Reimagining Myself

Aug 2010

Focus on small - achieve big

This is the second of a series of posts on things I learned from riding my recumbent 150km across the Czech republic, Slovakia and lower Austria.

When I planned for my trip to take my bike home, I did two things: 1.) I checked for the train to bring me to Uhsersky Brod and 2.) I checked my route back. Due to my terrible planning skills I ended up doing this the night before I left. Thus I was not able to buy any decent bike map for the area. I went on Google maps, asked it to give me directions from Uhersky Brod to Vienna for walking, and simply took down the villages it would lead me through one by one. I ended up with a long list of names, occasionally I had street numbers on it. I hoped this would work out well. It did, and it did better than I thought. Because I just had a list of goals, each between 5 and 25km apart, the journey was full of achievements. Instead of longing for the big goal (Vienna) and asking myself when and how long I'll still be on the road, I focused on reaching the next town on the list.

The strategy of breaking big goals down to small bits, feel familiar to people who read Getting Things Done or similar pieces of literature. It is an amazing psychological trick, helping you to focus on what you are doing right now and what needs to be done next, rather than the far away goal. I had read this before but I never had the practical understanding I gained on that day

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Mon, 23 Aug 2010
Struggle Uphill, Fly Downhill

I'll start of my short series of articles on thoughts I had on my 150km recumbent ride with a no-brainer. At least it seems to be quite obvious that, if you climb a hill, you will descend the hill at some point. This becomes very obvious riding a recumbent. An upright bike allows the rider to shift the weight and a lot of force can be put into the cranks by simply using ones weight. A recumbent rider on the other hand has only one way to put force into the cranks: pedaling. Where hills can easily be climbed using upright bikes with a limited gear range (such as 3 speeds or single-speeds), on a recumbent bike a nice range of gears is necessary. Fine adjustments have to be made to always keep the gear optimal gear. Climbing hills is quite a struggle on recumbents compared to upright bikes. Once the top is reached, the bike becomes a different vehicle. Speed is reached very fast and recumbents feel like flying and airplane. The lower point of weight and the different aerodynamics really pay off. Frankly speaking: it's a blast.

This experience translates very well to my work as a researcher in life sciences. A lot of work is invested in getting protocols to work reliably, pursuing experiments and ensuring results obtained are the proper ones. This takes ample time and is a quite frustrating process most of the time. It's struggling uphill. However once the protocols are stable enough and results start pouring in, more enjoyable parts of the work begin. Such as being able to judge ones own hypothesis and discuss it with fellow researchers. Maybe even getting a paper published. These phases often feel more like flying than actually doing work. The energy you invested in the last weeks just push you through it.

Seeing such a simple concept applying to so different areas in life is an amazing experience. Next time I struggle uphill somewhere, I'll try to remember it's worth the flight downhill.

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Tue, 17 Aug 2010
The biggest hack of my life

From autumn 2009 to about February 2010 I went through the psychically most strenuous period of my life. Stress from work had pushed me close to burn out complete with both hypomaniac and depressive episodes. I consider getting out of this mental trap as the biggest hack of my life.

It was always easy for me to handle multiple things. I didn't need to write anything down and could handle upcoming situations easily and without a problem. Around September 2009 finally a point was reached where I couldn't keep up anymore. My workload just got to high and there were too many projects and things to keep in mind. I started stumbling from urgency to urgency, always in complete stress to keep things from exploding. Doing so gave me very little freedom. Flexible work hours sound good as a concept, but if you need to work 16 hours a day it doesn't leave you much room.

Working crazy hours without any control over the work I had to do and how I wanted to spend my time started to strain my mental health. Mistakes became more common and episodes of depression or hypomania became more frequent and severe. At this time two people I knew committed suicide, independent of each other. I could not only understand their actions but it further seemed a valid option in my own situation. This was an incredibly frightening discovery. There were evenings I stayed at lab and worked simply because I didn't trust myself if I left the room. It was pretty obvious that this situation had to change.

