This year, I’ve reached a subtle but important transition point in my academic life. Up until now, I’ve mainly been taking classes, which usually means that my work came in chunks due at regular intervals, whether they are readings, problem sets, or essays.
This meant that the main way I kept track of all of that was through calendars and to-do lists with deadlines. For instance, I used Google Calendar’s tasks heavily, which lined up the to-do lists with my
By contrast, from here on out (at least while I’m in grad school), my academic work consists primarily of open-ended tasks like “investigate this research question.” Those sorts of tasks often don’t easily admit a characterization into “done” and “not done” or have deadlines. So I needed a new system.
After trying out a couple different ideas, I’ve come across something I find I really like. Here’s the idea: I plot all the various things I have to do on two axes. The first axis is how important or urgent that task is. The second axis is how enjoyable, fun or rewarding it is. Earlier, I posted a cruder version, but here’s what that graph currently looks like:
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The Christian Rationalist 