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A Regra dos 3

Essa ideia não é minha, não é revolucionária, mas faz muito parte da minha vida e precisa ser compartilhada:

Faça tudo aos três

Este texto explica em mais detalhes, mas foca muito na escrita e em apresentações: quando for fazer uma apresentação, concentre-se na três ideias principais; ou quando for escrever, estruture em introdução, desenvolvimento e conclusão.

Mas há mais exemplos da Regra dos 3:

  1. Toda semana, escolha 3 metas e todo dia, escolha 3 tarefas mais importantes (MIT); se o dia/semana for caótico e você conseguir cumprir as 3 MITs, o dia foi um sucesso (para mergulhar mais nisso, leia Getting Results the Agile Way
  2. Quando você ouvir falar de uma tecnologia/livro/filme pela terceira vez, é sinal de que não apenas um hype e vale a pena ir atrás (eu vi essa dica em algum lugar, mas não consigo de jeito nenhum achar a fonte
  3. Quando for sentar para fazer um lote de atividades mundanas de uma lista enorme, faça 3 itens e deixe o resto para outro dia (3 voltas em um sábado de manhã, 3 contas a agendar o pagamento, 3 emails a mandar).

Experimente a Regra dos 3 e me diga aqui em baixo se isso não mudou a sua vida.

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Can I work only 40 hours as an academic?

Prof. Marco Mello has published (in Portuguese) some advice for people considering entering graduate school including how “graduate school is not a 9-to-5 job”, and that good doctoral students usually work way more than 40 hours a week.

Similar advice was given by Prof. Matt Might:

Ph.D. school is neither school nor work.

Ph.D. school is a monastic experience. And, a jealous hobby.

Solving problems and writing up papers well enough to pass peer review demands contemplative labor on days, nights and weekends.

Reading through all of the related work takes biblical levels of devotion.

Ph.D. school even comes with built-in vows of poverty and obedience.

The end brings an ecclesiastical robe and a clerical hood.

Students that treat Ph.D. school like a 9-5 endeavor are the ones that take 7+ years to finish, or end up ABD.]

Although I still haven’t completed my doctoral studies, and I greatly value advice from people who are more experienced than I am, I tend to disagree with this sort of argument. My views are more aligned with another Professor, Cal Newport; he argues that you should mantain a regular 9-5 schedule, and you can accomplish this by:

  • Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
  • Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
  • Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
  • Stop procrastinating.

From observing all kind of people working around me, I’ve come to the conclusion that working hours mean very little. If someone maintains two-hour lunch breaks, plus one-hour coffee breaks, plus 2-3 meetings per day, plus endless sessions to process email, he might as well have worked 12 hours in a day without producing any value. On the other hand, if I work say 7 hours per day (as is usual for me, and without including the lunch break), but am able to keep two sessions of 2.5 hours each of intense concentration in an important task (like programming, reading and writing papers, studying some topic), haven’t I worked enough?

Additionally, for a graduate student, work is a subtle definition. If I leave the lab somewhat early to go for a run, and in my practice I listen to some podcast that gives me an idea to try at work on the next day, am I working or not?

I may only “work”, sitting down at my desk, for 7-8 hours each day, but I am constantly thinking about work, about how can I better write some section of some paper, about what does that theory mean, about some result I got from a simulation.

And lastly, there are non-work things that help me to work. I spend almost one hour each day praying and reading the Bible; I could work during that time, but doing this instead makes more calm and more focused than if I simply “worked”. Same for exercising on the evenings, or relaxing while watching a movie on the weekends.

Am I wrong?

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Adjust your plans

Expectation: come to the lab, work like crazy for two hours, have lunch, organize some stuff, work like crazy for two more hours, attend a meeting, workday done.

Reality: come to the lab, turn on the computer, wait over one hour for Windows Update.

Lessons learned:

  • I should always have printed papers to read in my backpack, so I can always work offline

  • Is it possible to carry my laptop with me all the time?

