Tag: plan

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diary

One More Week of Daily Writing and Ideas

‘Challenge Must Go On’

After the first three weeks of publishing a new blogpost every day, this is what I’ve learned.

First of all, the daily grind of writing daily gets easier, but unlikely to become second nature. This is so far falling within expectations. The grind comes from fearing the writing process and the inherent writing block. As stated in the very first blogpost, the motive for starting this challenge was to learn to overcome this writer block. At this stage, I confirm that writing these blogposts is getting easier in comparison to the very first few ones. Ideas are flowing faster and in greater number. Sentences are forming in my head with less friction.

Furthermore and similarly to any skills, this is unlikely to become pain-free and the dread to write will not disappear, however smaller it becomes. This is both anticipated and in a sense welcomed. Part of what makes experiences enjoyable lies in the efforts that one pays to ripe the rewards. Like in a rollercoaster or climbing a mountain, the joy at the end is fueled by the fear or the sweat (or both ;p) in performing any of these activities.

Another side-effect consists in a lowering of my fear to share out more openly my thoughts and its positive impact on my stress level. A facet of my burn out stems from the harsh job environment of academia where written work (e.g. papers, proposals, reports, lecture notes, tutorials) are heavily criticized through their related review process. This had a massive negative impact on my mental state, already weakened by numerous bad personal and professional events. Some took place over a defined periods of time in the past and scared me till now to the point of more easily triggering burns out now. This is a point the work my therapist and I have been focusing on for the last year and we’ve made good progress on. I appreciate that very few of you are reading these blogposts as of now but releasing them combined with sharing them openly on this blog has tremendously eased the weight on my mind about my ability to write and share ideas. So thank you, the internet.

I thus shall continue to this writing challenge for all this above virtues and more.

‘Blog Will Rock You’

When scared about losing ideas to others, then one good advice surprisingly consists in sharing these ideas, as many more will start flowing; this writing challenge is no exception.

The more blogposts I write, the more ideas are coming to my head; at first during the writing sessions, then little by little throughout the day (please let me sleep at night). The first type of ideas consists of themes to write about in future posts. The second consists of future projects for this blog and general website. The third type is about the methods of sharing these ideas. The first two are self-explanatory and you will most likely see these ideas concretised in near-future blogposts or webpages.

The third type is however more subtle to describe. As much as I stated above that sharing these blogposts in the open on the internet has almost a therapeutic positive impact on my mental health, I also acknowledge that this blog is pretty hard to find and most likely (as confirmed by the website’s statistics) these posts are hardly read. This is the point I’m slowly warming up to improve by gathering the courage to share or advertise these posts more widely, especially on social media (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn). The objective is to gather more views and learn more and faster through exchanging comments with other readers. This can read at first as a contradiction to the point stated at the beginning of this post about how reviews badly impacted me. Rather than that, my view is rather that my mental health has been slowly regenerating through this writing challenge and is now ready to rise to the bigger challenge again.

There are also many other projects about creating a podcast about power electronics knowledge, a YouTube channel about modelling and control, a GitHub repository about open-source projects… You will hear more when these ideas will have more matured.

So, watch that space for more (grand and wider) announcements!

Closing Words

How has your reading experience on this daily blog been so far? Do you have any features or topics you would like me to cover?

For some reasons, the songs of the late Freddie Mercury resonated in my head while writing this blogpost. Did you catch their influence on the section names? ;p

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

Categories
diary

We’re now counting in weekS

An Interesting Experiment

When I started this writing challenge 14 days ago, the main expectation was gradual improvements in exchange for daily grind for posts.

I’m not going to lie. On one hand, when the day comes to an end and the blogpost still needs to be written, my dread for opening the WordPress app and typing these words often takes physical form as it becomes so intense. On the other hand, I know that once the first few words have been laid down into the virtual draft system, the motivation for the post properly takes off, together with the length of the resulting post. This observation has already been covered in this post.

In a nutshell, my excitement for this writing challenge is only matched by the dread of the daily writing; seems like a healthy balance? ;p

But what about the improvements?

Well, these are, as expected, incremental.

First, it has only been 2 weeks, so any gains remain unstable and stopping – or even a short break – now would definitely erase them permanently. As much as there are claims for habits starting to form from 21/66/200/whatever number of days, I’m far from feeling this one from being solidly rooted yet. By the way, Prof Huberman does have yet another interesting podcast about habit forming. So my best bet consists in carrying on with this challenge. After all, I purposely didn’t set an end date or end point, since I consider this being a life-long challenge; just hopefully getting easier over time.

Improvements, for sure. Minor ones, indeed. Permanent gains, work in progress.

What to Look For Next?

On top of my mind, the two main improvements I’m aiming for now consists in writing these posts faster (ideally earlier in the day as well) and start working on the editing.

Advice and my own experience have demonstrated again and again that writing usually only produces a fraction of the quality of a final text. The real gem lies in the editing, which I’m honestly lacking. These blogposts are often written with little planning and on-the-fly editing. I suppose that writing experience does help at this point but better quality posts are yet to be unearthed by better editing yet. I suppose the first obstacle will be to face the guilt of reading one’s writing again. A step easy to confront by simply skipping this part of the full writing process.

One thing at a time, the first objective was to overcome the fear of writing; the fear of editing will come next.

Closing Words

What are you looking for in this blog? Do you have any pieces of advice on how it has been going so far and which direction to focus next?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

Categories
diary

Setting and Achieving Goals

Huberman Podcast

A new podcast has been skyrocketing on the internet over the last few months: The Huberman Lab podcast. Set up by Prof Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology at Stanford university, this (almost weekly) podcast aims to present insightful biological explanations and life tips supported by peer-reviewed research.

