Confessions of a researchaholic

After my turn of presentation in a recent intern seminar about how to write research papers, I took a break mandated by the eye-break program installed in my computer. Instead of moving around elsewhere as I would usually do, I stayed in front of my computer to attend the next presentation, but moved a bit to avoid staring directly into the display. Later I got a message from the meeting host reminding me that everyone can see me stretch in the virtual meeting, which I replied that everyone should do that during a long meeting!

A related thread from Cornell about the importance of moving around during work instead of just standing or sitting (or remaining in any other stationary poses).
I think knowing how to take care of our body is more important than knowing how to write papers.

At the beginning of a movie I was watching there was a scene of someone who received a surprise layoff and, after being escorted outside the office building, did not seem to have any idea what to do.
(I don’t know what happened to that character at this moment of writing as I have yet to continue with the movie.)

Which prompted me to ponder: when at last we leave our jobs, what has to be left behind and what we can bring with us? Thinking ahead of this eventuality can clarify our priority about what is really important: titles and positions we hold, colleagues/collaborators we interacted with, experiences we learned, products we built, achievements we accomplished, etc.

Now, replace job with life, and think again.

Certain activities tend to drag me in and hard to get out, such as debugging and prototyping. To avoid crowding out other tasks, I try to schedule these sinkholes later in the day and start with these that I might skip over.

This is an orthogonal dimension with respect to the importance x urgency matrix.