine the days when it’d be easiest to fit in these activities.
- Revive some of my foreign languages. I’m going to postpone my ambitious German plans for the quarter, and instead focus on reviving both my French and Spanish. I realized during this past week’s break just how dearly I missed using my French, and wish to give it more of my time for learning benefit and fun this quarter. Likewise, I’ve neglected Spanish recently, and I think it deserves more attention.2
- Talk to people. More specifically, I want to become more active in my academics. Making a deliberate effort to connect with my professors and instructors will allow me to derive much more benefit from the classes in which I’m enrolled.3 I especially want to get involved with the instructors in my classes this quarter on natural language understanding and introductory economics.
- Keep working on intentional social activities. This goal yielded some enormously positive improvements last quarter, and I’d like to keep vigilant in my search for the best ways to be social: those that best help me relate to and bond with others, and establish mutually beneficial relationships.
And here comes my third quarter of classes:
- CS 110: Principles of Computer Systems
- CS 202: Law for Computer Science Professionals
- CS 224U: Natural Language Understanding
- ECON 1: Principles of Economics
I’m really excited to see how these goals and these classes unfold. Onward, to progress!