My wife and I discovered back in October after his episode on Dopamine made a splash on social media. We have since been trying to keep up with his release; mostly failling since the episodes are often released weekly and are information dense & long (1-2hrs). These episodes never miss to trigger a discussion between us and how we could potentially change of our habits in line with the reported research; my wife now likes to promptly open the curtains to see the sun in the morning!

I’ve got a feeling that his (future) episodes will make a recurrent appearance on this blog…

The One About Goal Setting

The latest episode on ‘Setting and Achieving Goals‘ is again very interesting and thought provocative. Prof Huberman has once again packed this episode (2-hour long!) with biological explanations on what motivate us to achieve the goals we set to ourselves (surprise, surprise! It includes dopamine).

As you may have already experienced yourself, the literature and social media on this topic is very prolific and provide enough claims about overriding the motivation problem that it could solve the World and more.

Prof Huberman focused on the scientific literature and came up with 9 life-hacking tools to approach goal setting and achieving:

  1. The 85% rule
  2. Initial focal visualisation
  3. Aged self-image
  4. Goal visualisation at the start
  5. Failure visualisation to carry on
  6. Challenge/reward balance
  7. Avoid goal distraction
  8. Specificity of goals
  9. Space-time bridging

Some Reflections

As Prof Huberman said in this episode, most of these points have been covered with different names in popular motivation books and some of them even seem obvious once you have experienced them at some points in your life.

I’m not going to comment on every of these points as the best would be for you to listen directly to the podcast. What I’ll share however are some (fairly hot) takes.

The 85% Rule

This one refers to managing the challenge level of the intermediate goal we are currently tackling. The idea consists in setting the difficulty level such that we succeed 85% of the time and fail 15%. The former reassures us that we are not overwhelmed by the task, while the latter keeps up on our toes and curious enough to put efforts into it. This applies typically when learning something.

I straight away thought about my own learning journey and present role as a teacher. Keeping the motivation high requires to make the goal look achievable but not too easy and I concur with this; not too sure about the stated ratio but apparently some research backs it.

This is definitely a point I need to remember when setting up a course and writing a specific lecture. The students should be able to grasp the vast majority of the points with minimal reflection (the 85%) but should nevertheless feel challenged by the new material presented to them.

Visualisation and Planning

All the points about visualisation and specifity of goals can be grouped under the classic project management umbrella. The final objective (e.g. mastering control theory) should feel grandiose enough to motivate us to start this journey in the first place.

However, this long-term vision can quickly become toxic as the goal may feel unattainable when we realise that hardly any (relative) distance has been covered after the first few steps. To counteract this stage, breaking down the journey into smaller steps and visualizing the eventually of failure will help to keep motivate and pushing forward.

Over-commitments

The point about avoid goal distraction rang particularly home.

Having too many concurrent goals (also read projects) turns out to be counterproductive. Since our efforts become divided, our progress on each goal also slows down; potentially leading to a loss of motivation and an endless cycle of underperformance. In extreme (but unfortunately common) cases, burnout can appear and take hold (as I battle with myself cyclically for years).

In the world of university, academic time is often considered by many (including academic themselves) as of free and limitless. This combined with an environment prone to generate ideas (we are all educated in doing research after all) leads to a propension to often accept new projects, big and small.

However, the physicality of life and the absence of cloning (a recurring joke amongst academics) means that we become overcommitted and cannot deliver on all these projects.

This is further compounded by the fact that each of these projects often involves different stakeholders (e.g. students, industrial partners, various part of the administration, other colleagues in and outside our home university) and their lack of global vision on our workload (as well as our inability to communicate it) gives the impression that we are almost purposely making no progress on the project they are involved in.

As part of this year’s resolution, I will develop my assertiveness and let go of some projects/ideas as well as saying ‘no’.

Closing Words

And what do you think? How do you motivate yourself to set and achieve goals? Do you have some good references to share on this topic?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

Categories
general announcement

Welcome to my new website

A new home for my research

This website is first and foremost intended to host snippets of my research on power electronics. Future posts will obviously detail more about this aspect. However, I also intend to use this new website as a platform for being more open about my work in general (i.e. teaching, research, admin) but also personal projects and interests (e.g. idea brainstorming, notebook, open-source designs, sharing knowledge). One of the key motives behind creating this platform also lies in sharing my thinking process and making it a central station for my work flow; I have this vision of an extensive dashboard to manage my –numerous– projects.

Third time lucky

I have to acknowledge that this new website does not constitute my first attempt at building up a webpage for my research. The two previous attempts (both abandoned for various reasons and definitely offline) still provided me with plenty of experience into the website world. This new website thus represents the third attempt, mostly motivated by the recent discovery of the book ‘show your work!‘ by Austin Kleon (highly recommended: https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/) after a recommendation by the YouTuber Ali Abdaal, specialised on productivity knowledge and tips (https://aliabdaal.com/).

Website in construction

There is obviously lots to be done on this new project, central to my new work flow. I will most likely make mistakes, suboptimal choices, even small and big mistakes, waste time or efforts, repeatedly ask myself why am I doing this is the first place… But all in all, this is a new place to express myself and failing is learning (as long as we acknowledge and learn from those misteps) and what I’m mostly looking for is to share all these (good and bad) steps with the world so we can learn together.

Let’s get to work

So, welcome to my new website. Take a comfy, virtual seat in this corner of the web and happy learning!