So I began looking for help. Talking to the ones closest to me as well as professionals. One night in this phase, after working around 12 hours (I considered this to be a short day), I arrived home and M told me he finally had all his private projects organized in his GTD system. I looked at him puzzled and he briefly explained the system known as Getting Things Done (short GTD) and the tool he uses. Something clicked. I sat down immediately and started to input my work into the system. I ordered David Allens Book, the foundation of the principle the same night. At 2 am I was finished and fell into bed completely exhausted.

I had previously had to-do lists and tried to keep track of things. I never succeeded. Simply because, since I could manage most things easily without it I didn't see the point. This time was different. The effect was immediate and incredible. The next week I worked like crazy, finishing the book on the weekend it arrived. I spend days and nights at lab, sleeping little and constantly doing things. I had never had a boost in productivity like that before. Until then my desk used to be a heap of papers. One day I cleaned my desk and it has been clean since then. About a week later I suddenly arrived at the point where I had done everything that was urgent or overdue. For the first time since 4-5 months I could decide what to do next.

But not only did I get more productive immediately, the psychological effects were profound. My mood stabilized very soon and I was more relaxed. The visit of a friend some weeks in the future wasn't an additional problem anymore but something I could look forward to. I knew I could spend time with her and still not come back and have everything falling apart. If anyone before had ever told me that organizing myself had such a profound effect I would have laughed at them. I simply couldn't imagine that a simple strategy to organize yourself had such an effect on the psyche. Getting Things Done seems to be about business and productivity on the surface, but as Merlin Mann points out in a talk he gave recently: It is about attention.

Turning from a biphasic chaotic maniac into a relaxed much more organized person is indeed the biggest hack I've pulled off so far.

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Fri, 06 Aug 2010
Re-Imagining Myself

Last week, Everett Bogue (author of the art of being minimalist) posted an article on how to imagine your ideal reality. This article inspired me to write about why I decided to call this blog re-imagining myself.

A lot of what we are and what we do is powered by our imagination of the person we want to be. We are able to work harder and endure more, if what we are doing is bringing us towards this goal. Three years ago, I imagined myself as a researcher (in life-sciences) living a life filled with critical thinking, experimenting but also time to spend with friends, partake in political action and so on. Working in Boston in the last two years, I had to realize that this image failed. Life-sciences here are a competitive business. Everyone strives and puts up enormous amounts of work. Very few people somehow successful in this field actually have family (or family life). For most of them their life seems to consist of work. This is fine if you imagine yourself as a constantly working person, sacrificing yourself to the advancement of your field. However this is not how I imagined myself, working myself close to burn-out in the beginning of this year.

My next goal was simply to get out of there. Luckily my PI was supportive and so mid-June I ended up in Vienna. I still kept on doing data analysis and writing papers for my lab, but the workload was much reduced. What still made me unhappy was: I lost the image of the person I wanted to be. Thus Re-imagining Myself become my imperative.

I started this process in the first night I arrived in Vienna. I needed a place to work and decided to work from home. Through looking at Simple Desks, I stumbled across minimalist living. Not being a fan of a lot of stuff (I have too much and I am a person who can not keep order if there is too much). The ideas of filling your life with actions you enjoy rather than objects clicked with me. I still haven't imagined the human being I'd like to be, however I have a more immediate goal: I want to go sailing in the Mediterranean next summer. Therefore, I learned how to sail for the last two weeks (while working between 10-14h in Boston). I enjoyed doing so and resent the weeks I can't go out sailing often.

This simple goal gave me the power to carry on. Change my habits into becoming an early riser (It's Sunday and I woke up at 5am without an alarm clock, the jet-lag in the helped in the first days). And being more cheerful during the day (Although I have to confess I was extremely angry from Thursday to Saturday noon, simply because my week was filled with days of doing shit at work, keeping me there for at least 14 hours a day). I went sailing yesterday and it was one of the best times I've ever had out on the Charles. Now I can carry on for the next few days, before I go back to Vienna.

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Sun, 01 Aug 2010
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