Without further ado, here are my personal and professional goals for 2012:
1. Have a special "Date Night" with my wife at least once a month.
My parents celebrated their 40th Anniversary last month, and while this is certainly a laudable accomplishment, I wouldn't exactly say that they've experienced 40 years of wedded-bliss. Everyone involved recognizes that while they were busy being two excellent parents to their 8 children, they were pretty terrible spouses to each other. Nowadays, they hardly talk, and when they do they incessantly take little swipes at one another.
I desperately don't want to see that happen in my marriage, too. Relationships, like everything else is life, take lots of time and effort to maintain. Making a conscious effort to spend time keeping our relationship healthy is an investment worth making.
I had thought my best option was to sit down and slog through online tutorials in either BioPython or BioPerl. However, I recently signed up for a guided eductional program called Code Year. Each week, CodeAcademy emails you a new lesson, and you click through it when you have time and learn at your own pace. I've gone through the first few simple lessons, and it seems to be targeted at true beginners, which is unlike many of the other tutorials I've tried in the past.
4. Write 1,000 words a week.
This is a surprisingly difficult one for me, because although I genuinely enjoy the fruits of arduous writing, I get ridiculously nervous about actually sitting down and putting words on the page. I somehow got it in my head that if every sentence I write isn't the most beautifully crafted phrase ever to grace the English language, then I don't want to write it at all. This posed a major problem while I was writing up my thesis, as you can imagine.
I realize, of course, that this fear is irrational and absurd, and that the only way to improve my writing and find my stylistic voice is to practice, practice, practice. I'd like to say I want to write 1,000 words a week about science, which is the one topic I'd really like to get better at discussing. However, writing about science, especially other people's science, greatly exacerbates my stress level. As I become a better writer, I'll write more about things I really care about. Until then, I'll write about whatever else I am interested in--as long as it gives me more practice writing.
5. Run the Cleveland Marathon --maybe.
This is a tricky one. I've run two half-marathons before, but the second was much worse than the first. I was pretty worried about my first big race, so I trained a fair amount (not nearly enough, though, I'll admit). I beat my expected time, and felt pretty good afterward. However, I must have gotten cocky, because I barely prepared myself at all for my second half marathon, and I felt absolutely awful afterwards (not to mention had a terrible race time), and vowed to never again run unless something was chasing me.
I've had a change of heart, though, and I think I'm ready to put the time into actually training for a full marathon. My wife is an avid runner, so I know it takes more than a few long runs to adequately prepare yourself for a 26.2 mile race. I'm not ready to fully commit to the marathon yet, so I'm giving myself three more weeks to decide. That will put me 16 weeks away from the race, which is the amount of time needed for my training plan.
The plan says that a beginner should be able to run 5-6 miles without collapsing, so if I can do that and actually do the 3-4 runs/week for the next three weeks, then I'll actually sign up for the race. If I don't stay motivated and fail to run anymore this month, then I'm not going to waste the money.
2. Read at least one book a month.
I realize this makes it seem like I don't read very much, but I actually read quite a bit. However, most of what I read tends to be news articles, blog posts, and scientific papers. For example, I read around 5 novels last year for pleasure, but I estimate I read the equivalent of 5-7 books worth of scientific papers alone (~3-5 papers/week*50 weeks). So it's not that I don't read enough, it's that I don't read widely enough. And no, perusing the occasional neuroscience manuscript doesn't count as reading "diversity."
I've got a stack of great books waiting to be read, and this month I've picked Lawrence Krauss's biography of Richard Feynman, Quantum Man. So far, the descriptions of Feynman's many contributions to quantum physics is fascinating. However, I'm finding Krauss's style of writing, which is riddled with subordinate clauses, always jumping around the subject, to be distracting.
3. Learn a computer programming language.
If I had it to do over again, I would double major in computer science. At minimum, I wish I could go back and take some introductory programming classes. Now, as a burgeoning evolutionary geneticist working with microbiome pyrosequencing data (i.e. MILLIONS of DNA sequences), I can't really put it off any longer.
I had thought my best option was to sit down and slog through online tutorials in either BioPython or BioPerl. However, I recently signed up for a guided eductional program called Code Year. Each week, CodeAcademy emails you a new lesson, and you click through it when you have time and learn at your own pace. I've gone through the first few simple lessons, and it seems to be targeted at true beginners, which is unlike many of the other tutorials I've tried in the past.
4. Write 1,000 words a week.
This is a surprisingly difficult one for me, because although I genuinely enjoy the fruits of arduous writing, I get ridiculously nervous about actually sitting down and putting words on the page. I somehow got it in my head that if every sentence I write isn't the most beautifully crafted phrase ever to grace the English language, then I don't want to write it at all. This posed a major problem while I was writing up my thesis, as you can imagine.
I realize, of course, that this fear is irrational and absurd, and that the only way to improve my writing and find my stylistic voice is to practice, practice, practice. I'd like to say I want to write 1,000 words a week about science, which is the one topic I'd really like to get better at discussing. However, writing about science, especially other people's science, greatly exacerbates my stress level. As I become a better writer, I'll write more about things I really care about. Until then, I'll write about whatever else I am interested in--as long as it gives me more practice writing.
5. Run the Cleveland Marathon --maybe.
This is a tricky one. I've run two half-marathons before, but the second was much worse than the first. I was pretty worried about my first big race, so I trained a fair amount (not nearly enough, though, I'll admit). I beat my expected time, and felt pretty good afterward. However, I must have gotten cocky, because I barely prepared myself at all for my second half marathon, and I felt absolutely awful afterwards (not to mention had a terrible race time), and vowed to never again run unless something was chasing me.
I've had a change of heart, though, and I think I'm ready to put the time into actually training for a full marathon. My wife is an avid runner, so I know it takes more than a few long runs to adequately prepare yourself for a 26.2 mile race. I'm not ready to fully commit to the marathon yet, so I'm giving myself three more weeks to decide. That will put me 16 weeks away from the race, which is the amount of time needed for my training plan.
The plan says that a beginner should be able to run 5-6 miles without collapsing, so if I can do that and actually do the 3-4 runs/week for the next three weeks, then I'll actually sign up for the race. If I don't stay motivated and fail to run anymore this month, then I'm not going to waste the money.
I know I have problems staying motivated, so I've looked into software designed to help you manage goals (like HiTask and LifeTango). However, I am also self-aware enough to realize that I'll just avoid visiting the website if I know I don't have anything good to add (Example: I can never again login to fitday.com).
Instead, I've decided to use Google Calendar to track goals and send email reminders. I already use gmail and google calendar everyday, so I can't avoid it. I can still chose to ignore it, however, but in the end, technology can only go so far to influence my behavior. The rest I've got to do myself.
Instead, I've decided to use Google Calendar to track goals and send email reminders. I already use gmail and google calendar everyday, so I can't avoid it. I can still chose to ignore it, however, but in the end, technology can only go so far to influence my behavior. The rest I've got to do myself.
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