  • I had a plan, but the plan is worthless now: after the update is done, I will do a new plan. Eisenhower: “Plans are nothing, planning is everything” (see also this video by Thomas Frank)

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Why learn GTD

2017 was a mixed year for me. For 6 months, I lived in Denmark during an external stay for my doctoral studies, and this experience was wonderful. Professionally, I became a colleague of researchers I truly admire, complemented my numerical studies with some important experimental work, re-evaluated my work ethics. On the personal side, I tried to learn Danish while also practicing my English, ate a lot of bread, met some new friends, and experienced of the most exciting cities in the world in the wonderful company of my wife.

The preparation, however, was an emotional hell. For starters, me and my wife had visa issues. I also missed an opportunity to book accomodation months before going, and when I finally found a place, I missed the deadline for the security deposit for our new home (luckily there was no consequence). Since 2016, I had been trying to follow a “simple” productivity system, inspired by the works of Kourosh Dini, with some daily routines and review practices, but clearly it was not enough. I am a huge fan of Dini, and I follow his work closelyto incorporate his ideas about creativity in my own work, but I needed something more suitable to lots of projects with multiple deadlines.

And that’s the story of why I decided to revisit the productivity classic Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen, whose first edition I read in 2009. I bought the new edition just before traveling to Denmark, to make this period an opportunity to learn to be better organized. During my daily train commutes, I read this book very actively, taking lots of notes and trying to implement its practices. My period abroad was an excelent experimentation opportunity.

I will use this blog to document my GTD setup and what I’ve learned from the book. I’m by no means a GTD expert; this is a pure example of showing my work of reading Getting Things Done analytically. I did become a lot more organized and productive in this process. I’ve already mentioned my great experience there, but in more specific terms, while I was in Denmark I accomplished a few things:

  • Published the first journal paper from my doctoral studies
  • Submit one conference paper and have it accepted
  • Prepared one poster and one talk for another conference
  • Travelled with my wife to several countries, after my study period ended
  • Managed to host my family and some friends as they visited Copenhagen
  • Participated in two bike trips around the city
  • Completed my first street run

In addition to that, I kept regular contact with my family in Brazil, continued to work in my numerical studies, attended Mass regularly and hang out with friends often. The GTD method was essential to that, and now I hope to help others. This series is a not a substitute for the book; it´s mainly intended for people who have read the book and need some practical examples, or for people considering to read the book and who would like to know a little more about the method.

To understand GTD, there are three fundamental principles:

1. Learn to manage open loops

The GTD method is a productivity system. It tells you how you should manage your projects and tasks, with the basic goal of higher producivity with lower stress. According to Allen, productivity is simply a ratio of outputs and inputs: how much you can accomplish (in terms of results) for a given investment of time and energy. Being productive is valuable for two reasons:

  • For fixed input, you accomplish more or perform a better and more complete work, in the same time it would take to do a poor job if you were not productive
  • For fixed output, you need less time to conclude something you have to but don’t want to do

The challenge is being productive without the stress and overwhelm of trying to do too much. The first basic argument from the book is that the key to being productive and stress-free is managing open loops. You feel anxious about your work when you do not control it. Some piece of information comes to you: a worry about a family member, a request from your boss, the fact that something is broken at your home, an email about a paymemt due. You know you should do something about it, but you don’t know what. In addition, you have unfinished projects: a report, a party to organize, a talk to prepare.

Keeping these open loops on your head is a bad idea. You have no guarantee that you will remember to do the appropriate things at the right time, as you cannot control what you remember and what you don’t (try it). And these worries take energy out of your mind, preventing you from doing good work. The goal of the GTD method is, in its own terms, to help you engage with your work, achieving the state of flow, the state of play as Kourosh Dini calls it in his texts. In a sense, the GTD method is all about creating conditions for deep work . The GTD term for this is mind like water: your mind is so relaxed that, when requested, it reacts in a proportional way, but then goes back to equilibrium. When you are working, you work, and don’t think of anything else.

The core of the method is to provide a system where you store information, ideas and worries out of your mind, and to develop habits that allow you to not worry about open loops. This was what caused most of my problems: I had lots of deadlines (for submitting the visa application, for mailing documents, for paying fees) that were not properly recorded, and I often had to act in a hurry when it was almost too late. I also was underutilizing the concept of contexts (as we’ll see in later texts), the notion that I can do different things in different places; I would maintain a list of sequential tasks and would postpone some of them until others were completed, when in reality I could do some things while waiting for others.

2. Start bottom-up

The second main argument from the book is that the most effective way to manage open-loops is bottom-up: first manage your day-to-day actions and commitments, and only them re-evaluate your commitments and higher priorities.

This is not exactly common sense, and is against “modern” advices on productivity. Most gurus advise you to do something like a “personal mission statement”, and then to only work on goals that align with this mission. However, decision-making takes time on itself (as discussed in Kourosh Dini’s excellent Workflow Mastery) , and it’s impossible to find time to important things like this in the midst of a daily chaos.

Based primarily on his experience as a coach, David Allen states that first you have to be able to manage daily activities. If you have to do a report for next week, you need to take care of that. If you have a meeting in an hour, you have to be there in time, even if it does not align with your personal values. However, if you learn to be productive, you start to take less time to do your work (as discussed in the first principle above) and to be less stressed, and it is with this energy and time that you attack on your higher levels of focus.

Fancy techniques, trendy apps and productivity hacks don’t work because they don’t give you more time — or worse, they may help you processing your email in less time, but then you will want to fill this time with new responsibilities (something I experience myself all the time, and I bet most readers do too) and then new worries. What we need is, according to the author, a systematic approach of managing these worries.

Another important proposition, related to this argument, is that the key to manage open-loops is to manage actions: if something is on your mind, then you must find what your should do, physically, to resolve that loop. If I’m worried about a birthday party, then I need to put the date on my calendar and then a reminder to buy the gift; when the time comes, all I have to do is go to the party. We’ll talk about this concept of next actions in future posts.

To summarize: if you have an open-loop in your head, draining energy, you have to act on it. As you learn to do this, you begin to take control of your days. Then, you can take time and energy to analyze your long-term goals and values. Doing that in the reverse order may only create more worries.

3. To close open loops, apply the 5 steps

We’ve already established that, to be productive and stress-free, we have to manage open-loops, so that worries don’t pop in our heads when we are trying to engage in the work. But how do we manage these open loops?

David Allen states that there 5 habits or processes that you have to master and apply to every piece of information that comes to you. The author argues that they are “commom sense, systematized”, and are the result of years in coaching successful individuals. Personally, I think that the examples the author gives to show that these steps are “natural” a little bit forced, and he is trying to prove the conclusion he wants. The GTD method is used for many years and many people have already proved that the method work; we don’t need to fit it into a precise explanation of how our mind works.

The 5 steps of the GTD method to control the workflow are:

  1. Capture
  2. Clarify
  3. Organize
  4. Review
  5. Engage

To recap: open loops are created with stuff (to use a term from the book) that comes to your attention. Some other examples:

  • You’re reminded by the newspaper that it’s tax season
  • Any colleague request you to do something
  • Your wife kindly suggests it’s time to visit her family again
  • You feel ill and should see a doctor
  • You receive an email about a job opportunity
  • You get work assignments after an important meeting
  • You need to study for an exam that was just announced

For every item like this, you apply the 5 steps, defining concrete things to do, until you close all loops.

In the next posts, I will detail how I set up my GTD system and how I implement these habits.

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A Year Without Coffee

In 2017, I spent 9 months without drinking coffee.

I admit that I cheated a little bit in the title, since 9 months is not a year, but 2017 felt like the year without coffee for me. During Lent, I abstained myself from coffee as a form of penance; and a few months later I chose to stay coffee-free for the rest of the year as part of a religious promise.

Before starting to write this post, I saw that there are a lot of texts in the Internet with identical titles and themes. I chose not to read any of them; what follows are simply my impressions.

Drinking coffee is a habit

This may sound obvious, but my strongest impression is this: what I missed the most was not the taste of coffee, but the ritual of drinking it.

I quickly got used to drinking a cup of tea in the morning and right after lunch. But this was when I was by myself; it was particularly hard to watch my family drink the usual espresso after our meals, or to not join my wife for a nice warm coffee in Copenhagen cafés.

From what I read about habits and addictions, dealing with these triggers is the first step in managing good and bad habits, and my experiene proves this.

Coffee ≠ caffein

The worst side effect I expected was worsening my ability to focus, or feeling drowsy all the time. I was particularly worried about this because I started this experiment right before going to Denmark for my PhD external stay. However, by drinking black tea regularly (in its various forms, like English Breakfast and Earl Grey), I managed to feel almost the same stimulating effects as regular coffee would provide me.

As I said in previous posts, my period in Danish land was very productive. Abstaining from coffee did not affect this, nor did it affect my sleep. I don’t usually sleep very well, mainly because of anxiety issues, and trading coffee for tea did not change anything.

Religion is a great motivation

During preparation for going to Denmark, many things started to go wrong, and I became pretty desperate; I then prayed and prayed and promised that, if God provided myself with the solution to my problems, I would stop drinking coffee for the whole year. Because of His Infinite Grace, He came to my rescue, and so I kept my promise.

Every time I felt the urge to drink coffee I reminded myself of my motivation, and the desire quickly vanished. This was not a game bet or some joke; this was a minuscule action to thank God for the incredible experience He provided me.

And for Him, I would do it again.

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What to do on moments of despair

Despair, noun:

utter loss of hope

We all feel a little bit of despair some times. I’m not talking about “I’ll fail my test tomorrow” problems, but real life situations. You discover you have a health problem, someone in your family dies, your partner loses her job. Or it can be something really small; you simply did something wrong and you feel terrible about it.

What should you do on moments of despair?

I have many defects: I complain way too much, I’m too strict with my routines, I’m not as polite with strangers as I’d wish. But I have one great quality: in moments of despair, I don’t resort to drinking, or gambling, or any other addiction. My first instinct when I feel really, really bad, is to pray.

It might seem strange for a nerd/productivity blogger like me to write this kind of post, but I’m feeling a great urge to share this message. My main goal with this blog is to help others, and there are times when an app, a book or a time-management technique won’t do it. And besides, if you really want to see a link between spirituality and productivity, consider that your mind is your work tool, and hence everything that you do to keep yourself in a state of calm is beneficial. Despair is not.

It’s been recently the one-year anniversary of my grandmother’s death. Prayer was fundamental in that time, because it made me realize how little control I had: apart from yelling at the doctors to do more to help her (which I’m glad I didn’t), there was absolutely nothing I could do to prevent her death. She was old, she got sick, and then she was gone. But she had lived such a wonderful and fulfilling life, so her mission on Earth was accomplished. Despair would not help with anything, so I simply accepted the fact and became in peace.

One of the advantages of living abroad and attending Mass in another language is learning a new array of songs, and recently I listened to a wonderful piece called Lift up your hands. The central message summarizes what I’m trying to say with this little text: there is hope! There was someone who came down from heaven and teached us that God is not there to punish us, but to love us unconditionally. He will always be on our side.

So my advice for this post is this: when you feel bad, talk to God. It should be obvious by now that I’m Catholic, but I would guess that this message applies to other religions. Open yourself. Try this: write a letter to Him, stating everything you are feeling. If you’ve failed with someone, write an apology as if you were talking to this person, but asking first God for forgiveness. If a tragedy happened, be humble enough to realize there’s nothing you can do, and then ask for help. And in situations like this, stop thinking that you don’t deserve this, and that you should be in a better position — we know nothing about why these things happen! Open the Bible and see how many people came to Jesus asking for help, and how many times He replied: “I want you to be free/healed/resurrected” — not because these people deserved anything (we simply can’t know that), but because of God’s infinite goodness and forgiveness.

Believe me, realizing our smallness can be liberating: no matter what happens, you simply hold the hand of God and move on. Soon you will see that there are things you can do, and you begin to attack the problem as a capable human being, without being consumed by despair. But the first step might be to pray.

And of course, if the problem seems too big, and if praying doesn’t help with anything, you might need medical assistance, so don’t hesitate in seeking it.

One more thing.

I talked about opening yourself to God when you feel bad, but please don’t forget to say thanks when that feeling vanishes. Your wife got a new job? Excellent; now realize that’s also the fruit of God goodness and pray accordingly. I find chanting Psalms to be particularly useful in moments of joy.

If you are Christian, and even more if you are Catholic, refer to your local Parish to see if they offer Life and Prayer Workshops (available in many countries), where you learn how to pray and talk to God in these various situations. I was attending these workshops when my grandmother passed way, and I don’t know how I would react if it weren’t for them. These are truly life-changing experiences. I cannot recommend them enough.

Speaking from personal experience, the moments when I’m feeling better are the moments where I am the most intimate to God. And that is more important than talking about goals.

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How I consistently accomplish my goals

When I was in school, I was the standard nerd looser: fat, never made it with the ladies, bad grades in sports and good grades in everything else. In my free time, I’d rather spend time playing videogames alone than with other people or doing any form of physical activities.

Fast-forward many years, and a few weeks ago I completed my first street race, successfully running 5 km in under 30 min:

Fábio Fortkamp finishing a race

What allowed me to do this is that completing a 5 km race was of one of my goals for this year, and I’ve developed a system to effectively review and achieve my goals.

This post is about this system.

Why goal setting is important

I’m slightly obsessed with goal setting because this forces me to focus time on things that are important. It’s very easy to spend time working on whatever seems urgent or even interesting right now, without getting long term value out of these activities.

As a practical example, I love studying programming, and I often fantasize about droping many of my projects and dedicating myself to studying open CS courses. However, being a world-renowmed programmer isn’t one of my goals, while being the best researcher I can be is. Studying programming in depth may help, but I have to balance this with other important skills, like keeping up with the literature, writing quality papers, studying theory; taking time out of these activities to dedicate myself only to programming, as interesting as it sounds, might be actually detrimental to my goals. Hence, I resist such urges and remind myself that I have more important things to do.

Music is another example of activity that was almost completely eliminated from my life as part of these exercises. Whenever I brainstorm my goals, “being a musician” never comes out. I learned the keyboard and the guitar when I was younger, but I can’t justify any time invested into it. Same thinking as with programming: it would certainly be fun re-learning to play the guitar, or even learning a new instrument, but this requires time to be extracted from more valuable activities. Having a solid lifelong relationship with my wife is top-priority, so I’d rather spend time on activies that help with that (such as cooking nice dinners, watching movies, traveling). I can also exercise my creativity by reading and writing — “being a writer” is definitely a goal of mine!

Routines to do reviews

My system for tracking goals comes from three main resources:

  1. The book Vida Organizada, by Thais Godinho (in Portuguese; an English translation of the title would be Organized Life). I was already familiar with David Allen’s GTD method, but this opened my mind to a top-down approach of setting up projects: first, think about what you to accomplish in life; then, break this vision into things you can accomplish this year, this month, this week, until you can define day-to-day projects that will ultimately make you achieve the broader goals
  2. Getting Results the Agile Way, a poorly-written book with a strong emphasis on simplifying task lists. David Allen advises against setting priorities for a day or week because they will inevitably change, but this book teached me to do it anyway in the simplest form: for any time frame, select 3 main goals, and work first on that.
  3. The work of Kourosh Dini in general, especially his emphasis on routines.

As I will describe, these goals are set, tracked and updated regularly, and instead of just wishing to do so I actually have calendar appointments. I have a special calendar in Google Calendar named Habits, and I have periodical all-day appointments that serve as reminders to what I would like to do in certain times of the year. This will become clearer in the next section.

Goals by horizons

Broad goals

The first time I seriously did the exercise of imagining myself when I’m 100 years old was after I read the Vida Organizada book, and it was the beginning of my goal-setting system. Thais is a GTD master trainer, and in the GTD system we have horizons of focus:

  • Life principles, things that we want to cultivate through our entire life
  • Vision, a scenario in which we see ourselves in the span of 5-10 years
  • Goals, things we want to accomplish in the next 2-3 years

So the first step in setting goals is doing a giant brainstorming and writing down your principles, your vision and your goals. In your deathbed, what do you want to have accomplished, so that you will have lived a happy life? And to do that, how should you be in 5 years? And to do that, what must you do in the next two years?

I like mind maps for this kind of exercise, and I use MindMeister for creating mind maps. I like the free form of brainstorming these broader goals, and I agree with Thais that it’s an apt analogy that we can use mind maps to map our life. My broader goals are reviewed at my Annual Review, which is a routine I like to do by December 27-28th every year. I open this mind map, I check to see if I agree with these principles and vision, and I update my short-term goals. For instance, in 2016 I set up my two-year goals, and so in the end of 2017 I will track how these goals arere going and what should I change in my life to really accomplish them by the end of 2018.

Mind map in Mind Meister for tracking goals

The important thing to distinguish these broader goals from other levels is that are very free and “dream”-like. There is nothing SMART about them, and they are just things I want to do: defend my PhD thesis, get married, buy a house, start a family, become a published author.

Things become more specific when I define my annual goals — which brings me to the next section.

Annual goals

As part of my Annual Review, I sit down and think about long and short term goals. To think of goals in increments in two years gives me plenty of time to plan; however, as the year begins, we can break these goal into more manageable things. We all read things about how New Year’s Resolutions are bound to fail because they are too vague and are not followed by a specific plan; but I still like the ritual of thinking about year that is beginning.

That’s why I’ve adopted a simplification: I simply set 3 outcomes for the year, based on my two-year goals. For instance: when I did this exercise in 2016, I realized that in two years I want to complete my PhD; this is very broad thing that can’t be done in one year, but what can I do that will help with that? Well, I can aim for publishing at least four papers in journals or conferences this year (current status: one published, one accepted for a conference, one with my supervisors for corrections and another one being planned).

Because annual goals are much more simple, straight to the point, and actually accomplishable, I’ve being using Todoist for this sort of thing. I have a “project” called Outcomes for the year, in which I have 3 tasks represeting my desired outcomes. I have to confess: I felt an enourmous pleasure checking out the box for my task/goal of “Completing a 5 km race”.

My Todoist Projects for tracking goals

In addition to the Annual Review, I like to track these outcomes (together with the broader goals) in a Season Review, which I do quarterly. While in the annual review I dream big, in the season review I mainly check on things and plan accordingly. I might even update my yearly outcomes. For instance, in my last seasonal review I noticed that I had an annual goal that was completely out of sync with my current life, and so I changed to something that I actually can do this year and that still contributes to my life vision.

And that is one key to this whole system: you cannot be afraid of changing goals and questioning your original plans. They are a map, not a strict algorithm. For instance, completing the race was not related to any life principles, but it was something I really wanted to do this year. Upon reflection, I realized that being fit and healthy is an important value to me, and thus my mind map was updated accordingly.

One last thing about annual goals: I think it’s important to include multiple areas of focus. I’m in a phase where I really need to focus on my career — I’m entering my last year as a PhD and I’m in the middle of an external stay in Denmark — so two of my goals are professional-related. But I included one very personal goal — namely, completing the race — to make sure I advance on other projects as well. If I already had a more stable job, I would possibly include other areas: family, home and personal projects etc.

Monthly goals

This is an area where I still need to improve. Similar to my annual outcomes, I like to set monthly outcomes, but many times I’ve encountered a problem: a month is at the same time too long, so I feel I can do a lot of things (there are 25 working days!), and too short, so I’m always a little bit stressed when the month is ending and I haven’t done all I wanted. But anyways, here is my system.

Some day in the last week of a month, I sit down and plan the next month in my Monthly Review. I look at my calendar and my list of projects, to see what needs to be completed; being in the academic world the critical deadlines are papers to submit to conferences and presentations to deliver at various events, but I also need to advance on things what will reflect on the conclusion of my thesis in 2018. I brainstorm all outcomes, answering this question: “if the next month ends, what would make me feel like it was a good month?”.

Inspired by the previously mentioned Getting Results the Agile Way, I’m experimenting with Must, Should, Could priorization, but I don’t think it’s very effective. The important thing is that I have a list in Todoist called Outcomes for the month (see figure above) in which I list all this monthly goals, and because a month has that weird length I cannot reduced to 3 outcomes.

The monthly goals are reviewed weekly, during my Weekly Review. Based on my monthly goals, I set up my…

Weekly goals

At this point, I find a week the perfect time frame to plan things. I already know what I can accomplish in a week, because I know my habits and I don’t have a crazy schedule with lots of appointments. The Weekly Review is a centerpiece of the GTD method and I will not go into its details in this post; my point here is that planning the next week is how my close my weekly review and consequently how I finish my work week. When I’m done with that, I feel ready to freshly start a new week.

Based on my monthly outcomes, I set up 3 goals for the next week; and every day, I work on projects that will contribute with these three goals. If the week goes extremely well and I accomplish these goals before Friday, I set up new ones. In addition, what seems important on Monday may have to give room to other things on Wednesday. The main point of this system is to avoid a situation where on a given day I have a laundry list of things to do, but I have no idea which are the most important. Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

Also, because I may have multiple monthly goals, I may alternate between them in different weeks. For instance, if I have several professional outcomes to accomplish, some financial problems to solve and other personal projects, then on the first week I will choose three of them and try to advance the most I can do; on the following week, I will start attacking other outcomes. And naturally, if an outcome has a strict deadline (like submitting a paper), I will insert next actions with due dates in Todoist, and then even if it’s not one of my weekly outcomes I will deal with that on the required day.

For reasons of habit, my weekly goals are listed in an Evernote note, where I maintain a rough plan for the week, including a very basic meal plan and some miscellaneous notes.

Conclusions

So there you have it. Every year, every quarter, every month and every week I set goals for the next period. I am so serious about this that I have calendar events to remind myself to do these reviews at certain days:

  • Every year, in my Annual Review, I think about my short- and long-term goals, and I set 3 outcomes for the year to come
  • Every three months, when the season changes, I do my Season Review, where I check to see how my goals and yearly outcomes are going and if I need to change something
  • Every month, I do my Monthly Review, where I decide my monthly outcomes that will lead to my annual goals
  • Every week I do the Weekly Review, where I actually manage my day-to-day projects, focusing on three weekly goals that will contribute to the higher-levels goals. Ultimately, every day I focus on advancing on three projects, and because of all these reviews I can be sure that they are not a waste of time.

If you don’t believe me, take the advice from CGP Grey: reviewing goals is the key to a successful life.

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How to get compliments from someone you admire

(Nota: esse texto está em inglês como parte de um experimento. Por favor, digam-me nos comentários o que acharam)

I had been postponing this task for months. It’s weird, since one of the things I was most excited to do here in Denmark was to be able to talk in person to him, but my shyness was taking control of me, as usual. But I finally sent an email:

Hey, I’ve got some ideas I would like to discuss with you, if you have time.

And he had time. He, in the case, is one of the researchers I admire the most in the world. Since beginning my PhD, I’ve devoured his thesis, I’ve read all his papers, and I even wrote a paper myself largely based on his work. He is one of the definitive references in our field — magnet design for magnetic refrigeration, if you want to know —, and every publication in this area for the last decade cites one or many of his works.

But more important, he is such a nice person.

So here I was, talking to him. I have spent the last two years working on my own magnet design and my own theories. I combined his ideas with concepts from one of his students, plus some other works, and I devised a design methodology that, I believe, has great potential. But I needed his opinion.

He was impressed. Multiple times he said: “I’ve never thought of that” and “Very nice work”. Within minutes we were brainstorming ideas for a joint publication.

I’m a mechanical engineer. Until two years ago I didn’t know anything about magnetism, and now I am talking to an expert in magnet design as equal. How did I get to this point?

The answer, of course, is deep work. Hard, distraction-free work.

One of the greatest insights of my proposed methodology (which needs much testing and is far from finished, I should emphasize) was taken from the thesis of the student of him I talked about. I spent months where I was dedicating whole days to reading it, page after page multiple times, until I could finally understand all concepts. And when I was done, I had to re-teach myself Java, and then spend some other months studying the API from the program we use to do the magnet simulations, so that so I could implement all these ideas. And then I had to test, and fix bugs, and create plots.

Progress was slow, and many times I felt I was actually wasting time. I should be just using other language, or doing the simulations manually, just generating results faster. But if I had done that, I wouldn’t be here, getting compliments from someone I admire.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll repeat: PhD students cannot be afraid of deep diving into theories, even the most fundamental of them. Two years ago I had to buy a (undergraduate level) book on electromagnetism, so that I could understand how currents generate magnetic fields, and how to calculate them — I even did the exercises! Yes, it is a challenge, because we all have meetings, presentations, papers, reports, deadlines. But in the same way as you make time to prepare for a meeting and other time-sensitive things, you have to make time for studying hard things. Study productivity, wake up earlier, stop working with one eye on WhatsApp, live a healthier lifestyle (so that you have the energy to work throughout the day).

Believe me, it’s worth it.